The Rise and Rise of the Savvy Bumpkin
A theory I can't stop thinking about.
(Editor’s Note: The following was written by Miles Gloriosus, a shitposter I used to read when Medium was still a thing. It was originally published in July of 2016, but I’ve been thinking about it lately. Miles hasn’t posted anything since 2021, and he didn’t return my emails, but I’m sure he’d be okay with me bringing it to your attention. That’s what shitposters want. Attention. )
The word “bumpkin,” like all English nouns, began as a slur. Derived from the Dutch bommekijn, or “little barrel,” it was used by the English to mock the supposed dumpiness of those who founded New Amsterdam.
After 1883, however, bumpkins became inseparable—like the cartoon bandit and his mask or the ruined businessman and his modestly barrel—from the sale of the Brooklyn Bridge. The scene is familiar. The bumpkin arrives from the countryside. A con man makes an incredible offer. Knowing no better, the rustic is ripped off and humiliated as he tries to collect tolls on the bridge.
What happens next? We don’t know. That’s not part of the story, though the naive bumpkin has two options when confronted with the bridge con:
He can accept his own misjudgment, and move on, learning the ways of the City. This is the road to savviness. Everyone who moves to New York City takes some steps down this road, whether they admit it or not. (I paid a “key fee” for my first New York apartment like any other hayseed.)
Or he can shake his head at the con man’s deceit and see it as the latter’s failing rather than his own. “Call me a rube and a hick,” Will Rogers said, “but I’d rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.”
Here bumpkinism is valorized; savviness shunned. The bumpkin neither assimilates nor competes. He turns the other cheek. (This Christlike aspect of the naive bumpkin is explored in art, Being There for example.)
The savvy bumpkin rejects both options, inventing a third. Rather than assimilating to the world of the con man by developing knowledge of the true and false, or eschewing such knowledge and remaining unsullied, he defeats the con man on his own turf with an ingenious theory. That theory is this:
Don’t believe anybody, ever.
The posture is savvy because it is at once a unifying theory of everything and an attitude that goes well with the feeling and projection of superiority. I know better. You’re not going to fool me. It also resembles intellectual skepticism while bypassing the intellect completely.
At the same time, this pseudo-sophisticated pose remains bumpkinish, because— well—it gets a lot of things wrong. As pure negativity, it is no better at getting things right than guileless belief, though it is perhaps more dangerous since it poses as knowledge.
Savvy bumpkinism is on the rise on all sides of the political spectrum. You see it among the anti-vaxxers or B.o.B’s denial that Earth is round. You can see it among the birthers and the climate-change deniers. It seems particularly virulent when championed by demagogues with other trappings of metropolitan sophistication—New York holdings, business successes, European trophy wives—but the really scary thing about savvy bumpkins is that they are unreachable by reason.
In fact, given the purely negative nature of their theory, appeals to reason only strengthen their will to negate. Like conspiracy theories and terrorist cells, they are anti-fragile, to borrow from Nassim Taleb. Their beliefs don’t just survive rational challenges, they become more entrenched with every blow.
How did we get here? What accounts for the rise (and rise) of the savvy bumpkin? Education has something to do with it. In a complex world where education is declining, heuristics are needed, and “Don’t believe anybody, ever” isn’t a bad rule of thumb when surrounded by enemies—in this case your fellow citizens. It saves one from the humiliation of not knowing, admitting it, and then learning something new. That can be painful. Why go through it if you don’t have to? That explains why the savvy bumpkin refuses the first option, but what about the second?
Well, the idea that it would be better for one’s soul to be the serene victim than the sinful victimizer has fallen out of favor, from the muscular Christianity of the right to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ disavowal of MLK’s ideals of forgiveness. One might argue, following Nietzsche, that it was a sucker’s ideology all along, but its role in limiting domestic bloodshed in the 20th century could perhaps be better appreciated. Meanwhile, Will Rogers’ sentiment is barely legible today. He—like Chauncey Gardiner, Gandhi, and Jesus—is a rube and hick, while the savvy bumpkin gets to be a patriot, a theorist, and (at long last) an insider.
But the savvy bumpkin doesn’t do this to himself, not all by himself. There is another party: the con man. The irritant who provokes this exaggerated, possibly terminal reaction. Who is he?
In the story, he is a cynical urbanite. A good talker. A shameless exploiter. A false friend. He wounds the bumpkin, who is only looking for a new life, and implants in him—at least potentially—a sense of anger and betrayal much worse than if they had never shared confidences.
Can you feel the wound and the shame? The embarrassment and the resolve to never let this happen again? They are all very deep.
In the end, it only matters who the savvy bumpkin thinks the con man is (or was; he is gone now, vanished in the City), but I know for sure he will not take my word for it.
Yep, very useful.
Miles was onto something here.