When I started working on this series, one of the first people I reached out to was Caffwayato.

I wanted to talk to him about idiocy.

Idiocy is just a synonym for, like, stupidity, like being dumb.

Coughway teaches urban studies at CUNY, and back in April, he was thinking a lot about that word.

Ordinary, colloquial sense, idiocy.

I mean, I try to be as careful as I can, going out and wearing masks and, you know,

washing my hands like multiple times every three hours. But I still do really,

still do stupid stuff just because I'm not used to it.

But he also thinks about this other meaning of idiocy, how Karl Marx and Frederick

Engels meant it in the Communist Manifesto. It's a line you might have missed.

I'd have to look it up. I'd have to look it up.

All right, so the full line is the bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns.

It has created enormous cities and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.

The idiocy of rural life.

So for them, you know, idiocy is basically a synonym for isolation or

privatized isolation. The word comes from ancient Greek. An idiot was someone who wasn't

participating in democratic public life. So for Marx, idiocy was more and more a thing of the past.

So capitalism was doing away with the idiocy of real life.

The new mode of production was pushing people together.

It was ugly, but it was making new kinds of social relationships.

You know, individuals in isolation working on their petty plots of land,

you know, do not see themselves as part of something larger. They don't see themselves as a broader

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