Our Need for Constructive Idiocy
Counter-Cultural Communities of Hope
At the heart of constructive idiocy is a commitment to relational power and respect for the dignity of every person. Relational power is not power over others but power with and for others—the capacity to listen, cooperate, encourage, heal, and create possibilities together. It does not coerce people into conformity but helps them become more fully themselves.
What distinguishes constructive idiocy from its destructive counterpart. Destructive idiocy humiliates, dominates, scapegoats, and excludes. Constructive idiocy resists such power through solidarity, imagination, courage, and care. Its apparent foolishness lies in believing—despite abundant evidence to the contrary—that enemies can become neighbors, strangers can become friends, and societies organized around domination can be transformed into communities of mutual flourishing.
If this it to make sense, I ask you to hear the word idiot in a fresh way. Do not think only of an idiot in the modern sense—as someone profoundly foolish or misinformed. Think instead of the word’s original meaning: a private person enclosed within an idios, a world of his or her own.
Understood in this broader way, the idiot may be foolish or wise, destructive or compassionate, narcissistically self-enclosed or creatively free from conventional thinking. This older meaning helps us understand the complex role of the idiot in Western history, as explored by Leonhard Emmerling in his book Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus. Enjoy an interview with him below.
A Little Shakespeare
On this view, we all possess an inner idiocy. In varying degrees and different ways, each of us inhabits a world of our own—an idios that does not necessarily conform to the world outside us, but from which we perceive, imagine, and act. We might as well acknowledge and claim this inner idiocy. The question is whether we claim it in ways that add goodness and beauty to the world or in ways that bring harm and destruction. Two characters from Shakespeare can help us recognize the difference between the good idiot and the bad idiot: Lear’s Fool in King Lear and Malvolio in Twelfth Night
The Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear is a classic example of the wise fool. He possesses no official authority, commands no army, and enjoys no social prestige. Yet he sees what the powerful cannot see. Through jokes, songs, riddles, and apparent nonsense, he tells Lear truths that others are too frightened—or too ambitious—to speak. He is a good idiot.
Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night offers a contrasting example of the bad idiot. Self-important, judgmental, and “sick of self-love,” he inhabits a private world in which he imagines himself superior to those around him and destined to become “Count Malvolio.” He interprets everything through the lens of his own importance and dreams of gaining power so that he can command and humiliate others.
Whereas Lear’s Fool appears foolish but sees reality clearly, Malvolio appears respectable while remaining trapped within a narcissistic fantasy. Lear’s Fool lives in another world to awaken others; Malvolio lives in another world to enthrone himself.
Thus we have two kinds of idiocy: truth-telling and self-enthronement.
Transformed Idiocy: God as Creative Transformation
But distinguishing the good idiot from the bad idiot could suggest that idiocy is a fixed and definitive state from which no transformation is possible. This runs counter to the idea, important in open and relational or process theology: God is a spirit of creative transformation at work in the world, experienced through fresh possibilities for growing beyond whatever states we inhabit—especially when they are destructive. We can therefore speak not only of good and bad idiocy but also of transformed idiocy.
King Lear himself offers an example. He begins the play enclosed within an idios of vanity, power, and hunger for flattery, unable to recognize the love that does not perform itself for his approval. Through suffering, loss, and exposure to the vulnerability of others, however, his private world is broken open. By the end, Lear has not ceased to be an idiot in the deeper sense; he still inhabits a world of his own, as we all do. But his idiocy has been transformed from narcissistic self-enclosure into humility, tenderness, and love.
We should not be naive about the likelihood of such transformations. The powers shaping people’s lives—inherited from the past, embodied in personal habits, and reinforced by others—possess tremendous force, often greater than that of the fresh possibilities offered by the Spirit of creative transformation.
God, after all, is loving but not all-controlling—not all-powerful in the sense of being able to produce transformation unilaterally. Divine possibilities become effective only through the desire and response of those who receive them. Perhaps this is one reason the good fool is so important. The good fool speaks a truth that can disturb the closed world of another person. That truth may have a jarring effect, but also a constructive one: it can become a vehicle of the Spirit, opening a door through which transformation becomes possible for those who have ears to hear.
Collective Idiocy
It is also important to recognize that societies and groups of people, not individuals alone, can be absorbed into destructive idiocy. They can partake of group narcicissism: a self enclosure in terms of which their collective private worlds lack empathy and care, especially for people who are different from them, and who have worlds of their own. From a process perspective, God is not only a lure toward the creative transformation of destructive idiocy, but also a horizon of love whose tender care includes each and all, including those who are 'different' from us. The stranger, the immigrant, the asylum seeker, is as much loved by God as the insider.
