The Idiots—Barrett Avner

Make yourself into a complete fucking idiot.

The Idiots, Lars von Trier (1998)

Byung-Chul Han’s book Psychopolitics paints a distinctly clear picture of the conditions of neoliberalism: endemic conformity, self-induced slavery under the guise of freedom and self-opimization, and a bare existence devoid of pain and, therefore, purpose. Our current reality is one where Control Society, the Algorithm, and self-compelled managerial compliance troops enforce a particular logic: that everything we do must in principle be of service to Capital, with low-vibrational numbness the only certain reward for participation.

Although this sounds bleak, Psychopolitics offers a very simple solution: make yourself into a complete fucking idiot. “In light of compulsive and coercive communication and conformism, idiotism represents a practice of freedom,” Han writes in his final chapter. He isn’t the first to remark on the role of idiocy in civilization, and he won’t be the last. Descartes presented a formal practice of idiotism through thinking through thinking thought itself; wherein relating only to oneself, one regains a kind of “virginal state.” This separates the “retards’’ from the retards (Angelicism01’s infamous and now deleted Retard List). The difference between the two versions of us is that one accepts not knowing, while the other projects knowing and forecasting onto an environment in an attempt to separate itself from it. The idiot is the heretical innocent in a world that claims itself knowledgeable and expert, but truly knows nothing.

Witold Gombrowicz 1937 satirical novel Ferdydurke portrays a lost soul who, in an effort to free himself from the psychic binds of a meaningless and dull society, crystallizes a practice of immaturity and idiotism. Nazis and Communists alike banned the book. In the early 2000s, absurdist provocateur and filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief apparently cleared out his 500-person debut Berlinale screening (and of those 400 people who left, two were his parents and one was Wim Wenders). Schlingensief once mused, “I don’t mind barrelling down a hill and crashing into a tree, as long as it’s done in a state of euphoria.” The idiot is someone who can dissolve his or her identity, erase the functional characteristics that society imprints on the individual in cosmic vats of holisticity, purity, and innocence.

The late 90’s was culturally obsessed with idiots. You had Tom Green, MTV’s Jackass, and Lars Von Trier’s Dogme 95 movie just titled The Idiots. The Idiots featured a group of well educated, middle-class professionals who momentarily retreat from society to “spass” as the mentally disabled. Once confronted with the reality that they must one day return to their jobs, families, and normalcy, they become crestfallen, as if being an idiot is more purposeful than the lives and relationships they fostered in the supposedly “real world.”

One memorable line in the film is when Stoffer proclaims that “idiots are the people of the future.” This has a historical component: in many civilizations, the idiot was seen as a gatekeeper towards the sacred gates of life beyond death (the heyoka, the psychopomp). The idiot, like the heretic, neither embraces nor opposes that rejects it. The heretic is a radical deviation from that which it comes from, and thus, presents a new, unified embodiment of future and present temporal sensory experiences that we would otherwise not be aware of. Idiotism grants access to that which is an unidentifiable other. The idiot is a messenger of neutrality, and reminds us that we can go only as far as the language we speak into existence.