Wit & Attitude Quote by Remy de Gourmont

A neat little insult dressed up as a compliment: intelligence, de Gourmont suggests, isn’t humanity’s redemption but its most efficient tool for self-sabotage. The line pivots on a sly reversal. We expect intelligence to “invent” progress; instead it manufactures stupidity, not as mere ignorance but as a designed product - a system, a posture, a convenient blindness.

That’s the subtext that gives the quip bite. Stupidity here isn’t the absence of thought; it’s thought put in bad faith. It’s ideology, fashionable certainty, bureaucratic routine, the kind of crowd-thinking that requires brains to build and maintain. De Gourmont, a fin-de-siecle French novelist and critic, was writing in a Europe intoxicated by rationalism and “modernity” while also careening toward mass politics, nationalism, and mechanized slaughter. In that atmosphere, the idea that cleverness could generate new forms of folly wasn’t pessimism for sport; it was a diagnosis.

The sentence also flatters the reader just enough to recruit them. If stupidity is invented, it can be un-invented - or at least detected. The joke is that humans aren’t trapped by nature so much as by their own innovations: the sophisticated excuses, the polished myths, the rationalizations that let educated people behave stupidly with confidence. It lands because it refuses the comforting binary of smart versus dumb. De Gourmont is pointing at a darker truth: intelligence is morally neutral, and one of its favorite hobbies is building elaborate permission structures for nonsense.