Here, too, we need holy fools—constructive idiots who think beyond the boundaries of insider and outsider, in-group and out-group. Often free spirits themselves, they have discovered within their own idios the capacity to think outside the boxes imposed by conventional society. They are “naive” in the best sense: not ignorant of the world’s cruelty, but unwilling to accept its divisions as final. By imagining forms of community that others dismiss as foolish, they can become vanguards of hope in a divided world.
Idiotic Communities of Hope
The apostles of early Christianity understood themselves in something like this way. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, “We are fools for Christ’s sake,” (1 Corinthians 4:10). His irony contrasts the vulnerable, unsettled apostles. ridiculed by the world as mere scum, with more established Christians who considered themselves prudent, strong, and respectable. The fools for Christ inhabited another world—not a narcissistic world centered on themselves, but a widening world animated by love. They were idiots in deeply healing ways, We do well to follow their idiocy.
- Jay McDaniel, Sept 15, 2026
What distinguishes constructive idiocy from its destructive counterpart. Destructive idiocy humiliates, dominates, scapegoats, and excludes. Constructive idiocy resists such power through solidarity, imagination, courage, and care. Its apparent foolishness lies in believing—despite abundant evidence to the contrary—that enemies can become neighbors, strangers can become friends, and societies organized around domination can be transformed into communities of mutual flourishing.
If this it to make sense, I ask you to hear the word idiot in a fresh way. Do not think only of an idiot in the modern sense—as someone profoundly foolish or misinformed. Think instead of the word’s original meaning: a private person enclosed within an idios, a world of his or her own.
Understood in this broader way, the idiot may be foolish or wise, destructive or compassionate, narcissistically self-enclosed or creatively free from conventional thinking. This older meaning helps us understand the complex role of the idiot in Western history, as explored by Leonhard Emmerling in his book Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus. Enjoy an interview with him below.
A Little Shakespeare
On this view, we all possess an inner idiocy. In varying degrees and different ways, each of us inhabits a world of our own—an idios that does not necessarily conform to the world outside us, but from which we perceive, imagine, and act. We might as well acknowledge and claim this inner idiocy. The question is whether we claim it in ways that add goodness and beauty to the world or in ways that bring harm and destruction. Two characters from Shakespeare can help us recognize the difference between the good idiot and the bad idiot: Lear’s Fool in King Lear and Malvolio in Twelfth Night
The Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear is a classic example of the wise fool. He possesses no official authority, commands no army, and enjoys no social prestige. Yet he sees what the powerful cannot see. Through jokes, songs, riddles, and apparent nonsense, he tells Lear truths that others are too frightened—or too ambitious—to speak. He is a good idiot.
Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night offers a contrasting example of the bad idiot. Self-important, judgmental, and “sick of self-love,” he inhabits a private world in which he imagines himself superior to those around him and destined to become “Count Malvolio.” He interprets everything through the lens of his own importance and dreams of gaining power so that he can command and humiliate others.
Whereas Lear’s Fool appears foolish but sees reality clearly, Malvolio appears respectable while remaining trapped within a narcissistic fantasy. Lear’s Fool lives in another world to awaken others; Malvolio lives in another world to enthrone himself.
Thus we have two kinds of idiocy: truth-telling and self-enthronement.
Transformed Idiocy: God as Creative Transformation
But distinguishing the good idiot from the bad idiot could suggest that idiocy is a fixed and definitive state from which no transformation is possible. This runs counter to the idea, important in open and relational or process theology: God is a spirit of creative transformation at work in the world, experienced through fresh possibilities for growing beyond whatever states we inhabit—especially when they are destructive. We can therefore speak not only of good and bad idiocy but also of transformed idiocy.
King Lear himself offers an example. He begins the play enclosed within an idios of vanity, power, and hunger for flattery, unable to recognize the love that does not perform itself for his approval. Through suffering, loss, and exposure to the vulnerability of others, however, his private world is broken open. By the end, Lear has not ceased to be an idiot in the deeper sense; he still inhabits a world of his own, as we all do. But his idiocy has been transformed from narcissistic self-enclosure into humility, tenderness, and love.
We should not be naive about the likelihood of such transformations. The powers shaping people’s lives—inherited from the past, embodied in personal habits, and reinforced by others—possess tremendous force, often greater than that of the fresh possibilities offered by the Spirit of creative transformation.
