Luis Palencia, Professor, IESE, University of Navarra
Movie fools
As the Psalm says: "Every day that dawns the issue of fools grows...". That is to say, it comes from ancient times. I imagine that each country has its own collection of expressions about tontuna, but I think that Spanish, language is very suitable for insult, is student : tontos del bote, de baba, de capirote, del haba, de solemnidad, de los palotes, de Coria, de Anchuelo... and that without counting the sayings about topic.
The thing is universal and in the movies there are plenty of examples of tontuna, bobería or stupidity. By the way, in the movies, those who have some kind of cognitive peculiarity subject -such as "Forrest Gump", or a difference like "The Rain Man"- come out better and often give lessons of good sense and good work to the "normal" spectators. The other foolishness, the bad one, the one that is not liked, is usually the result of a vice (pride, anger, ambition, envy...) without any counterweight of virtue (prudence, humility, generosity...). In heist movies it is common for impeccable planning to collapse due to an excess of ambition or confidence; due to foolishness, come on.
We all agree on how widespread foolishness is, as certified by a synthetic and resounding expression: people are stupid. I have no proof but I would say that we have all uttered this phrase at some time, which leads us to a paradox that, without going into disquisitions on the whole and the parts, says: if we all think that people are stupid, and people are all of us, who is the fool, us, the others, "the people"...? It is an unsolved topic . It could be that tontuna is a temporary status , which fits better in the verb estar than in the verb ser: estar tonto instead of ser tonto.
We all do foolish things and when we fall into error, we recognize: what was I thinking? There will be learning if we have the humility to transform today's mistakes into lessons for the future. I sense that there are differences here. There are those who learn from their mistakes and those who insist on looking for culprits and causes unrelated to them. If a collective has become accustomed to not assuming its responsibilities, it cannot expect leaders to assume theirs because they will be blamed by those of the collective nonsense, and the mess will remain unresolved.
If we are looking for explanations, it could also be that the foolishness is only in the eyes of the observer and not in the observed. In these times of relativism the idea sells well: there are no fools or people who act foolishly... there are only intransigent observers. In "Gaslight", a perverse husband wants to drive his wife crazy by making her believe that, indeed, she is not well balanced. He almost succeeds. If our common sense (that of grandmothers, that of spending less than we earn) is numbed by making us believe that we are intransigent from the last century (or the last decade), we will end up believing it and first accept and then collaborate with behaviors that, after a few years and when we look back, make us conclude, with sorrow and without solution: people are stupid, we are stupid.