The Applause of Fools: How Erasmus Predicted Every Century After His Own
In 1509, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, writing from the restless perch of Thomas More’s London house, composed The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium) in the span of roughly a week. The book was a satirical grenade lobbed at the Church, at the academy, at every strutting peacock of European intellectual life who mistook plumage for substance. Among its many surgical observations, one line has outlived them all with terrifying accuracy: “The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity, and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools to applaud them.”
Five centuries have passed since Erasmus set that sentence loose on the world, and in every generation since, the observation has not merely survived but has been independently rediscovered, repackaged, empirically tested, and confirmed. It is one of those rare insights that functions less like an opinion and more like a natural law: the inverse relationship between competence and self-regard, and the symbiotic ecosystem of mutual delusion that sustains both the performer and the audience. What Erasmus understood, without benefit of controlled experiment or peer review, is that vanity is not a solo act. It requires a chorus. The fool on the stage needs fools in the seats, and they find each other with the unerring precision of water finding its level.
The Ancient Root: Socrates and the Oracle’s Riddle
Erasmus was himself a scholar of antiquity, and his insight did not arrive without precedent. Nearly two thousand years before The Praise of Folly, Socrates stood trial in Athens and offered his famous defense as Plato recorded it in the Apology. The Oracle at Delphi had declared Socrates the wisest man alive, and Socrates, baffled by the claim, set out to disprove it by interviewing every Athenian with a reputation for wisdom. Politicians, poets, craftsmen: he tested them all and found, to his increasing irritation, that “the men most in repute were all but the most foolish, and that some inferior men were really wiser and better.” The politicians knew nothing but believed they knew everything. The poets could produce beautiful work but could not explain what their own poems meant. The craftsmen, skilled in their trades, extrapolated from that narrow competence a belief that they were experts in everything else.
What Socrates discovered was not simply that people are ignorant. That is banal. He discovered the structural relationship between ignorance and confidence: that the absence of knowledge creates the illusion of its presence. The only advantage Socrates claimed for himself was the awareness of his own ignorance, and that single sliver of self-knowledge was apparently enough to make him the wisest man in Greece. The insight cost him his life. The fools he interviewed did not appreciate having their folly exposed, and the applauding public did not appreciate losing the comfortable certainty that their applauded leaders deserved the applause. They voted to execute him.
This is the essential architecture Erasmus inherited and refined. Socrates identified the cognitive mechanism; Erasmus added the social one. It is not only that the incompetent overrate themselves. It is that they find each other. They create communities of mutual reinforcement, entire ecosystems of unearned validation, where the currency is not skill but the performance of skill, and where anyone who points out the deficit is treated as the threat.
The Renaissance Stage: Erasmus in His Moment
Erasmus wrote during a period when this dynamic had achieved institutional scale. The Catholic Church of 1509 was a massive bureaucratic apparatus in which advancement depended less on theological learning than on political connection, family wealth, and the willingness to play along. Bishops who could not read Latin presided over Latin liturgies. Monks who had taken vows of poverty accumulated spectacular fortunes. The Pope himself, Julius II, was more comfortable in a suit of armor than in vestments, and spent his pontificate waging wars of territorial expansion. The entire system ran on the principle Erasmus identified: the less qualified the officeholder, the more grandiose the self-presentation, and the more eager the flock to accept the performance as reality.
The Praise of Folly attacked this structure by having Folly herself deliver the diagnosis. It was a brilliant rhetorical inversion: let foolishness praise itself, and in the praising, reveal what everyone already suspected but no one was willing to say. Erasmus understood that satire works not by telling people something new but by making visible what they have been trained not to see. The clergy he mocked were not hidden figures. They were everywhere, obvious, conspicuous in their absurdity. What was hidden was the permission to acknowledge the absurdity aloud.
The book was a sensation across Europe precisely because the observation was so immediately recognizable. Readers did not need convincing. They needed the sentence, the crystallization, the permission to nod in recognition. Erasmus gave them that, and the nodding has not stopped.
Shakespeare and the Calculus of Foolishness
A century after Erasmus, William Shakespeare embedded the same principle into As You Like It (c. 1599) through the character Touchstone, who observes: “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Shakespeare, who read Erasmus and was formed by the humanist educational tradition Erasmus helped create, took the insight and gave it dramatic specificity. Touchstone is a professional fool, a court jester, and when he speaks this line, the irony is layered: the man whose job title is “Fool” possesses the self-awareness that the supposedly wise characters around him lack.