God, after all, is loving but not all-controlling—not all-powerful in the sense of being able to produce transformation unilaterally. Divine possibilities become effective only through the desire and response of those who receive them. Perhaps this is one reason the good fool is so important. The good fool speaks a truth that can disturb the closed world of another person. That truth may have a jarring effect, but also a constructive one: it can become a vehicle of the Spirit, opening a door through which transformation becomes possible for those who have ears to hear.
Collective Idiocy
It is also important to recognize that societies and groups of people, not individuals alone, can be absorbed into destructive idiocy. They can partake of group narcicissism: a self enclosure in terms of which their collective private worlds lack empathy and care, especially for people who are different from them, and who have worlds of their own. From a process perspective, God is not only a lure toward the creative transformation of destructive idiocy, but also a horizon of love whose tender care includes each and all, including those who are 'different' from us. The stranger, the immigrant, the asylum seeker, is as much loved by God as the insider.
Here, too, we need holy fools—constructive idiots who think beyond the boundaries of insider and outsider, in-group and out-group. Often free spirits themselves, they have discovered within their own idios the capacity to think outside the boxes imposed by conventional society. They are “naive” in the best sense: not ignorant of the world’s cruelty, but unwilling to accept its divisions as final. By imagining forms of community that others dismiss as foolish, they can become vanguards of hope in a divided world.
Idiotic Communities of Hope
The apostles of early Christianity understood themselves in something like this way. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, “We are fools for Christ’s sake,” (1 Corinthians 4:10). His irony contrasts the vulnerable, unsettled apostles. ridiculed by the world as mere scum, with more established Christians who considered themselves prudent, strong, and respectable. The fools for Christ inhabited another world—not a narcissistic world centered on themselves, but a widening world animated by love. They were idiots in deeply healing ways, We do well to follow their idiocy.
- Jay McDaniel, Sept 15, 2026
The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus
In a world obsessed with expertise and control, the figure of the idiot illuminates deeper truths about society. In this interview, Morteza Hajizadeh interviews Leonhard Emmerling about his book The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus (Seagull Books, 2026)
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person who was alienated from public life—has always challenged society’s norms from the margins. Far from a simple madman, the idiot is a powerful subversive, a person who disregards norms and finds profound insight in a state of unmediated inspiration. Using a cross-disciplinary approach bridging literature, religion, art, and philosophy, this volume traces a rich journey up to the present, where the idiot reemerges in a dramatic twist: a public figure who inverts social norms, confounds the boundary between private and public, and declares a new, paradoxical view of the world.
Leonhard Emmerling has worked as an art historian in different capacities: as curator and director of art institutions in Germany and New Zealand; as teacher at art academies in Auckland, Düsseldorf, and Munich; and as advisor and director for the Goethe-Institut. His most recent publication is Aesthetics: What For?.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person who was alienated from public life—has always challenged society’s norms from the margins. Far from a simple madman, the idiot is a powerful subversive, a person who disregards norms and finds profound insight in a state of unmediated inspiration. Using a cross-disciplinary approach bridging literature, religion, art, and philosophy, this volume traces a rich journey up to the present, where the idiot reemerges in a dramatic twist: a public figure who inverts social norms, confounds the boundary between private and public, and declares a new, paradoxical view of the world.
Leonhard Emmerling has worked as an art historian in different capacities: as curator and director of art institutions in Germany and New Zealand; as teacher at art academies in Auckland, Düsseldorf, and Munich; and as advisor and director for the Goethe-Institut. His most recent publication is Aesthetics: What For?.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.
Table of Contents of The Idiots
- Foreword, by W. J. T. Mitchell
- Introduction: A History of Nullities
- Creation from Nothingness
- The Rejection of the World
- The History of the Word “Idiot”
- Revaluation of Values
- The Abolition of Time
- Fools
- The Ship of Fools—Sebastian Brant
- Praise of Folly—Erasmus of Rotterdam
- Opicinus de Canistris and Hugo van der Goes
- Jurodivyj—the Russian Holy Fool
- On Some Films of Andrei Tarkovsky
- The Idiot in the Asylum
- The Redeemer
- The Idiot Revolting
- Art of Forgetting
- Illness as Motive and Projective Stimulus
- Art of the Mentally Ill
- Actionism, Fluxus, and Pop
- Performance of Regression
- Criticism and Shamanism
- Cynicism
- Indifference and Subversion
- Punk
- Precursors
- Punk, Industrial, and Geniale Dilletanten
- The Presence of the Idiot
Good Idiots and Bad Idiots
If, as Emmerling proposes, the idiot is an idiotes, a person who is alienated from public life, is powerfully subversive, who challenged society's norms from the margins, and whose inspiration seems to come from another world, then we can distinguish good idiots and bad idiots, at least as archetypes.
