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“Stupidity is caused, not by brain failure, but by a wicked heart. Insensitiveness, opacity, inability to make connections, often accompanied by low “animal” cunning. One cannot help feeling that this mental oblivion is chosen, by the heart or the moral will—an active preference.” 

Mary McCarthy, in a letter to Hannah Arendt (1964) 

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McCarthy began by discussing reasons for major cruelties affecting global events, (specifically what was asserted to be the “stupidity” of bureaucratic monster Adolf Eichmann), but then she extended her rejection of the “stupidity” defense, applying it to many major and minor crimes of human relations, insisting that no one had to be an intellectual giant to know right from wrong. 

Her uncompromising definition of “brain failure” as an “active preference” of a “wicked heart” seems irrefutable, not only in major atrocities, but in petty, personal cruelties. These include those little verbal stabs instantly retracted by the perpetrator with, “Oh, that was SO stupid, I didn’t mean to . . .“ 

The implication—if not demand—is that the victim should not be so touchy as to take offense. 

We all remember being on the receiving end of such slights and such excuses. What worries me sometimes is that I may have neatly erased from my memory, sent into “mental oblivion,” some occasions when I chose “stupidity,” chose to toss out an “insensitive” remark or some casual injury. As a human being, I can’t assume that I’m not capable of all varieties of human behavior.  

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