Well, it is perhaps just inevitable to find someone, at any point in history, that feels surrounded by ideological microcosms that, at their very core, are nurtured by folly. I mean, folly has the power to seduce not only a few misguided souls, but an entire civilization to the point of making entire communities sleepwalk through obvious truths.

The feeling is so universal—so “global” as to adhere to our current conceptual frameworks—so deeply felt across centuries and cultures, that it starts to look less like a diagnosis and more like a condition—something baked into the way human societies process change. And if we trace that feeling through some of history’s most consequential intellectual ruptures, a discomforting pattern takes shape, something like trying to fit the human form into a pyramidal container. People have confidently called others fools without noticing, in hindsight, that they had been standing on the wrong side of understanding.

Think of Aristotle, a mind so formidable that Western thought still orbits him. In his Politics, he laid out with calm precision the argument that some human beings were, by nature, slaves—that their subordination was not a cruelty but a reflection of the natural order. To the educated Greek or Roman reader, this was not controversial. It was simply how things were. Those who might have questioned it—and some did and continue doing so—were the unreasonable ones, the ones failing to see what every sensible person already knew. We now recognize this as one of the most catastrophic intellectual failures in the history of philosophy. But at the time, the “wisdom” was seamless. That is what makes it so instructive and exemplary to fathom the terrible reach that folly can wreak on humanity.

Centuries later, the same dynamic played out on a cosmic stage. When Galileo presented evidence that the Earth was not the center of the universe, the establishment did not engage his data. It charged him with heresy. The Vatican’s 1616 decree called the heliocentric idea “foolish and absurd” (language that tells you everything about how threatened the reigning worldview felt). To defend the old model was to defend reason, civilization, God. To question it was madness. And yet the madness turned out to be the truth.

A similar pattern, in a different key, follows a few centuries later in the story of women’s rights—quieter but no less revealing in its arc. For most of recorded history, the exclusion of women from political, intellectual, and economic life was treated as a matter of biological fact, not political choice. When Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, she was not celebrated as a pioneer. She was ridiculed as a dangerous eccentric. The collective certainty that women were naturally inferior—held not just by the uneducated but by philosophers, scientists, and lawmakers—now reads as one of the longest-running blind spots in human civilization. But it did not feel like a blind spot at the time. It felt like common sense, like the spirit of the times.

Which brings us to the present, and to a question that carries real weight: is Artificial Intelligence making us into a new generation of fools? The anxiety is genuine. When we offload reasoning, creativity, and judgment to algorithms, something is at stake—something about what it means to think for ourselves. Prominent voices have warned that we risk a kind of cognitive atrophy, a civilization that has outsourced its own mind. But this fear, too, has precedent. The printing press was supposed to destroy memory. Calculators were going to ruin mathematical reasoning. A 2023 report from Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI suggests the more likely trajectory is augmentation, not replacement—provided we remain deliberate about how we integrate these tools into our lives and everyday thinking processes.

If there is a lesson here, it is not that we should stop worrying about AI or dismiss legitimate concerns about where our technologies are taking us. It is that we should hold our certainties a little more lightly. The world has never been short of people confident they know who the fools are. The record of that confidence, however, is not reassuring. But optimism arises when we realize that there are more fools around us convinced that the mission to achieve clarity is worth the effort.