There have been many attempts through the years to classify different parts of society according to their tendencies, all in an effort to determine the effects a person with certain characteristics has on society. Popular examples of this include attempts to classify society according to economic conditions, gender, race, religion, IQ, and numerous other classes. The fields of Psychology and Sociology have dedicated a great deal of time researching what makes people act in this way or that. An entire branch of knowledge, psychology, is devoted to this pursuit. Today’s example with be using the The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity developed by Professor Carlo M. Cipolla. Cipolla posits that humans, at their most basic level, can be divided into four different classes, typically considered as the individual compared to others (society at large):
The Intelligent: People whose actions benefit themselves and others.
Examples: A scientist who makes a beneficial discovery, an entrepreneur who brings a good product to market, a successful tradesman, quality teachers and doctors, etc.
The Helpless: People whose actions benefit others while deriving little or no benefit for themselves.
Examples: A worker who spends 90% of their earnings on a combination of food, a rented apartment, and taxes. The proverbial “barely making ends meet” wagie.
The Thief: People whose actions benefit themselves and harm others.
Examples: conmen, scammers, robbers, etc.
The Stupid: People whose actions harm others, while gaining no benefit for themselves, even to the point of self-harm.
Examples: road ragers, drug addicts, mass shooters, alcoholics… and today’s subject
Intelligence, Stupidity, and Class
Cipolla notes that the traits ascribed to each of these intellectual classes exist among all different kinds of people, irrespective of race, social class, or gender, occurring at very similar percentages and differing primarily in how they manifest. For example, many think about intelligence with the initial assumption that stupidity is primarily confined to the working classes, while the intelligentsia and upper classes have a far lower tendency towards stupidity. That assumption, however, is incorrect. There are as many intellectuals and upper class leaders, percentage wise, who embrace, promote, and develop stupid socially destructive ideas as there are incompetent workers and citizens in the lower classes. To give a classic example, one might have heard the theory put forward by certain persons, who often consider themselves quite intelligent, that our universe is a computer simulation. Now, that is obviously an absurdity, but it’s a theory that has many supporters, many of whom have their lives impacted very negatively by the lifestyle such a belief encourages. Similarly, one might compare this to a cult such as Heaven’s Gate which embraced a doomsday mentality, encouraging its members into negative paths such as castration and drug abuse to stop sexual impulses, and eventually got literally memed into committing suicide by a computer hacker they believed to be god. A path, you will notice, that is also common to many ecstatic religions such as the ancient cult of Attis and Cybele, or the western and eastern churches at different points in history. All of these are idea promulgated by stupid socially destructive members of the social elites, many of whom themselves embrace them.
Similarly, many academics, social planners, and science fiction writers have imagined that the idealized world for humanity is one where AI does all the thinking and labor, leaving humanity entirely without political agency and in a period of extreme social leisure. Yet, that would be the effective death of humanity as an idea.
To cite, in the end, a general theme amongst the stupid of the upper classes, I will posit that their arguments and foolish ideas generally follow the form of Saint Anselm’s maxim (though it is not my argument here that Saint Anselm himself was a stupid man). Anyways, Anselm’s maxim is as follows:
“God exists because none greater than God can be conceived.” Bluntly, for all the time people have spent arguing this point, it is a blatantly stupid statement. Pure irrational categories, such as purple sounds or nothingness cannot truly be conceived of. The best we can do is imagine them as an odd abstraction, but that doesn’t mean these concepts are reckoned as God. This is where a vast body of axiomatic philosophy can be sent, this namely following the form of philosopher posits X as the source of an axiom, axiom must be true, therefore it follows that X is true. This is where a vast swamp of irrational ideas are forged. Numerous other such follies can be cited, but you get the idea.
These are the demonstrations of an intellectual’s stupidity, typically found when reality is lost in their greater ability to use abstract thought. By contrast, much of the stupidity of the lower classes is found in their lessened ability to use abstract thought. An example of this is using water to put out an oil fire in a fast food kitchen (which typically results in a massive fireball occurring), failure to use a proper diet (lack of abstract conception of consequences), or excessively gambling (not solely a vice of the lower classes, but often more personally destructive than similar cases in the upper classes).
Similarly, the thief repeats in both lower, mid, and upper classes. The low class thief is either an outright brute or a conman. The middle and upper class thief is more refined, often having authority over others, but remains the same in principle. You’ll typically find embezzlers, stock cheats, wall street corporate raiders, fake/useless NGO executives, and similar people in this group.
