willful stupidity

From Dictionary.com:

will·ful/ˈwilfəl/Adjective

1. (of an immoral or illegal act or omission) Intentional; deliberate.
2. Having or showing a stubborn and determined intention to do as one wants, regardless of the consequences or effects.

Is it a reaction to being beaten down in childhood? To being told, over and over again, that you are stupid, or worthless?

The pendulum effect is interesting, too - I'm pretty sure that my 'intelligence' is, to a large degree, a reaction to my mother's 'stupidity'. In other words, I HAD to be smart in order to survive her. Or, becoming 'smart' was the path that made sense to my sensitive temperament? Dunno. And I'm not implying conscious choice here, at the age of two or three. I'm talking more about Drama of the Gifted Child kind of intelligence, a la Alice Miller.

Googling turned up this link on the subject:
http://brucebyfield.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/willful-stupidity/

No, what bothers me is the willfully stupid’s absolute conviction that they are correct. They know almost nothing about what they are talking about – in this case, not even what stock their store carries. Nor, despite the fact that they are focusing on a topic for much of their working life, have they made any effort to push back the limits of their ignorance, a failure that I find baffling. When I’ve been in similar situations, I’ve learned, partly despite myself and partly so the work would be more interesting. But when people choose to become willfully stupid, not learning seems the whole point of their behavior. In a perverse way, they seem to have scored some victory over the conditions of their lives by refusing to see a point or learn.

But the worst thing about such behavior is that it seems to be self-inflicted. In this sense, it is the mental equivalent of cutting yourself or some other self-destructive behavior. It seems to me that, if you play stupid long enough, you risk becoming stupid permanently. Eventually, you might reach a point where you can’t see evidence or listen to a counter-argument no matter what. And I can only imagine this state as one of diminished enjoyment and intellectual impoverishment.

That, in the end, is why such encounters disturb me. They send my scuttling to my mental mirror for a close scrutiny, wondering if my behavior is ever anything like what I’ve just seen, and wondering if I would know if it were.