Good idiots imagine alternative worlds that conventional society regards as foolish or impossible but that, if actualized even partially, would make life better for human beings and the more-than-human world. And even when their visions are never actualized, the visions themselves can awaken hope, expose injustice, and enlarge the moral imagination.
Examples of good idiots include holy fools, compassionate dreamers, artists, prophets, abolitionists, peacemakers, ecological visionaries, and advocates of human and animal dignity. Francis of Assisi, William Blake, Dorothy Day, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless unnamed caregivers and community-builders have all appeared “idiotic” to people captivated by conventional definitions of realism, power, and success.
Bad idiots also imagine alternative worlds that conventional society may consider foolish or extreme. But their imagined worlds, if actualized, would diminish the lives of human beings, other animals, and the Earth. Even when their visions are not fully realized, they can spread fear, cruelty, resentment, and fantasies of domination.
Examples of bad idiots include racial supremacists, religious extremists, authoritarian ideologues, apocalyptic cult leaders, and technological utopians who imagine that efficiency, wealth, or control matters more than living beings. Their idiocy is not that they depart from what is considered normal. Sometimes the normal itself is cruel. Their idiocy lies in the kinds of worlds they desire and the suffering those worlds would produce.
Both good and bad idiots are, in their different ways, “out of touch” with what many people regard as real, reasonable, and normal. The difference between them is ethical and aesthetic. Good or constructive idiocy is imagination in the service of life. Bad idiocy is imagination in the service of domination.
- Jay McDaniel
Good idiots imagine alternative worlds that conventional society regards as foolish or impossible but that, if actualized even partially, would make life better for human beings and the more-than-human world. And even when their visions are never actualized, the visions themselves can awaken hope, expose injustice, and enlarge the moral imagination.
Examples of good idiots include holy fools, compassionate dreamers, artists, prophets, abolitionists, peacemakers, ecological visionaries, and advocates of human and animal dignity. Francis of Assisi, William Blake, Dorothy Day, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless unnamed caregivers and community-builders have all appeared “idiotic” to people captivated by conventional definitions of realism, power, and success.
Bad idiots also imagine alternative worlds that conventional society may consider foolish or extreme. But their imagined worlds, if actualized, would diminish the lives of human beings, other animals, and the Earth. Even when their visions are not fully realized, they can spread fear, cruelty, resentment, and fantasies of domination.
Examples of bad idiots include racial supremacists, religious extremists, authoritarian ideologues, apocalyptic cult leaders, and technological utopians who imagine that efficiency, wealth, or control matters more than living beings. Their idiocy is not that they depart from what is considered normal. Sometimes the normal itself is cruel. Their idiocy lies in the kinds of worlds they desire and the suffering those worlds would produce.
Both good and bad idiots are, in their different ways, “out of touch” with what many people regard as real, reasonable, and normal. The difference between them is ethical and aesthetic. Good or constructive idiocy is imagination in the service of life. Bad idiocy is imagination in the service of domination.
- Jay McDaniel
The Prophetic Imagination:
Two Forms of Constructive Idiocy
Good idiots can function in one or both of two ways. Here I draw upon Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination. Their visions may denounce the way things are—call this prophetic denunciation—or they may announce the way things can be—call this prophetic annunciation.
Brueggemann’s point is that different prophets may lean in different directions. Jeremiah, for example, speaks primarily in the denunciatory mode, exposing the injustice, illusion, and spiritual exhaustion of the existing order. Second Isaiah leans toward the annunciatory mode, offering images of renewal, liberation, and a new future. Jesus embodies both. He denounces domination, hypocrisy, and exclusion while announcing—and enacting—the possibility of a community shaped by love, mercy, justice, and shared life: the kingdom of God.
Some of the best idiots today probably lean in the denunciatory direction. Punk rock is an obvious example. Its noise, anger, satire, and refusal of respectability expose the violence and absurdity hidden beneath what society calls normal. Punk may not always provide a detailed picture of the better world, but it clears imaginative space for such a world by declaring that the present arrangement is neither natural nor inevitable.
Other good idiots work primarily through annunciation. They create images, stories, communities, practices, and ways of living that offer foretastes of a more compassionate world. The fullest prophetic idiocy combines both modes: it says a defiant No to what diminishes life and a creative Yes to what life might yet become.
-Jay McDaniel