The Helpless seems primarily to be a low class phenomena, most often seen in those who barely make ends meet (the Wagie meme, in a nutshell). It could also be applied to puppet governments/kings and people placed in situations with high monetary gain, yet which have little personal benefit such as child actors/stars (of the category whose parents spend their money haphazardly or let their child be placed in abusive situations).
The Intelligent definitively begin to occur at the upper end of the working class, where people like tradesmen or those with stable jobs can be found, and then occur in varied forms in the middle and upper classes.
All this is summarized in the Second Law of Stupidity:
The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
The Fifth Law
The Fifth Law of Stupidity states that:
A stupid person is the most dangerous sort of person.
The argument is that an intelligent person can understand the nature of their most direct counterpart, the thief, and thus know how to counter them. This is because the central motive of the thief, self profit, is understandable. However, the nature of the stupid is much less comprehensible because their actions are destructive to both society and themselves. One can imagine the opportunities and telling signs of a thief or a conman. One knows where such people might lurk or how they might try to take what is your. It is harder to imagine the motivations of someone who just decides, in an instant, to irrationally attack you (for example). Similarly, what is the mindset of a road-rage driver who decides to irrationally wreck another vehicle at great danger to themselves and damage to their own vehicle?
Just as the actions of stupidity are often near incomprehensible, so too are damages often entirely unpredictable, and that unpredictability brings us to the example subject of today’s article, one Ezra Miller.
Ezra Miller is a Hollywood actor best known for his role as the Flash superhero in the 2014 film Justice League. He has another major role, but we’ll be getting to that later.
As you can tell from above, this is already an all too typical example of the attitudes what one finds in the modern upper-middle class. There’s a complete sense of self
The DC comics brand, which owns such characters as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, is owned by Warner Brothers Studio, which in turn is owned by the AT&T telecommunications corporation. It was noted for producing several decent Batman movies in the 2000s, but these movies were designed as a complete trilogy during a period of time when Marvel Films were putting out a connected film project which would culminate in the Avengers and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Warner Brothers, in an attempt to catch up, put out a poorly conceived group of films as the DC Cinematic Universe, most of which ended up being received poorly, whether critically or financially (though there were also some major financial successes amongst them such as Aquaman and Suicide Squad). Warner Brothers sought to bring its characters together in an Avengers style project with the 2014 Justice League film. This was a film which was to feature Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg, and the Flash together. Ezra Miller was chosen to play the Flash by the film’s director, Zach Snyder. For a number of reasons this project had a troubled development cycle, and proved to be ill conceived, poorly written, and extremely janky. Rather famously, the Avengers director, Joss Weadon, was brought in to replace the original director and tried to change the tone of the film from somber to light hearted. This meant reshoots and, under the now poor time table, a lack of time to polish the CGI.
Needless to say, the film was considered a box office disaster, and effectively destroyed DC’s ability to compete with the MCU. This meant that future films in the series were often delayed or in canonical flux. It was undecided whether or not Justice League would even receive a sequel. And so the Flash character went without a movie for a number of years. And it was during this time that the major incidents in Ezra Miller’s life began to pile up.
The Incidents of assault, in no particular order, include choking a young pregnant Icelandic woman, who was even one of his fans (for which he received no punishment); throwing a chair at a woman and giving her a cut on her head, an apparent home invasion where he robbed a man and his family (for which he still cannot go back to Hawaii, but otherwise received no punishment), and several random bar fights which he instigated (the end results of one you can see in the second video). As you can tell, this is pretty typical spoiled rich kid behavior, feeding into narcissistic power trips by exercising power over others without consequences.
[Long Aside follows: Miller’s one clever trick since the modern internet world is obsessed with such minutia as gender pronouns, this particular obsession with they/them being seemingly derived from a modernist misunderstanding of how the third sex actually functioned in some of the old school tribal societies (an interesting subject that a lot could be said about). Briefly, the third sex, when present in tribal societies, either operates as a permanent change to the social function of a gender (more comparable to transgenderism), or a temporary ceremonial change (more common in certain shamanistic religions). Intersex persons may or may not have their own unique functions in addition to these groups, or be categorized with them. The concept of “twin spirits” is actually a shamanistic reference to being joined with one or more otherworldly spirits (the more powerful the shaman, the more spirits they were attached to). In some shamanic societies the dominant spirit decided what gender the shaman as, whether that was a literally gender transformation or ceremonial cross dressing. There isn’t actually a sense of functionally mixed male and female identity attributes in that concept, except where intersex persons are concerned. Even if English were to eventually include a pronoun for the third sex, they/them would be a terrible choice because it’s already used for plural references. We’re stuck with “they/them” at the moment for the occasional reference to ambiguous persons (since “it” is too dehumanizing and “he” for gender ambiguous use cases is rather archaic at this point), but that doesn’t make it a good choice.
