Working inside the underbelly of global media, as I did for nearly forty years in places like Hollywood and New York, I have a new appreciation for wisdom. I know this may sound harsh, but I view Hollywood as the epicenter of cultural and moral stupidity! Even self-descriptive phrases from the lips of those who live and work in these media centers make my point:
- “In Hollywood, people spend money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.”
- “In media, when someone pats you on the back, he is looking for a soft spot to put the knife in.”
- “The key to success in Hollywood is sincerity. If you can fake that, you have it made.”
Anita Busch, editor of the Hollywood Reporter, says, “If I talk to one hundred people in a day, ninety-nine of them are lying, and the other one is my mother.”
In a conversation overheard at a swanky Beverly Hills restaurant, one media executive said to another, “You are lying to me!” The response was, “Yes, but hear me out.”
Stupidity!
When Hebrew King Solomon and his advisors put together a collection of wise insights for life called proverbs and they were inserted into the Hebrew Scriptures, they did humanity a real service. This is especially true in a culture that is increasingly embracing notions and behaviors that for millennia have been considered outrageously foolish.
I prefer the word stupid to foolish because it seems to carry more damning consequences. It may be foolish to lock your keys in your car, but carrying on a relationship with someone else’s spouse and lying to cover it up is outright stupid. Ask any divorce lawyer! This is the reason Proverbs makes adultery a major theme including the line, “For a prostitute can be had for a loaf of bread, but another man’s wife preys on your very life” (Proverbs 6:26). Feel free to replace foolish with stupid or folly with stupidity everywhere you find these words!
Solomon and the boys call out stupidity in the most unambiguous of terms. “As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly [aka stupidity]” (Proverbs 26:11). No ambiguity here!
The purpose for this devotional is to personalize and dramatize God’s wisdom from Proverbs, so the teachable can learn it without having to experience the awful consequences of stupidity—in the everyday “trenches” of life where the moral warfare is waged in and around us 24/7.
Larry W. Poland, Ph.D.
[bio]