Shakespeare’s contribution was to dramatize what Erasmus had satirized. In play after play, he showed that the people most certain of their own virtue, intelligence, or authority are the ones most catastrophically wrong. Lear believes he can divide his kingdom and retain his dignity. Othello believes he is acting on solid evidence. Malvolio believes the Countess Olivia is in love with him because a forged letter told him so, and he believed it because he wanted to believe it, because his vanity created a gravitational field strong enough to bend his perception of reality.
This is the mechanism Erasmus identified operating in real time: vanity does not merely distort self-perception. It distorts the perception of evidence itself. The vain person does not evaluate information neutrally and arrive at an inflated conclusion. The vanity comes first, and the information is processed through it, filtered, bent, restructured until it confirms what the ego has already decided. The fools who applaud are not incidental to this process. They are essential to it. They are the forged letter. They are the external validation that allows the internal delusion to feel like confirmed reality.
The Enlightenment Inversion: Confidence as Virtue
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries introduced a complication that Erasmus could not have foreseen. The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, individual judgment, and the overthrow of traditional authority, created a cultural environment in which confidence itself became a virtue. If the old regime was sustained by deference to inherited authority, the new order required the individual to trust his own reasoning, his own observations, his own conclusions. This was genuinely liberating. It was also, as Erasmus might have predicted, a gift to every fool with an opinion and the nerve to assert it.
The democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century translated this philosophical principle into political structure. In a democracy, every citizen’s judgment is theoretically equal at the ballot box, regardless of expertise, education, or competence. This is a defensible moral principle, and it is also, in strict Erasmian terms, a machine for amplifying the applause of fools. The Founders of the American republic understood this. James Madison, in Federalist No. 10, worried explicitly about the power of faction, the tendency of impassioned majorities to overwhelm reasoned judgment. The entire structure of checks and balances, of representative rather than direct democracy, of the Electoral College and the Senate, was designed as a series of buffers against exactly the dynamic Erasmus described: the talentless leading the credulous, sustained by mutual flattery.
The buffers worked, imperfectly and intermittently, for about two centuries. Then came the technology that dissolved them.
Darwin’s Quiet Confirmation
In 1871, Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man and included an observation that reads like a scientific annotation on Erasmus: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Darwin was writing about the tendency of poorly informed people to make bold claims about natural history, but the principle he identified was far broader than his specific subject. What Darwin added to the conversation was the evolutionary framing. If confidence aids survival, if the bold proto-human who acted decisively on incomplete information was more likely to eat, mate, and reproduce than the cautious one who waited for certainty, then overconfidence is not a bug. It is a feature, baked into the species by millions of years of selection pressure.
This is important because it reframes the Erasmus observation from a moral failing to a biological one. The fool is not vain because he is morally weak. He is vain because his ancestors survived by being vain, and the neural architecture that rewarded overconfidence has been passed down through thousands of generations. This does not excuse the vanity. It does, however, explain why five hundred years of satire, philosophy, and explicit warning have done absolutely nothing to reduce it. You cannot satirize away a survival instinct.
Bertrand Russell and the Catastrophe of Certainty
Bertrand Russell, writing in the early twentieth century, sharpened Erasmus further: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Russell was watching the rise of fascism in Europe, the triumph of ideological certainty over empirical caution, the spectacle of millions of people applauding leaders whose confidence was in perfect inverse proportion to their competence. He saw Mussolini’s theatrical bombast, Hitler’s absolute certainty, and the roaring crowds that validated both. The applause of fools, Erasmus might have noted, was no longer a matter of court intrigue or ecclesiastical corruption. It had become the organizing principle of entire nation-states.
Russell’s formulation added a critical asymmetry that Erasmus implied but did not make explicit. It is not simply that the incompetent are overconfident. It is that the competent are correspondingly underconfident. The knowledgeable person, precisely because she knows enough to recognize complexity, hesitates. The ignorant person, precisely because he does not know enough to recognize complexity, charges forward. In any contest between hesitation and certainty, certainty wins the crowd every time. The intelligent person says “it’s complicated.” The fool says “it’s simple.” The audience, which wants answers more than accuracy, applauds the simplicity and punishes the nuance.
This is the dynamic that has governed the last century of democratic politics in the West, and Russell saw it coming with acid clarity.
1999: The Laboratory Finally Catches Up
For 490 years, the Erasmus observation lived in the realm of philosophy, literature, and bitter personal experience. Then, in 1999, two psychologists at Cornell University, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, decided to test it empirically. They gave undergraduate students tests in logic, grammar, and humor, then asked the students to estimate how well they had performed relative to their peers. The results were, in Erasmian terms, entirely predictable: students who scored in the bottom quartile estimated that they had performed in the sixty-second percentile. They were not merely wrong about their abilities. They were wrong in a systematic, directional, and self-serving way. Their incompetence denied them the metacognitive tools necessary to recognize their incompetence.
