Confessions of an Undercover Ignoramus
Introduction
I am torn between explaining why I am choosing to write more allegorically going forward and just jumping in and writing whatever I write and seeing how it goes. So, I am going to compromise with myself and make this introduction and then get into this allegory.
The reason why I am somewhat resistant to explaining myself is probably because I hate beating around the bush. But life has taught me that some people really like a little bush beating before you tell them what you are going to tell them. As for me, fundamentally, I am a rip the Band-aid off kind of guy. So much so the when I was a kid with a toothache, I chose to take the pain and pull out my own tooth with a nail and a pair of pliers rather than wait for a dentist appointment. I like people to give things to me straight no chaser so I know what I am dealing with. And, no lie, my wife and I have had some serious discussions about me not wanting any pain meds that might make me lose consciousness while I am dying. I told her to just let me scream and lose my mind from the pain until I faint if that is what life hands me. But, she says that is not fair to her. So, I hope I just get taken out quickly so we don’t have to deliberate on the issue.
I am telling you this because I want you to know who you are dealing with. And just like I want someone to be straight up with me, I used to be super straight up with other people and was willing to take the consequences all the way up to death. Seriously! I literally had the mindset that I would rather be killed in the middle of speaking my mind than to live hiding in my thoughts. And life tested me many times to see if I was full of crap or not. Maybe way too many times. So much so that I figured that I might be the problem and I started to get better at tailoring my communications. To get a sense of the leap that I have made over the years, when people used to tell me that how I communicated hurt their feelings, I would say, “I didn’t hurt your feelings. Your feelings hurt your feelings.” I know. I sounded like an asshole. But, the truth is I wasn’t trying to be one. I thought I was being loving. But, to get that, you would have to know more about how I grew up.
Unfortunately, that’s going to have to wait for now. Just know that if I am saying things very slowly and intentionally or using metaphors and allegories, it has taken gargantuan effort for me to get to a place where I could do this. I used to hate acronyms for God’s sake. I used to say, “Don’t make a word out of words. Just say the thing you want to say. And if I am too slow to get it, move on without me.” And if someone said, “It’s like you don’t care about my feelings,” I would say, “See, now you’re getting it. I don’t care about your feelings. But, you don’t have to get all sad about it. I don’t care about my feelings either.” I figured that if Life didn’t care about my feelings, why should I care about my own or anyone else’s. I just took what happened to us as impersonal. That’s how I kept moving forward. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel things. I just didn’t see the use of coddling them. Does that make sense?
Now, imagine a guy with that mentality basically writing a bedtime story to tell people something that would be much easier for me to say directly and you will get a sense of how delicate I am trying to be in order to communicate effectively. That’s why I have no patience for people who act like calling someone by their chosen name or using pronouns is going to break their fake alpha male brains. If I can write pages to try not to come off as an asshole, you can say “they”. That’s what I am thinking. But this effective communication version of me would try not to insult them and would probably write a whole book to tell them in the nicest way possible that they can’t both be tough and fight to be themselves and then cry about other people wanting the same liberty without coming off as a hypocrite and an ignoramus. And with that, here is my allegory, that will also be featured in my upcoming book.
If you would prefer listening to this piece as opposed to allegory instead of reading it, you can do so here.
The Illusion of Merritt
Ignorance is Bliss
Then I turned myself to consider wisdom and madness and folly;
Then I saw that wisdom excels folly
As light excels darkness.
The wise man’s eyes are in his head,
But the fool walks in darkness.
Yet I myself perceived
That the same event happens to them all.
—The Kohelet (Ecclesiastes)
“I just have one more question for you Merritt. Knowing what you know now about how hard it was to come back from that time within the inner circle, would you do it again?”
Merritt almost says no. But, he catches himself and looks off into the distance. He can still feel the allure of not having to think for himself. And that is both disappointing and telling.
Ignoramus Undercover
Merritt Worthington had spent years training for deep cover assignments, but nothing had prepared him for this one. His mission was not to infiltrate a criminal syndicate or dismantle an international espionage ring. No, his task was far more insidious. He was sent to become effectively stupid—perhaps irrevocably so—for the sake of science.
