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

Kaffway Otto. I wanted to talk to him about idiocy.

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

Kaffway 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 I'm not used to it. But he also thinks about this other

meaning of idiocy how Carl 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

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