Dunning and Kruger published their findings under the title “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” and the paper became one of the most cited in modern psychology. The “Dunning-Kruger effect” entered popular culture as shorthand for exactly the phenomenon Erasmus described. The finding has since been contested on methodological grounds, with some statisticians arguing that the apparent effect is partly an artifact of regression to the mean and the mathematical impossibility of underestimating when you are already at the bottom. These critiques are legitimate and worth taking seriously. But they address the precise mechanism, not the underlying observation. Whether the lowest performers overestimate themselves because of a metacognitive deficit or because of a statistical floor effect, the lived reality remains unchanged: the least capable people in any domain tend to be the most certain of their capability. Erasmus did not need a p-value to see this.
What Dunning-Kruger added to the five-century conversation was the concept of “dual burden”: the incompetent person is burdened twice, first by the lack of skill and second by the inability to recognize the lack. This is not cruelty. It is structure. The same knowledge that would allow you to perform well is the knowledge that would allow you to evaluate your performance accurately. Without it, you are flying blind and congratulating yourself on your navigation.
The Social Media Acceleration: 2004 to Present
Erasmus wrote in an era when the printing press was still relatively new and literacy was limited. The fools who found other fools to applaud them had to do so in physical space: courts, churches, marketplaces, taverns. The radius of mutual delusion was constrained by geography and the speed of a horse. Social media removed every constraint simultaneously.
Facebook launched in 2004. Twitter in 2006. Instagram in 2010. TikTok in 2017. Each platform was, in effect, an industrial-scale applause machine. For the first time in human history, any person, regardless of qualification, education, expertise, or basic contact with reality, could broadcast a claim to a global audience and receive instantaneous validation from thousands or millions of strangers. The algorithm did the matchmaking that Erasmus described: it connected the fool on the stage with the fools in the audience with a speed and efficiency that would have made a Renaissance pope weep with envy.
The platforms did not create the vanity or the credulity. Those are, as Darwin suggested, ancient features of the human operating system. What the platforms did was remove the friction that had previously limited the damage. In 1509, a vain and incompetent priest could mislead his parish. In 2025, a vain and incompetent influencer can mislead a continent. The scale changed. The principle did not.
The second-order effect was even more corrosive. Social media did not merely amplify the voices of the unqualified. It actively penalized qualification. Algorithms optimize for engagement, and engagement is driven by emotional intensity, not accuracy. The careful, nuanced, properly caveated statement generates fewer clicks than the bold, wrong, emotionally charged one. The expert who says “the evidence is mixed and more study is needed” loses the attention war to the charlatan who says “they don’t want you to know the truth.” This is Erasmus’s applause economy scaled to planetary dimensions and running at the speed of light.
The Next Hundred Years: Fools, Machines, and the Algorithmic Colosseum
Now extend the timeline forward. If the Erasmus observation has held for five centuries across every medium, every political system, and every technological revolution, what does the next century look like when the mediating technology is not the printing press or the television or the social media feed, but machine intelligence itself?
The first and most obvious development is already underway. Generative machine systems have made it possible for people with no expertise in writing, visual art, music composition, coding, legal analysis, or medical reasoning to produce outputs that superficially resemble the work of experts. A person who cannot write a coherent paragraph can now generate a polished essay. A person who cannot draw can produce a photorealistic image. A person who cannot code can build a functioning application. The skill gap between the competent and the incompetent, which was already difficult for audiences to perceive, is about to become functionally invisible.
This is the Erasmus problem on a steroid injection. When the fool had to perform the folly himself, at least the performance had a ceiling. The bad writer produced bad writing, and a discerning reader could detect the deficiency. The bad painter produced bad paintings. The bad thinker produced bad arguments with visible logical holes. Machine-generated output removes that ceiling. The fool can now produce work that looks, on its surface, indistinguishable from the work of the talented. The vanity remains. The incompetence remains. But the visible evidence of the incompetence has been laundered through a machine, and the audience, which was never particularly good at distinguishing competence from its imitation, now has almost no chance at all.
Consider what this means for Erasmus’s second clause: “All these fools, however, find other fools to applaud them.” The applause was already easy to generate through social media. When the product itself is machine-assisted, the applause becomes automatic. The fool produces machine-polished output. Other fools, unable to distinguish it from genuine expertise, applaud. The algorithm detects the applause and amplifies the signal. More fools arrive. The cycle accelerates. And somewhere in the background, the person who actually possesses the skill, who spent years developing the judgment, the taste, the discipline that real competence requires, is drowned out by the noise, because her authentic work looks no more impressive than the machine-laundered imitation, and the audience lacks the tools to tell the difference.
