FOREWORD:  The following list of matters is premised on the belief that the concept of “educated incapacity”, which appears in the writings of the nuclear strategist, futurist, and polymath Herman Kahn, actually relates to a greater array of things than is served by the choice of words and than is discussed in Kahn’s writings to date.  In fact, the phrase masks matters which are probably more important than those matters rendered explicit by it, and a consequence of such narrowness might be a destructive sociological analysis of a far more complex and needy situation.

I myself generally prefer the term “intellectual stupidity”, because it speaks to a somewhat more general failing of intellectuals and is more blunt and usefully provocative.  Kahn’s term is actually the economist Thorstein (Bunde) Veblen’s.

       1. The foolhardiness and superficiality of savants.

       2. The unrepresentability of reality by abstract symbols.

       3. The valuelessness and meaninglessness of secondhand and thirdhand knowledge.

       4. The sloth and degeneracy of scholars.

       5. The intellectual and human narrowness of specialists.

       6. The illusions, delusions, and arrogance of technicians.

       7. The constant uncertainties involved in science.

       8. The unforeseeable or uncontrollable dangers inherent in scientific and technological progress.

       9. The overcomplexity and ambiguity of the real world.

     10. The eternal conflict between knowledge, power, and wisdom.

     11. The pretensions and excessive prestige of experts.

     12. The overcomplexity, impersonality, carelessness, and corruption of governments.

     13. Blindness promoted by ideology, formal education, institutionalization, and professional interest.

     14. The insensitivity of the educated to the beauty, the creativity, the variety, the complexity, the connectivity, the infinity, the challenge, the truth, the meaning, and the requirements of the real world.

     15. The etiolation, sterility, intolerance, dogmatism, impracticality, artificiality, polarization, inertness, and lifelessness, of the scholar.

     16. The increasing abstractness, complexity, artificiality, arbitrariness, inutility, obscurity, meaninglessness, and deceptiveness, of knowledge and ideation.

     17. The inability of the intellectual to decide, to discriminate, to act, to act well, and to act wisely.

     18. The excessive education of the populace.

     19. The increasing power and authority of the intellectual, the savant, the technician, the scientist, the expert, the specialist, the ideologue, and, indeed, the government.

     20. The difficulties involved in the full employment and reemployment of the educated man, the inexperienced individual, the untrained, the specialist, etc.

     21. The anomie, strife, anarchy, discontent, nihilism, extremism, arbitrariness, pointless innovation, barbarities, incivilization, etc following upon the abandonment of tradition.

     22. The rapid obsolescence and vitiation of knowledge and training in a society undergoing vast, quick, and radical change.

     23. The need for direct contact with nature, with horror, with other men, with things, and with the real world — stupid, finite, dirty, natural, physical, simple, odd, subtle, unique, and all-important.

     24. The additional or inseparable importance to trustworthy intelligence of such things as: intuition, imagination, inspiration, conjecture, reason, adventure, practical or executive experience, feedback, failure, loss, vested interest, individual initiative, common sense, worldliness, discipline, culture, humor, self-development, psychology, character, style, integrity, etc.

     25. The inability to see the forest for the trees, the deadliness of old knowledge, the perceptual and behavioral advantages of the child, etc.

     26. The contagious illusions of educators.

     27. The importance of varied experience.

     28. The importance of manual labor, sports, generalized labor, knowing nature, and also things like engineering, mathematics, schooling in art, philosophy, etc.