The assignment came from Weld Darner, a behavioral scientist obsessed with a theory that had troubled him for decades. His core belief was that all human beings were inherently born with access to the highest of intelligence—what folks in ancient times called the Godhead. What he wanted to know was what got in the way of us accessing it on a global scale in order to create societies where most of humanity could thrive? His working theory was that it was an issue of nurture suppressing nature. From his research, he gathered that “means justification” was the culprit. In other words, he believed that if early in life someone was taught directly or indirectly that “the ends justify the means”, that very same Godhead level intelligence would develop a “distorted reverse bias” wherein their intelligence will be used to impede any thoughts that would facilitate building relational bonds with people that they believe will not serve them in arriving at their desired ends. Almost like Robocop with its prime directive.
What was most confusing about this use of intelligence is that they actually have to deny what they know is true and affirm what they know to be untrue in order to maintain a semblance of structural integrity and intentionality for anything they do. They could be likened to someone who is so committed to failing a 100 question test with a score of 2 that they study what it would take to get a 100 then hypnotize themselves to get 98 answers wrong. Then when they are criticized for only getting 2 answers correct, they respond with saying, “I am so intelligent that I got 98 answers wrong on purpose just so I can get the only 2 right that I wanted to get right. It is all part of the plan.” It wasn’t ignorance in the traditional sense. It is like willful anti-intelligence, a rigorous discipline of wrongness in service to an imagined victory. It was, in short, a kind of genius in failure. Only they didn’t really study at all. They just got a score of 2 because that is all they know. But they say that they were aiming for a 2 with such confidence that it even confuses the people who are aiming for a 100 percent who, because they are so concerned with avoiding getting an answer wrong, are rarely ever able to speak with such confidence.
This was a real problem. It was both sides of the Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE) taking hold of the very potential of humanity. You see, many people are familiar with the “overconfidence of the incompetent” aspect of DKE. But, many are not familiar with the “self doubt of the competent” aspect of this phenomenon. The irony of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that both sides feed into one another. The incompetent dominate conversations because of their confidence. The competent hesitate, which can make them seem less certain, even when they’re right. And as a result, bad ideas too often spread faster than good ones, because confidence is frequently mistaken for competence. Hence, America. And this is the problem Darner aimed to solve.
Unfortunately, any effort that Darner made to recruit overconfident people to participate in his research utterly failed. It was next to impossible to get them to consider that they know less than they thought they did without subjecting them to a devastation level event, which was unethical. Therefore, he had to find someone intelligent enough to know that they still could learn more and yet confident enough in their expertise to speak up. But, the kicker was that for this mission, the person had to also be disciplined enough to ignore their intelligence. Because any sign that they might be thinking for themselves, such as asking clarifying questions, might blow their cover for this very important project.
The Rise of the Fall
M.T. Wordsworth, the leader of a rising political movement, was the perfect test case. By every objective measure, he was an uninspired, directionless man with the intellectual agility of a waterlogged sponge. And yet, he was on the verge of gaining power in the upcoming state election. His followers, equally uninspired but fervently devoted, seemed to operate under an unshakable belief; if M.T. said it, it must be true. Merritt’s job was to embed himself into M.T.’s inner circle, not to stop him, but to become like them. If scientists could figure out what it took to make a rational, thinking human surrender to nonsense, they might understand how to reverse the process.
To get the data they needed, the experiment required total immersion with no contact with thinking people for the entire time he was undercover. And that wasn’t just limited to conversations. This meant that for two years, Merritt was forbidden from reading, engaging in critical thinking, or interacting with anyone outside of M.T.’s influence. His only source of information was the H3S (He Said, She Said) Television Network, a perpetual fog machine of misdirection and contradictions so dense that even Merritt, who once prided himself on his analytical skills, began to let go of the habit of trying to discern if the information going into his head was factual or not.
