Whoa. Big question. There are books that need to be written about this, or at least pulled together into a master class. I can provide some thoughts on how to start thinking about this stuff: 1) USEFUL THOUGHTS - Every statement that we can make about the universe has past predictive power and future explanatory power. Some statements are so little of either as to effectively be useless. Some have good amount of both. 2) TECHNIQUE - Ever use photoshop or a image editing software? You know how you can look at an image at full resolution and it looks one way, zoom in and it looks completely differently? A useful technique for thinking about a problem is to zoom in and out of the problem, literally. There are many others, but this is the most basic and most practical. So, when someone says another person is dumb, that is a very low resolution analysis because it has very little past explanatory power and very little future predictive power. If you know someone is dumb all you know is they are dumb and they are going to keep on doing the same dumb things over and over again. So, thinking about the problem we can: ZOOM OUT: Visualize the whole planet of humans and pan over to the sun. In 4 billion years the sun would have expanded so much that the physical size of the sun would have expanded beyond the orbit of the planet and consumed it. This means that in 2 billion years time it either would have either been half that size and boiled the planet fully or well on its way. Which means that in 1 billion years time the earth would be completely uninhabitable. Which means that realistically humans can survive on this planet for a maximum of 500 million years. Which means that we MUST have completed interstellar travel technology and have been seeding the galaxy for at least 250 million years. And that doesn't even account for buffer time and out of bounds / unforeseen events. Zoom out and you can easily see the meaninglessness of it all - we have a 100 million years to get our shit together and get off this marble. ZOOM IN JUST A BIT: We know the human brain is made up of many many subsystems that both work independently and co-dependently with other subystems. We know that some subsystems become dominant in some situations and other subsystems become dominant in other situations. We have a pretty good idea that our conciousness (us, the thing that has a name) lives in the pre-frontal cortex and mostly acts as a firewall to the rest of the subsystems operating in the background. We also know that those silent systems are what control us and we know that they learn silently because the conciousness (us) software cannot filter out all information, it has kind of a specific job. The moment you start to visualize that is that you start noticing certain patterns. In large crowds one subsystem becomes dominant and takes over and that person is actually a different person. When people are alone, that subsystem quiets down and another becomes dominant and you are a different person. The same goes for what people believe and why they believe it. This is an oversimplification, but if you take the above and marry it with an observation you would have if you zoom out just a bit about how our species behaves, you would say something like this: human primary survival strategy is by aligning them selves with a social group where they stike a bargain: the groups gets their labour (they add 1 member to the group) and the individual MUST onboard the troups ENTIRE belief system. If you think about the variability in human brains and how no two really operate 100% alike considering the above complexity, you can imagine that there will be variability in how effectively the troup can brainwash the new member they have allowed in. As we have learned over the last 2 years, the percentages are roughly like this: 30% will merge with the group so fully they will kill their own family for that group, 30% will pretend to be aligned with the group until they can cheat the group and move on (traitors), 30% will be repulsed by the group and seek another until they find one that aligns with their world view and the rest are here, dotwin or gab. So, saying people are dumb provides us with exactly nothing of value, it explains very little and provides no predictive power. Zooming out provides us with a lot more of both but it isn't particularly useful. Zooming in just a bit into the problem and voila, we have past explanatory power. We have future predictive power. And what else do we get for free? That's right, strategy. If you know the 30/30/30 split you know the size of your enemy. It means if you think your enemy has 60% of the population, you should be able to peel 30% away just by a show of force because traitors will always move to the stronger side (and stab you in the back when it suits them). If you know your family or friends are in the 30% die hard you know enough about them to start formulating a plan to detach them from the group they have aligned with, and there are an infinite number of possibilities here ... it's called politics, back stabbing, power games, female social warfare, male social warfare --> it's what our species has been doing for about 50 million years now. The most effective strategies are those used by sales people which include repetition, overcoming objection and NEVER EVER taking no for an answer. You won't believe the power of hello that has NOTHING attached to it. Got a father that doesn't want to speak to you? DO NOT CALL HIM TO PREACH. Just make two phone calls a week and leave voice mail, tell them you love them and each time tell them a new story about what happened in your life. That would be EXTREMELY effective on parents especially if they are getting up there. When they call you, DO NOT preach or tell them anything, instead give them space to ask. If they don't, they don't. I mean, the same technique could be extended to get them to switch sides, but some things are not that important. Anyway. Because, all sales people know that it's just a numbers game. There is more to it, but roughly speaking, because of the way the brain works, if you schedule a set of repeated interactions with a target human inthe right way, eventually you will win. You just have to develop the right touch. So, saying people are dumb is the wrong frame. If you think about the above, when someone tries to get you to say people are dumb, what they are trying to do is disarm you from thinking critically about the problem. They are actually playing a trick on you, even if they don't know it. The more that I think about it the more insidious that it seems. I hope that provides some entry point that you can find useful.