Noisy idiots have been a problem throughout history. What to do with precocious citizens with half-baked yet strangely appealing ideas? The notion that jobs are being taken by immigrants is an enduring and popular fancy. Another is that the federal government is merely a front for a squad of hidden mandarins quietly controlling the government from a bunker.
So, where do I get off calling people idiots? Is it not possible that I am an idiot as well? Yes, I’m anxious to clear the air and admit to my own idiocy. No point in denying it. As a lifetime member of the set of all idiots, I’ll offer a defining quality of idiocy.
An idiot is someone who knows enough to assert a statement with certainty, but not knowing enough to realize their knowledge may be too shallow or based on falsehoods or inaccuracies. Idiocy is a vector pointing in the wrong direction with imaginary magnitude. It’s a part of the human condition everyone is afflicted with but differing in direction and magnitude.
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The rest of this post is cut and pasted from Facebook. I don’t know who wrote it but here is the link.
Umberto Eco was a scholar — a man who spent sixty years inside libraries, inside ancient manuscripts, inside the deepest questions human beings have ever wrestled with. How do we make meaning? How does a symbol become a belief? How does a word become a world?
He wrote The Name of the Rose — a murder mystery set inside a 14th-century monastery, where the most dangerous weapon wasn’t a sword. It was a book. And the most dangerous idea wasn’t heresy.
It was forbidden knowledge in the hands of the unprepared.
He understood, better than almost anyone alive, what happens when information moves without wisdom to carry it.
So in June 2015, when Umberto Eco accepted an honorary degree from the University of Turin and turned to face the journalists in the room, what he said wasn’t a prepared speech.
It was a warning.
“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced. But now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner.”
The room went quiet.
Because everyone in it knew he wasn’t being cruel. He was being precise.
For most of human history, spreading an idea required effort. A book had to be written, edited, printed, and earned its way into hands. A journalist had to answer to editors who asked: Is this true? Can you prove it? A voice had to build credibility slowly — through knowledge, through time, through the hard work of being right more often than wrong.
That process wasn’t perfect. Important voices were shut out. Power shaped what got heard. The gatekeepers had their own agendas.
But there was friction. And friction — it turns out — slows things down just long enough for truth to catch up with speed.
Now that friction is almost gone.
A rumor written in anger at midnight can reach a million people before sunrise. A post with no sources, no context, and no accountability can be shared more times than any correction will ever be. Outrage travels faster than nuance. A confident lie moves faster than a careful truth.
Eco understood this — not because he hated technology. Not because he was a bitter old man longing for simpler times.
He understood it because he had spent a lifetime mapping exactly how human beings get deceived. By symbols. By certainty. By the seductive confidence of a voice that sounds like it knows.
His warning wasn’t that everyone having a voice is wrong.
Every person deserves to be heard. The democratization of expression — the idea that you no longer need wealth or institutional power to reach an audience — is genuinely, powerfully good.
His warning was about something quieter. The collapse of the space between having an opinion and having expertise. Between speaking and being believed.
We feel that collapse every single day now.
In the health post written with total confidence by someone with no medical training — shared a hundred thousand times by people who trusted the tone, not the facts. In the political story that races ahead of the truth. In the moment satire gets mistaken for news, and no one notices until the damage is done.
The algorithm doesn’t reward careful.
It rewards engaging. And “engaging” — too often — means shocking, confirming, or enraging.
Umberto Eco died in February 2016. Just eight months after that warning. Just as the world he described was beginning to fully unmask itself.
He never saw what followed.
But his words survived. And they don’t read like criticism anymore.
They read like a map.
So the next time something lands in your feed and every instinct says share this now — pause. One breath.
Ask: Who said this? Why does it make me feel this way? Is the confidence of the writing a substitute for evidence?
Not because you distrust everything. Not because truth doesn’t exist.
But because the single most powerful thing any of us can do in an age of noise — is slow down long enough to think.
That, Umberto Eco would say, is not weakness.
That is the only thing standing between information and wisdom.
Lamentations on Chemistry 