The Intelligent Fool Has Entered the Room

“He who suffers fools gladly is himself a fool.” It is a wonderfully blunt proverb, and probably written by someone who had already encountered the intelligent fool. The ordinary fool is easy enough. You recognise him, smile politely, step around the nonsense and carry on with your day. The intelligent fool is far more difficult. He has qualifications, opinions, experience, impressive vocabulary and, most importantly, a very convincing explanation for why everyone else is wrong. He does not look foolish at all. That is precisely what makes him dangerous.

A friend was in town recently and, over coffee, we found ourselves talking about teenage parenting, that delightful phase of life when a perfectly reasonable question can be met with a seventeen-minute argument about personal freedom. We laughed about teenagers being stubborn, convinced they know everything and mysteriously incapable of finding the things sitting directly in front of them. Then came the uncomfortable realisation: adulthood does not necessarily cure any of this. Teenagers grow up. Some simply become better-dressed teenagers with mortgages, job titles and access to bank accounts.

What makes adult foolishness particularly interesting is that it is not always rooted in ignorance. Some of the most spectacularly foolish decisions are made by people who know better. They have enough education, experience and common sense to understand precisely what they are doing, and yet they do it anyway. That is the intelligent fool. He does not lack information. He has an extraordinary talent for using information to justify ignoring it.

You can usually spot one by what happens after a bad decision. An ordinary fool might say, “I didn't think.” The intelligent fool will give you a fifteen-minute explanation of why, given the circumstances, it was actually the most logical decision available. Every variable has been considered. Every possibility has been examined. There may even be references to psychology or behavioural economics. The one possibility that has not been considered, naturally, is that the decision was simply foolish.

This is where intelligence becomes a very convenient hiding place. Bad judgement becomes “a learning experience”. Stubbornness becomes “having principles”. Procrastination becomes “waiting for the right time”. Refusing to listen becomes “thinking independently”. Being unpleasant becomes “being honest”. Apparently, if you have a sufficiently good vocabulary, almost any personality flaw can be given a respectable job title.

Take the intelligent procrastinator. We all put things off. I have stared at an email long enough to wonder whether the sender might eventually lose interest and go away. That is ordinary human behaviour. The intelligent procrastinator, however, has turned delay into an art form. He is not avoiding the task. He is “assessing priorities”, “considering the broader picture” and “protecting his bandwidth”. Meanwhile, the deadline has passed, the opportunity has disappeared and everyone else is standing around wondering whether the task is ever going to leave the planning stage.

Then there is the intelligent fool who asks for advice without ever wanting any. He tells you the problem, listens carefully while you offer a solution and then explains, point by point, why your solution cannot possibly work. You try another. Same problem. A third. Another objection. Eventually you realise you were not asked for advice at all. You were invited to audition for the role of Person Who Agrees With Me. If you fail, you are accused of being negative.

These people are often wonderfully perceptive about everyone else's behaviour. They can identify their colleague's insecurity, diagnose their sibling's unresolved issues and explain exactly why somebody else's marriage is in trouble. Ask them about their own contribution to a problem and suddenly the analytical machinery packs up. Their behaviour was a reaction. Someone else provoked them. Someone else misunderstood them. Someone else pushed the wrong button. They are forever innocent bystanders in the consequences of their own decisions.

And because they are intelligent, they can make it sound entirely plausible.

Then come the well-wishers, another fascinating branch of the intelligent fool family. These are the people who approach your plans with concern neatly wrapped in good manners. “Are you sure?” they ask. “Have you really thought this through?” “I only say this because I care.” Sometimes they genuinely do care. Sometimes, however, somebody else's courage simply makes their own caution uncomfortable.

Some people are perfectly happy with your dreams while those dreams remain hypothetical. The moment you begin doing something about them, their concern becomes wonderfully energetic. Suddenly there are risks, practicalities, timing, responsibilities and, inevitably, a cousin who tried something similar in 2007 and lost money. The unspoken message is beautifully simple: by all means fly, but preferably no higher than I have managed.

We should be careful here, because the intelligent fool is not always somebody else. We have all been one. We have defended bad decisions because admitting they were bad meant admitting we were wrong. We have ignored advice because it was inconvenient. We have called ourselves patient when we were procrastinating, principled when we were being stubborn and independent when we simply did not want to listen.

The difference between foolishness and wisdom is not that wise people never behave foolishly. It is that they eventually notice. That noticing matters more than we think. Real intelligence is not winning every argument. It is recognising when the argument is no longer worth winning. It is being able to say, “I was wrong,” without behaving as though somebody has repossessed your personality. It is changing your mind when the facts change. It is listening to someone younger, less experienced or less qualified and accepting that they might still have something useful to say.

We are rather dazzled by intelligence. We admire degrees, titles, confidence, fluent speech and people who can make simple things sound complicated. We often mistake certainty for competence. Yet some of the wisest people I know are not the ones with the fastest answers. They are the ones who pause, listen, ask questions and occasionally say, “I don't know.”

The intelligent fool, meanwhile, needs to be right even when being right is costing him everything. He will protect his argument while losing the relationship, protect his pride while losing the opportunity and protect his version of events while losing years that could have been spent doing something better. And because he can explain every loss, he may never realise what it has cost him.

Perhaps that is the great irony of intelligent foolishness. Intelligence can explain why you keep making the same mistake. Wisdom asks why you are still making it. Intelligence can tell you how to win an argument. Wisdom asks whether the argument is worth having.Intelligence can give you a hundred reasons why something went wrong. Wisdom asks the question we would all rather avoid: “What did I have to do with it?” Perhaps that is the modern version of the old proverb. We should not merely beware of fools. We should beware of the intelligent fool, particularly when he occasionally looks back at us from the mirror.

Because the truly intelligent person is not the one who always knows better. It is the one who knows better than to assume he always does.