As one might imagine, at first, the mental acrobatics of denying obvious truths were exhausting. But eventually, he learned the golden rule of M.T.’s world—stop trying. And by simply doing nothing to exercise his executive brain function, he realized that his life seemed way simpler than it did when he read, thought, had conversations with people from a variety of backgrounds, and concerned himself with the general well-being of all humanity. Even he had to admit that trying to be a truly caring human being and feeling responsible for living up to his professed values even when no one else was looking was a relentless pursuit with not a lot of reward. In so many ways, being in the inner circle of M.T. Wordsworth almost felt like living on permanent vacation.
Imagine almost never having to think for yourself or take any responsibility for your actions. Merritt could see himself getting used to this. If M.T. was asked a complex question—whether about tax policy or the weather—the answer was whatever M.T. felt like saying in that moment. No calculations, no consistency, no need for coherence. And miraculously, that answer was right. Because rightness wasn’t about accuracy; it was about confidence. And the more people who nodded along, the more right it became. There was only one answer to every question, “What does M.T. have to say about it?” Imagine the simplicity! Someone asks you a math equation such as (19374953970 X 873743)/83742964 + (82684624 X 2846234) – 2 and you don’t even have to pull out your calculator because everyone knows that if you pull it out and it doesn’t match whatever M.T. pulls out of the ether, you will be wrong. So stop trying.
Of course, it took a little getting used to. Ignoring facts, rationale, and your own experience doesn’t come easy. But, also, it is a lot to keep track of and takes effort to retain. Why do that when you can just take no responsibility for anything and just look at one person for all of your answers? Plus you get all of the perks of knowing things without actually having to know anything. Some people would call that “genius’. And only the people who would call it “genius” made it into the M.T. inner circle.
The Extra Action Extraction
Before he took this assignment, Merritt never thought it was possible for him to lose his hard won abilities to discern right from wrong, assess people’s core motivations, be a master negotiator and more. But, at the time of extraction, it was pretty clear that he had developed a type of Stockholm Syndrome. He truly believed that he had cracked the code on M.T. Wordsworth and felt that Darner’s threat assessments were highly exaggerated. And sadly, Merritt believed that he was being objective. He had no idea that in his time undercover, he had developed certain biases as a result of his amygdala being hijacked by M.T.’s erratic though confident behavior. But the reality was that he was so far gone that he had come to believe that M.T. had orchestrated Merritt’s whole mission from behind the scenes and had actually tricked Darner into choosing Merritt specifically for his genius. That’s how lost he had become. And this terrified Darner. Rather than figure out a way to reverse the negative nurture effect, had he discovered a way to accelerate and strengthen it? After all, according to his theory, most people lost their access to the Godhead level intelligence when they were still to young for the prefrontal cortex to have developed enough to help them discern whether a situation called for an amygdala driven reaction or not. But Merritt was in his 30s with decades of experience that helped him handle cognitive dissonance and other mental calorie burning activities. And yet, he was in borderline walking coma still answering questions with, “What would M.T. say about this?”
Then finally, after months of intervention something broke through. As Darner predicted, M.T. Wordsworth had won the election. He was now the governor of Missibamasas, the megastate that emerged after Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas went bankrupt after deciding to protest any funds coming into their states from other states that supported pro-consciousness ideologies. And though Merritt had come to believe that M.T. was on to something with his MAMA (Make America Missibamasas Again) Movement, when the new administration first act was to make an attempt to annex Louisiana and Tennessee, Merritt started to question where his confidence in M.T. had come from. This annexing decision reminded him of something—of someone. It reminded him of his mama—of when he wasn’t able to protect her from his father who he had once worshiped even though he suffered at his hands. That was it. Just as he had convinced himself that his father’s abuse was his way of loving him and teaching him to be a man, Merritt had projected benevolence onto M.T. But when his mama tried to defend her son only to end up on the receiving end of his father’s powerful hands, Merritt forced himself to get strong enough to step in to try to stop his dad. He wasn’t able to do it then. But, he could now.