Regardless, simply by not declaring himself to be male, Miller is able to gather sympathy (despite the fact that he seems fine to be referred to as a male in private, as many of his friends have confirmed), and avoid being canceled for things which would have gotten any other male star canceled (i.e. the repeated assaults on women in public places).]
Now, at first this all sounds like the mentality of the a thief going by our classifications. He’s able to harm society with little to no consequences while also living the life of a relatively wealthy movie star. He’s even enabled by a fanbase that is attracted to him because of his shallow androgynous flamboyancy rather than any worthwhile contributions he has made to society. Such persons are all too common in the upper classes, or those parts of the middle class who fall into excessive wealth, unfortunately. And this might have been the end of his story, had a few public outbursts been the extent of it. As you might guess, that is not where it ends.
It was during this time that the now ousted previous regime at Warner Brothers made a decision about the way they’d be taking the DC cinematic universe. You see, DC comics has a fairly tactless way of resetting its canon continuity using what are called “Crisis” events. Basically, these are ways for the comics to reset the history of the entire universe of characters and write new stories for them without any of the previous baggage (or, from the fan perspective, the continuity that kept them reading the comics). In other words, it lets them keep using played out characters like Superman or Batman over and over again. Simultaneously, they also have a multiverse which means that multiple versions of characters in different situations exist. Why do a reset when you could simply shift to another universe? You’re probably thinking too much like a writer, not enough like a marketer for corporate ears.
One of the recent Crisis events, occurring in the 2010s, was called the Flashpoint Paradox, in which the Flash superhero modified timelines by traveling backwards and forwards in time. This created a new continuity called the New 52, which remains the current comic continuity (it’s also worth pointing out that there has already been a Flashpoint Paradox animated movie, but that is not relevant to the subject of this article).
So, the proposal is made to us a live action Flashpoint movie, starring Ezra Miller as the Flash, in order to wipe out the previous Zach Snyderverse continuity, replacing it with an entirely new cinematic universe designed to compete directly with Marvel’s MCU. Flash would interact with many different multiverses and timelines on his journey, effectively serving as a nostalgic trip through recent DC Cinema. One of the critical decisions in this plan is to replace the Snyderverse Batman (Ben Affleck) with the 1989 Batman (Michael Keaton), Keaton being an extremely critical part of the Flashpoint film. In turn, the Flash movie would be a critical introduction to the next three projects, Bat Girl (which would see an elderly Michael Keaton Batman mentoring Bat Girl as his replacement), Blue Beetle (which apparently has something to do with the multiverse as well), Aquaman 2, and potentially a Super-girl film after that. Effectively, this means that this movie (which certainly clocks in at 200 million $) is also a required setup for at least two more 100+ million $ movies.
I should note that the production on this film and the choice to have Ezra Miller star in it occurred after the video of him choking the pregnant Icelandic Woman emerged, but before some of his other more… egregious exploits. Thus, it was already known to the Warner Brothers execs that he was a publicity timebomb ticking towards disaster, but they chose to stick with him regardless. And so the filming eventually wrapped up, leaving a completed set of major films… which promptly had their release dates shelved as global theaters shut down in
During this time the CEO of Warner Brothers was replaced, leaving her successor with the ultimate task of sorting this all out. And for a short while it looked like it might work. There was some trouble with another star, Amber Heard who had legal troubles with her husband, Johnny Depp, concerning claims of defamation, but that wasn’t widely reported on outside of certain Youtube/industry circles. Thus, it seemed like DC would have no issues with the general audience. The theaters even seemed to be rebounding with the success of Spider-Man No Way Home, which earned several billion dollars at the box office, showing that superhero movies could still have legs.
And then the Fifth Law of Stupidity came into effect. You see, during the years after Justice League, Ezra Miller had not just been engaged in the occasional outburst of violence. Miller had apparently been in a six year long friendship/quasi-relationship with a Sioux girl, by name of Tokata, who turned 18 in 2022 (who also happens to be the niece of the current sitting Lakota chief). Anyways, so in the course of their interactions Miller brought a gun to her parent’s house, attacked her mother, and threatened other members of her family. The two eloped from the reservation together, under false premises, and her parents accused Ezra of grooming her and also of being the one who supplied drugs to her, creating an addiction. It also appears like she may have adopted Miller’s non-binary language, this being cited as one reason she ran away with him. She’d been in rehab at least once before, and apparently it was her desire to avoid going to rehab again which partially contributed to her decision to flee with Ezra Miller.
