understanding and properly identifying idiots

One of my favorite books is called "Shop Class as Soulcraft"  by Matthew B Crawford; its an excellent book for those who love to do things with their hands and happen also to be deep thinkers.

In that book Matthew discusses a piece from Pirsigs well known classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Let me quote from Matthews book and how he deconstructs that below:

The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was going full blast and they were clowning around and talking and seemed not to notice me. When one of them finally came over he barely listened to the piston slap before saying, "Oh yeah. Tappets."

Three overhauls, some haphazard misdiagnoses, and a lot of bad faith later, the narrator picks up
his bike from the shop for the final time.

Now there really was a tappet noise. They hadn’t adjusted them. I pointed this out and the kid came with an open-end adjustable wrench, set wrong, and swiftly rounded both of the sheet-aluminum tappet covers, ruining both of them.

"I hope we’ve got some more of those in stock," he said.
I nodded.

He brought out a hammer and cold chisel and started to pound them loose. The chisel punched through the aluminum cover and I could see he was pounding the
chisel right into the engine head. On the next blow he missed the chisel completely
and struck the head with the hammer, breaking off a portion of two of the cooling
fins.

Finally he gets on the road, only to discover that the shop had neglected to bolt the engine back into
the frame; it was hanging on by a single bolt.
I found the cause of the seizures a few weeks later, waiting to happen again. It was a little twenty-five-cent pin in the internal oil-delivery system that had been
sheared and was preventing oil from reaching the head at high speeds.

... Why did they butcher it so? 

... They sat down to do a job and they performed
it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it. 

... But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." 

"Nothing personal in it." Here is a paradox. On the one hand, to be a good mechanic seems to require personal commitment: I am a mechanic. On the other hand, what it means to be a good mechanic is that you have a keen sense that you answer to something that is the opposite of personal or idiosyncratic; something universal. 

In Pirsig’s story, there is an underlying fact: a sheared-off pin has blocked an oil gallery, resulting in oil starvation to the head and excessive heat, causing the
seizures. This is the Truth, and it is the same for everyone. But finding this truth requires a certain
disposition in the individual: attentiveness, enlivened by a sense of responsibility to the motorcycle. 

He has to internalize the well working of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. The truth does not reveal itself to idle spectators.

Pirsig’s mechanic is, in the original sense of the term, an idiot. Indeed, he exemplifies the truth about idiocy, which is that it is at once an ethical and a cognitive failure. The Greek idios means "private," and an idio¯te¯s means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role; for example, that of motorcycle mechanic. Pirsig’s mechanic is idiotic because he fails to grasp his public role, which entails, or should, a relation of active concern to others, and to the machine. He is not involved. It is not his problem. Because he is an idiot.

After reading the above when I read the book some years past I understood the problem with the modern world. In a world awash with selfies and the clamor for "look at me ... mum look at ME" attention seekers (like a pack of reproducing birds) that more and more people are failing to emotionally develop as part of the normal process.

This results in a bunch more people (perhaps even most of the population now) having some form of NPD (which is no longer regarded as a disorder because its become the new normal).

One of the attributes of a narcissist (well and, curiously, a psychopath too) is the inability to empathise or think externally ... makes for a bad mechanic (just for starters). I wrote a post on this subject a few years back here which takes a different angle on it.

So to me the problem with idiots is not that they are stupid, its that they can't function in many roles at all ...