The Road to Recovery
Relearning the skills of independent thought was painful. His old intelligence had atrophied like an unused muscle, and worst of all, he had to confront the things he’d said and done under M.T.’s influence. Just as a former addict does when they think of the things they did under the influence of drugs or how repentant Nazis did after WWII, Merritt shuttered at the thought of how utterly convinced he’d become that M.T. had a plan. He knew that he didn’t. And in some kind of way that made him almost feel sorry for M.T. That’s when all of a sudden Merritt realized why he surrendered to this clearly broken man. It was because Merritt and so many others who followed M.T. knew what it was like to be broken by the people they wanted to trust more than anyone—their parents. Though he was not able to call it up once he had been triggered, Merritt had trauma bonded to M.T. They all had. His personal battle to re-intellectualize was more about his internal struggle to break free from the trauma bond with M.T. than any ideological agreement. And just as he once wanted his own father’s approval, perhaps what made it so hard for him to leave wasn’t just the comfort of simplicity—but a deeper emotional entanglement where, at some level, he wanted M.T.’s approval, even though he intellectually knew M.T. is a fraud.
At last, after months of deprogramming, Merritt was ready to submit his final report. The question posed to him was simple: “If given enough intervention, do you believe M.T.’s followers could do better? Could they ever be trusted with leadership in the future after a re-intellectualization program such as the one you participated in?”
He took a deep breath, then wrote:
“As much as it pains me to deny the capacities of my fellow humans, I have come to the conclusion that they cannot do better. It is what it is. I have had the privilege of being around some truly unintelligent and uninspiring people. Many of them know they are not thinkers. But they believe that if they can acquire the symbols of success, they can erase the ignorance that haunts them. When they are in charge of anything, they feel like thieves on the run—barking orders, gaslighting subordinates, and scrambling to distract from their own incompetence. Their only strategy is momentum: if you move fast enough, no one will stop to ask where you’re going. And if they do, you mock them until they stop asking.
Their confidence is unshakable, not because they have answers, but because they refuse to acknowledge questions. They have mastered the delusion that a broken clock is ‘right’ twice a day. They stumble through life, and when luck hands them a moment of success, they retroactively declare it part of their master plan. And even the thoughtful, hesitant people—so terrified of being wrong—look at their reckless certainty and ask, ‘Could they actually know something I don’t?’ They don’t.
After two years of being inside, I can confirm: There is no method to the madness. The only thing you can do is stop trying to make sense of nonsense. The only way to counteract their ignorance is to trust your own intelligence as much as they trust their ignorance. Because if we don’t, we’re all screwed. The real trap isn’t what we consider “other people’s stupidity”, but the psychological dependency that fuels it. And that’s not just a problem for M.T.’s followers or even M.T. himself—it’s a systemic issue that extends to his opposition as well. The more they focus on “defeating” M.T., the more they validate his role in the system. The only way out is not to win against him but to render him irrelevant by rebuilding a culture where people don’t need an authoritarian figure to give them certainty.
He put down his pen and stared at the words.
And yet, something gnawed at him.
The truth wasn’t just about M.T. and his followers. No, the real horror was that they hadn’t created this system—they had been summoned into existence by it. The people who positioned themselves as M.T.’s opposition were not truly opposing him; they were fueling him. Their very righteousness, their fear of making mistakes, their desperate need to be seen as good and thoughtful and fair—it was all part of the cycle.
The culture had created an opening for someone like M.T. because it had abandoned the ability to tolerate imperfection. People were so terrified of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, thinking the wrong thing, that when M.T. arrived and declared that nothing mattered except sheer, blind confidence, he became an escape hatch. His followers didn’t have to be right—they just had to be certain. And the people who fought against him? They had become just as predictable, just as reactive, just as controlled by fear.
The real tragedy wasn’t that people had “become ignoramuses”. It was that they had become dependent. M.T. and his opposition were locked in a grotesque dance, each justifying the other’s existence. The only way out wasn’t to defeat M.T. It was to break free of the entire framework—where every mistake was treated as failure rather than learning, where fear dictated action instead of curiosity, where being right was more important than being in relationship with one another.