The Metacognitive Collapse
The deeper danger is not that machine systems will make bad work look good. It is that they will erode the metacognitive capacity that Dunning and Kruger identified as the missing piece. If you have never written a difficult paragraph yourself, if you have never struggled with the gap between what you intended to say and what the words actually convey, you have no basis for evaluating whether a paragraph is good. You cannot taste the difference between a sentence that works and a sentence that merely functions, because you have never cooked. Machine-generated text is fluent. It is grammatical. It is organized. It is, in the majority of cases, correct on the surface. What it frequently lacks is the internal pressure of a mind that has actually thought through the problem, the idiosyncratic rhythm of a consciousness that has wrestled with ambiguity and emerged with something earned rather than generated.
Over the next hundred years, as machine systems become more capable and more ubiquitous, the population of people who have had the formative experience of struggling with difficult cognitive work will shrink. This is not speculation. It is trajectory. If the calculator reduced the population’s capacity for mental arithmetic, and GPS reduced the capacity for spatial navigation, then machine-generated writing will reduce the capacity for evaluating writing, machine-generated reasoning will reduce the capacity for evaluating reasoning, and machine-generated art will reduce the capacity for evaluating art. The metacognitive tools that allow a person to recognize incompetence, in themselves or in others, will atrophy from disuse.
When those tools are gone, the Erasmus dynamic does not merely continue. It becomes the only dynamic. If no one in the room can distinguish competence from its simulation, then competence ceases to function as a social category. What remains is confidence, presentation, charisma, and volume. The fools will not need to find other fools to applaud them. The entire audience will be fools, not because they are stupid, but because the cognitive infrastructure required to be anything else will have been quietly dismantled by convenience.
The Vanity Singularity
There is a point on this trajectory, perhaps fifty years from now, perhaps sooner, where the Erasmus observation undergoes a phase transition. Until now, the dynamic has required actual humans on both sides: a vain person performing and a credulous person applauding. But what happens when machine systems are sophisticated enough to generate not only the performance but the applause? What happens when automated systems create content, automated systems evaluate it, automated systems promote it, and the human being is neither the performer nor the audience but merely the consumer of a feedback loop that has no organic component at all?
This is not science fiction. Portions of this system already exist. Automated accounts generate social media posts. Automated systems determine what content appears in feeds. Automated recommendation engines decide what books, articles, videos, and products reach human attention. The human being is already, in many contexts, less a participant in the conversation than a resource being optimized by the conversation. The Erasmus dynamic persists, but both the fool and the applauding fool have been replaced by processes that imitate foolishness with perfect fidelity because they were trained on five centuries of the real thing.
The vanity singularity is the point at which the loop closes entirely: machine-generated content, evaluated by machine-generated metrics, promoted by machine-generated curation, consumed by humans whose critical faculties have been so thoroughly atrophied by machine dependence that they can no longer tell, and no longer care, whether anything they encounter was produced by a mind or a model. At that point, Erasmus’s observation does not become obsolete. It becomes the founding document of a new civilizational condition in which the applause of fools is the only sound left.
The Counterweight: What Erasmus Would Prescribe
Erasmus was not merely a diagnostician. He was a humanist, and humanism at its core is the belief that education, properly administered, can produce self-aware, critically thinking human beings capable of resisting exactly the dynamic he described. His prescription was not despair. It was pedagogy. Teach people to recognize their own limitations. Teach them to value genuine understanding over performed confidence. Teach them that the applause of the crowd is the least reliable measure of quality, and that the discomfort of honest self-assessment is the price of not being a fool.
That prescription has never been more urgent or more difficult to implement. The next century will be defined by a contest between two forces: the Erasmian impulse toward critical self-knowledge, and the technological apparatus that makes self-knowledge unnecessary by automating the outputs that self-knowledge was supposed to produce. If the humanist tradition prevails, machine systems will be used as tools by people who understand their own capabilities and limitations, people who use the machine to extend their competence rather than to disguise their incompetence. If the Erasmian dynamic prevails unchecked, the machines will simply become more efficient engines for the production and consumption of folly, and the applause will be louder, faster, and more universal than anything Erasmus could have imagined from Thomas More’s guest room in 1509.
The line is five centuries old. It has never required updating. It has only required rereading, each time with the fresh horror of recognition that the fool in the mirror has new tools and a bigger audience, and that the applause, as always, is deafening.
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