It is at this time that the Sioux tribal court attempted to serve Miller an order of protection, which would have prevented him from going near Tokata, but he had already disappeared from the state. Miller would then post a meme on his social media platform stating:
You can’t catch me, I’m in another universe.
(A reference to the Flashpoint movie directly connecting it with the controversy.)
Miller and Tokata apparently parted way with Miller going to California. There he picked up a drug addicted stripper, who was the mother of three young children. She was apparently looking to get out of an existing polygamous relationship with the father of said children (said father also being in a simultaneous relationship with two additional women). She and Ezra Miller took off with her three children and holed up in a rural property. It turns out that Ezra Miller has another eclectic trait, that being that he’d very fond of guns and knives, which he took photos/videos of. Dozens of knives and guns appear to have been left haphazardly around the house, a house which, as a reminder, has three children of ages 1-5 in it. There have apparently been weekly visits by police, but otherwise the situation is essentially being left alone.
And that is where Ezra Miller is, as of the time of this posting. Needless to say, the current CEO and board of Warner Brothers is now left with a massive headache caused by their predecessors. The Flashpoint movie reportedly contains the Flash (Ezra Miller) in every scene, hence it is effectively impossible to reshoot it with another actor (for irony, the actor who plays the Flash in the extremely low budget CW show has had 0 controversies during this whole time). Similarly, the Batgirl film relies on the Flashpoint movie to reintroduce Michael Keaton as Batman, and each of the other films have similar continuity issues. Thus, canceling the movie itself seems impossible. This leaves the options of either redoing the entire movie, accepting the massive loses incurred, or releasing the film with an increasingly volatile actor, thereby associating the studio with whatever actions might occur from an unpredictably stupid person.
As a comparison, consider what would have happened if the same project had fallen victim to theft. Theft, in the sense of benefiting oneself and harming society, can occur in a few ways during film production. A producer might place a number of unnecessary producers or staff on a project for the sole reason of funneling funds to his friends. This is legal, but a complete waste of money. Similarly, advertising can easily prove to be a black pit, all the more so if certain execs or investors also have their hand in whichever company is doing the advertising. Another case includes the classic B-movie tax writeoff (where, in certain jurisdictions, it was once oddly profitable to lose money on B-movies and then write them off for better tax rebates). Such an act produces a poor cultural product while also costing the taxpayers of a country. Then, of course, there are the outright fraudulent elements such as stealing money through accounting loopholes, intentionally destroying insured sets/film reels, using public funds for movies that never get finished, etc.
However, with all that considered, financial manipulation of this type would have to occur in minor/subtle ways on such projects. So, let’s assume, in our theoretical situation, that the worst case of theft occurs and the project is run 50% over budget, and additionally forced to compromise on certain cinematic aspects because the budgeted funds proved inadequate for certain scenes or elements. At worst this would result in a film similar to the Justice League reshoot, a poorly thought through project that fails to achieve cinematic acceptability. However, such a film would still be a film that could be shown at theatres. The worst controversy would be how incomplete it looked rather than something innate that would reflect badly on a studio. An occasional flop, even a high stakes one, is expected. Making such a mistake consistently is another thing entirely.
It is easy for general audiences to overlook a lot of drama if it can be hidden. One of the rules in Hollywood is that public perception matters most when a film is released. If a lot of background drama comes out after the situation, it still made money when it needed to. The greatest loss in that situation is ultimately of a cultural product. For example, I believe it is extremely difficult to enjoy a viewing of The Wizard of Oz (1939) if one knows about all the background abuses that took place during filming. To give a few examples, numerous people were hospitalized (the actress playing the wicked witch literally had her broom prop explode under her, giving her permanent leg scars), the lighting constantly forced the various actors to work under conditions that literally induced heat stroke, Judy Garland (who played Dorothy) was put on Benzedrine drugs to control her eating habits and force her to remain at the same weight, which literally degraded her mental ability (she would later die of drug overdose), and she was apparently sexually harassed on set as well. And that’s from a cinematic blockbuster widely considered one of the best movies of all time.
In conclusion:
A stupid person is the most dangerous sort of person.
References:
THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY by Carlo M. Cipolla
Kotharian Lightning 