INTERVIEWER

Although there is a time-honored tradition of the satirical treatment of human stupidity from Aristophanes through Erasmus, Swift, Twain to Vonnegut—it is Vonnegut’s Jonah, the narrator of Cat’s Cradle with his interest in “the history of human stupidity,” that I am especially reminded of by your theoretician of stupidity, McCandless, in Carpenter’s Gothic.

GADDIS

Again, I think writers work from their own energies, their own concepts. I don’t think there is any influence among us. After all, stupidity—and I don’t mean ignorance—is a central issue of our time. In my own case, going back to entropy, I’m most intrigued by its correlation as the loss of available energy in a closed system with stupidity as the corresponding loss of available intelligence in our own political establishment, especially as regards foreign policy and the economy—its collapse that is to say—where Wiener sees physics’ view of the world as it actually exists replaced by one as we observe it, a kind of one way communication.