Beyond “Mean” and “Stupid”: How We Explain Harm
*last updated on January 11, 2026
Image credit: Pauline Baynes
SPOILER ALERT: This page contains spoilers for the book series The Chronicles of Narnia.
In the last book of C. S. Lewis’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia, the end of Narnia is set in motion. Lewis opens his seventh volume, The Last Battle, by introducing a donkey named Puzzle and an ape named Shift. After the two find a lion’s skin, Shift manipulates the naïve Puzzle into wearing it so that Shift can persuade everybody that Aslan—the lion-like creator figure of Narnia—has returned and is speaking through Shift. Given Lewis’s well-known Christian framing of the series, it is not hard to read Shift as a figure for religious corruption: an institution that claims to speak for God while using fear and spectacle to secure obedience for its own benefit.
Even the names feel suggestive. The verb puzzle means “to confuse,” and the donkey is indeed confused until the end, when he finally understands what he has helped to do and repents. Shifty, meanwhile, describes someone who deceives or evades, which fits the ape’s character and tactics; and when Aslan finally intervenes, Shift is not spared.
By tying Narnia’s collapse to the choices of Shift and Puzzle, Lewis’s story both reflects and reinforces a familiar idea: that problems are caused by people who are stupid and/or mean—figures we often collapse into the category of “bad people.”
If you wonder whether you share this tendency, it is easy to test. Think of someone whose words or actions have recently made you angry, sad, frustrated, or irritated. It might be a family member, a politician, or a coworker. It might be a driver who cut you off, a sales assistant who would not help, a bureaucrat who refused to stamp a document you needed, or someone online who left a rude comment. Whoever comes to mind, make sure the emotion is real and strong. Now ask yourself whether either of these phrases captures your reaction: “What a jerk!” or “What an idiot!”
“Idiot” is straightforward: it means “stupid.” As for “jerk,” Merriam-Webster defines it as both “an annoyingly stupid or foolish person” and “an unlikable person, especially one who is cruel, rude, or small-minded.” In other words, jerk conveniently fuses “mean” and “stupid” into a single, satisfying label.
Notice, too, what happens when you are deep in anger, frustration, sadness, or fear: you may not want to go beyond the mean/stupid explanation. Trying to understand can feel counterproductive (“He’s just horrible—there’s nothing else to it”), or even insulting to yourself (“Why should I waste time on this idiot?”). Once we decide that someone is simply mean or stupid, we close ourselves to the possibility that there are other causes worth noticing.
This habit can appear in many forms. It can hide behind sophisticated metaphors or moral commentary. But the core move is the same: we reduce a complex person to a moral failing or an intellectual deficiency. If you listen closely to how people talk about personal conflicts and large social problems, you can hear this pattern recur with surprising regularity.
To be fair, “mean” and “stupid” are not the only labels we reach for. We also say “lazy,” “sick,” “greedy,” “biased,” “insensitive,” or “selfish” (the list goes on). What these words share is their power to erase the individual behind the label. Still, “mean” and “stupid” are among the most basic and familiar categories—close cousins of the “good vs. evil” and “clever vs. ignorant” binaries that structure so many stories we tell about the world.
Several assumptions often sit inside these labels:
The last assumption points to a cognitive bias commonly called the fundamental attribution error: we explain other people’s actions by their character, but explain our own actions by circumstances. For example, we often tend to think along these lines: “Sally is late to class; she’s lazy; she doesn't care,” but “I’m late to class; it was a bad morning.”
Most people prefer to see themselves as basically decent and reasonably competent. Recognizing a mistake does not mean you walk around convinced you are wrong at every step. That self-understanding protects you from viewing yourself as fundamentally stupid. Similarly, most people resist being called “a bad person,” so, in your own mind, you are not essentially mean. Put those beliefs together—“I’m not mean or stupid” and “mean/stupid people hurt others”—and it becomes easy to conclude that you rarely hurt anyone at all.
But life is more complicated than labels and binaries. People do not hurt each other only because they are mean and stupid (or selfish, lazy, or greedy). Harm is often produced by ordinary people who see themselves as well-intentioned. Even beloved books can carry assumptions their authors did not consciously endorse. Lewis’s Narnia, for example, has long been criticized for racial and colonial patterns in its portrayal of Calormenes and in its recurring narrative of English children arriving to “save” (and sometimes govern) the land. The books also treat English as the default language of the world—an imaginative choice that is rarely addressed within the story and can feel neutral when you grow up inside it, and very different when you look at it from outside.
When we believe that harm is mainly caused by “mean” or “stupid” individuals (which we are not), we gain a convenient excuse to ignore our own role in the pain and discomfort around us. People can be so consumed by their own emotional distress that they miss other people’s needs. People can also suppress empathy and knowingly cause harm for reasons that feel justified to them—duty, loyalty, fear, ideology, or survival. Some of us may be more attuned to others’ feelings, or find it harder to shut empathy down, but none of us is perfectly sensitive or perfectly understanding.
Labeling people as “mean” or “stupid” also flattens the problem of free will. A great deal of what we call “character” is shaped by forces people did not choose: temperament, early attachment, trauma or chronic stress, education, culture, social status, and the incentives and pressures of a particular situation. These factors do not excuse harm, but they do help explain why the same person can act generously in one context and harshly in another—and why some people find empathy easier to access than others. If we take those constraints seriously, the simple moral division between “good people” and “bad people” becomes harder to sustain, and the question shifts from “What’s wrong with this person?” to “What conditions are shaping this behavior—and what might change it?”
About this project: Start page
Image credit: Pauline Baynes
SPOILER ALERT: This page contains spoilers for the book series The Chronicles of Narnia.
