What more than anything makes people stupid is that they think they are smart. And the smarter you really are, the more stupid you become if you live under that delusion. Actually, it's not any great advantage to be very talented and highly intelligent. In a manner of speaking, that is, more often than not, like having a supercharged, 800 hp monster of a racing car but no clue about how to drive it. Do we see an accident waiting to happen? Indeed we do. 

What really counts is discipline, as in self discipline, a calm control of own faculties which allows the powers of the afore mentioned racing car to be used in a manner which is appropriate to the power of such a vehicle. Discipline begins with purpose, with having a plan. Consider a child: The child has done something he's not allowed to do and will tell some fanciful story in order to cover up his mistake. As an adult, it's hard to not start laughing at this blatant lie, and it's actually more fun to play along with the outrage in order to see where the story is going. The adult person has a better perspective on life and how things work and is therefore able to spot the story for what it is. 

In 1884, Edwin Abbott published the novel Flatland, which was a satirical story about social conventions in Victorian Britain that has later been remembered mostly for its play on dimensional perception: The inhabitants of Flatland are living on a two dimensional surface, able only to perceive that which connects with this surface. They have no conception of "up". To them, our racing car will appear as four separate, but synchronized spots - where the tyres connect with the surface. They will observe that the spots are moving around in perfect harmony, perhaps thinking that they are somehow connected, but as they are unable to perceive anything in the dimension of "up", they won't see the actual car like we do. This, from our three dimensional perspective, is called to entirely miss the point. 

Children have a limited ability to perceive the real world. However, they will, after a certain point of development in their individuality, stubbornly insist that they "get it", and move on to demand gradually more power to make their own decisions as they get older. As an adult, what can you do?  Any parent can tell you that raising children is a never ending nightmare of damage control, rather than the romantic fantasy they had before winding up in such a situation. Such is the case with our simpletons who fancy themselves to be smart too.  Like the Flatlanders, they observe things that move in alignment but they lack the ability to imagine that there are unseen dimensions that actually connect these events in a pattern which lies beyond the world that we can perceive. 

Plato spoke of the invisible sun of enlightenment, which ignites at the moment when you admit that you know nothing, but all that this sun can do is to shine upon the racing car and thereby cast a shadow onto our two dimensional range of perception. This will give a distorted image of the actual, three dimensional phenomenon, but it will at least indicate that there's something more to the picture than four spots that move in a synchronized pattern. Still the hard core Flatlanders will snort at this and insist that reality is what we can see, touch, taste, hear and smell - and only that. If we have to invoke an invisible sun to cast an imaginary shadow of a multidimensional hyper-reality, we are in la la land. If something cannot be proven for all to see, it isn't real. At this point, the idiots among us will lean back in satisfaction, produce a smug grin, thinking that they are smart, and that they have now won the discussion.