Merritt added one last line to his report:
“If we want to change the world, we have to stop punishing people for being wrong. Otherwise, we’ll just keep creating the need for an M.T. Wordsworth.”
He closed the file. The real work, he realized, was only just beginning.
Weld Darner’s Preliminary Report (Part 1)
The findings of this experiment are beyond what I could have ever hoped for or imagined. When I set out to send someone in to infiltrate M.T. Wordsworth’s inner circle, I never in a thousand years would have imagined that someone as intelligent and disciplined as Merritt Worthington would have had such a difficult extraction. My blessedly incorrect assumption was that although they were not permitted to exercise it, the agent would have retained their executive functioning throughout the term of the immersion. Just as a person could retain their first language while learning a new language as I did while attending an immersion language school for Mandarin, I surmised that Merritt would fully be capable of communicated his experience upon his return in the fashion that I was was accustom to. After all it was not like he was a prisoner in the conventional sense. In fact, according to him, there were many enjoyable and comfortable experiences in the inner circle. But, what this experiment has taught me is that many of us, to include those of us trying to resist authoritarians like M.T. actually have a part of ourselves imprisoned within our own minds, desperate for a way out. And the function of someone like M.T. in our society is to give as a kind of escape. This is fascinating and will require a new type of research—an internal type.
Although I maintain that M.T. is an authoritarian and should not be trusted with decision making authority that will impact millions if not billions of people, I also acknowledge that he is just as much a victim of the System as the people he is harming. And so our approach to remedying this cannot simply be, “Get him and his followers out of power.” It has to be a strategy that aims to distribute power to as many people as possible. We have to encourage innovation and experimentation. And we must by all means embrace what Buckminster Fuller called, “Mistake Mystique”—that awareness that all progress has come through vision, trial, error, and revision. Finally, we must embrace multi-dimensional intelligence. While I still do believe that we humans naturally have access to Godhead level intelligence, I realize now that it can only be accessed through conscious interrelating and knowing that just as hurt people hurt people, healed people heal people. And saw after submitting this preliminary report, I will take a sabbatical to do some healing of my own so that I can liberate the imprisoned part of myself that fueled by rage, set out on a multi-year plan to stop M.T. only for him to rise to power anyway. Upon my return—hopefully healed—I will begin a new experiment that asks, what will it take to create a solution that can dissolve these authoritarian movements with love rather than trying to defeat them with fear? But, when I say love, I do not mean some smushy ineffective chocolate and flowers television love. I mean a love that flows like water. It is time for us to realize that being loving isn’t just all sunshine and rainbows. It is about Liberation. Water washes. But, it also erodes, dissolves, and—when necessary—breaks what ever gets in the way of flow. And it doesn’t do it with malicious intent. It does it naturally and effortlessly by just being what it is. It can do nothing else. Knowing what I know now, I can do nothing else.
There is additional content that can be found on my Substack for paid supporters. It includes Weld Darner’s Preliminary Report (Part 2) which is more of a systematic breakdown of my thoughts on how people may possibly get caught in an authoritarian cycle through the psychological phenomena of repetition compulsion, Stockholm Syndrome, and transference. Additionally, I offer some guidance on how to apply this information to your life and relationships, how to recover after finding yourself in an encounter with someone who activates your amygdala as well as my final thoughts. If you are a financial supporter or take advantage of one of the free trial options and choose to read this, know that I am not a psychologist. I am simply an avid reader, former pastor, Enneagram student among other disciplines, and someone who was gone through a whole lot of life and therapy and paid attention. Every single day I give everything I have to stay as present as possible with whatever arises and I push myself to try to give to others what I was blessed to receive.
If you are not a financial supporter and don’t get to the end, thank you for journeying with me this far. I do invite you to consider becoming a paid supporter even if you turn it off and on from time to time. I am working on some things to include a book that financial supporters will receive. But, if you are not able to support financially but would like access to something, I do have the option of a 7 day free trial for new subscribers as well as a 24 hour restack trial for people who share this post.
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