New Scientific Study Explains Sevco Stupidity
Today as much attention focusses on Celtic, there’s some news which will be of great interest to the fans on the other side of the city; new scientific research has emerged to shed light on the “three kinds of stupidity” and how they manifest themselves.
The Institute of Psychology at Eotvos University, in Budapest, has revealed that stupid behaviour is broadly broken down into three distinct sorts.
First, and most common, is called Confident Ignorance.
This is what happens when you take action believing you have a certain skill-set, or personal attributes only to discover – with all the attendant consequences- that actually you don’t.
Examples that spring to mind are Dave King telling the world how he’ll turn around the Good Ship Sevco and then getting into office and finding more holes in the structure than a Tetley T-Bag; Kirk Broadfoot trying to work a microwave; Ian Black thinking he’s a master gambler (and even a footballer); Chris Graham thinking he really does look trendy in fluorescent gloves and Barry Fergusson believing he has a future in club management.
Some of these simply result in embarrassment (yes, that’s you Chris). Others have more far reaching effects, as anyone who’s looked at photos of Broadfoot can attest to. (Gilding the lily with that one, I admit; that face actually pre-dates the famous exploding egg incident.)
The second form of stupidity is Lack Of Control.
That one is pretty easy to understand.
Examples of this are equally numerous; everything from fans making Nazi salutes even as they eschew the Best of British values; rioting in faraway lands, and even closer to home; as well as rabid behavioural tics in the face of such things as crucifixes, the Sign of the Cross, the mere mention of Ireland or expressions of Irishness and an inability to control oneself when reading On Fields of Green.
It’s linked to an inability to stop spending money, or when there’s none of that to fantasising about it and it also helps explain so much about John Brown.
Lack of control has been a common factor in the last few years at Ibrox.
Sometimes it affects entire institutions at one time, as we’ve seen there.
The third is even more important; it’s called Absent Mindedness.
As in, “Oh this sectarian email? I absolutely forgot I wasn’t supposed to send those in work.”
And such as “Oh that’s right; he was sacked for sending a sectarian email. We forgot that before we asked for his opinion to run it in a national newspaper.”
This explains how Dave King can conveniently forget things in a courtroom; how so many of their supporters started out with an understanding of what failing to get a CVA meant and now can’t remember it; how directors at the club can be so lax with the paperwork and salient details like contract registration; how even their legal team can “get confused” in front of a judge about the repayment of a loan; how they can talk about mending fences with other Scottish clubs one minute and the next start threatening to “settle scores.”
This particular thread puts down roots in the Survival Myth, the Victim Myth and the Global Super Club Myth, a claim that’s been blown apart time and time again and somehow still has traction with a support that ignores evidence even when it’s piled up like a snowdrift.
The author of this study, Balazs Aczel, said “These results bring us closer to understanding people’s conception of unintelligent behaviour while emphasising the broader psychological perspectives of studying the attribute of stupid in everyday life.”
Well, quite right.
But it could also be used for other things, like screening potential applicants to be the next CEO of the SFA or SPFL; it could be used to formulate a basic intelligent test for aspiring Scottish media hacks and it could be used to test the nous of fan representatives and future members of the RFC PLC board.
In short, this could revolutionise life at Ibrox.
Yet I suspect this will go the way of so many other scientific studies which could have benefited the Children of Sevconia, such as that vast body of work entitled “How To Tell When Something Is Dead” and everything that ever had anything to do with human evolution.