In the last book of C. S. Lewis’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia, the end of Narnia is set in motion. Lewis opens his seventh volume, The Last Battle, by introducing a donkey named Puzzle and an ape named Shift. After the two find a lion’s skin, Shift manipulates the naïve Puzzle into wearing it so that Shift can persuade everybody that Aslan—the lion-like creator figure of Narnia—has returned and is speaking through Shift. Given Lewis’s well-known Christian framing of the series, it is not hard to read Shift as a figure for religious corruption: an institution that claims to speak for God while using fear and spectacle to secure obedience for its own benefit.
Even the names feel suggestive. The verb puzzle means “to confuse,” and the donkey is indeed confused until the end, when he finally understands what he has helped to do and repents. Shifty, meanwhile, describes someone who deceives or evades, which fits the ape’s character and tactics; and when Aslan finally intervenes, Shift is not spared.
By tying Narnia’s collapse to the choices of Shift and Puzzle, Lewis’s story both reflects and reinforces a familiar idea: that problems are caused by people who are stupid and/or mean—figures we often collapse into the category of “bad people.”
If you wonder whether you share this tendency, it is easy to test. Think of someone whose words or actions have recently made you angry, sad, frustrated, or irritated. It might be a family member, a politician, or a coworker. It might be a driver who cut you off, a sales assistant who would not help, a bureaucrat who refused to stamp a document you needed, or someone online who left a rude comment. Whoever comes to mind, make sure the emotion is real and strong. Now ask yourself whether either of these phrases captures your reaction: “What a jerk!” or “What an idiot!”
“Idiot” is straightforward: it means “stupid.” As for “jerk,” Merriam-Webster defines it as both “an annoyingly stupid or foolish person” and “an unlikable person, especially one who is cruel, rude, or small-minded.” In other words, jerk conveniently fuses “mean” and “stupid” into a single, satisfying label.
Notice, too, what happens when you are deep in anger, frustration, sadness, or fear: you may not want to go beyond the mean/stupid explanation. Trying to understand can feel counterproductive (“He’s just horrible—there’s nothing else to it”), or even insulting to yourself (“Why should I waste time on this idiot?”). Once we decide that someone is simply mean or stupid, we close ourselves to the possibility that there are other causes worth noticing.
This habit can appear in many forms. It can hide behind sophisticated metaphors or moral commentary. But the core move is the same: we reduce a complex person to a moral failing or an intellectual deficiency. If you listen closely to how people talk about personal conflicts and large social problems, you can hear this pattern recur with surprising regularity.
To be fair, “mean” and “stupid” are not the only labels we reach for. We also say “lazy,” “sick,” “greedy,” “biased,” “insensitive,” or “selfish” (the list goes on). What these words share is their power to erase the individual behind the label. Still, “mean” and “stupid” are among the most basic and familiar categories—close cousins of the “good vs. evil” and “clever vs. ignorant” binaries that structure so many stories we tell about the world.
Several assumptions often sit inside these labels:
- Some people hurt others on purpose and may even enjoy it. They are mean.
- Other people have inferior intellectual abilities. They are stupid.
- Mean and stupid people are responsible for their failings. They should know better. Therefore, it is acceptable to blame them.
- “I can make mistakes, but I am not essentially stupid or bad.”
The last assumption points to a cognitive bias commonly called the fundamental attribution error: we explain other people’s actions by their character, but explain our own actions by circumstances. For example, we often tend to think along these lines: “Sally is late to class; she’s lazy; she doesn't care,” but “I’m late to class; it was a bad morning.”
Most people prefer to see themselves as basically decent and reasonably competent. Recognizing a mistake does not mean you walk around convinced you are wrong at every step. That self-understanding protects you from viewing yourself as fundamentally stupid. Similarly, most people resist being called “a bad person,” so, in your own mind, you are not essentially mean. Put those beliefs together—“I’m not mean or stupid” and “mean/stupid people hurt others”—and it becomes easy to conclude that you rarely hurt anyone at all.
But life is more complicated than labels and binaries. People do not hurt each other only because they are mean and stupid (or selfish, lazy, or greedy). Harm is often produced by ordinary people who see themselves as well-intentioned. Even beloved books can carry assumptions their authors did not consciously endorse. Lewis’s Narnia, for example, has long been criticized for racial and colonial patterns in its portrayal of Calormenes and in its recurring narrative of English children arriving to “save” (and sometimes govern) the land. The books also treat English as the default language of the world—an imaginative choice that is rarely addressed within the story and can feel neutral when you grow up inside it, and very different when you look at it from outside.
When we believe that harm is mainly caused by “mean” or “stupid” individuals (which we are not), we gain a convenient excuse to ignore our own role in the pain and discomfort around us. People can be so consumed by their own emotional distress that they miss other people’s needs. People can also suppress empathy and knowingly cause harm for reasons that feel justified to them—duty, loyalty, fear, ideology, or survival. Some of us may be more attuned to others’ feelings, or find it harder to shut empathy down, but none of us is perfectly sensitive or perfectly understanding.
Labeling people as “mean” or “stupid” also flattens the problem of free will. A great deal of what we call “character” is shaped by forces people did not choose: temperament, early attachment, trauma or chronic stress, education, culture, social status, and the incentives and pressures of a particular situation. These factors do not excuse harm, but they do help explain why the same person can act generously in one context and harshly in another—and why some people find empathy easier to access than others. If we take those constraints seriously, the simple moral division between “good people” and “bad people” becomes harder to sustain, and the question shifts from “What’s wrong with this person?” to “What conditions are shaping this behavior—and what might change it?”
About this project: Start page
