Does O.J.’s arrest on burglary charges mean he’s he’s stupid?
“He must be stupid”
“He skated on two murder charges, and he managed to get out of other charges of much lesser gravity since then. How did he manage to get himself back in trouble again? How stupid do you have to be?”
So asked former prosecutor Marcia Clark, who was the lead O.J. Simpson prosecutor in the criminal trial a dozen years ago, about O.J. and his recent arrest.
The questions assume that O.J. is not a brain-damaged individual, who is capable of learning from mistakes. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that he never kept his 1989 promise to Nicole, in which he said he would never hit her again, stop drinking and attend A.A. meetings. As a practicing alcoholic, O.J. would be incapable of overriding his base survival instincts with civilized responses. Instead, he is inexorably driven to inflate his ego, whenever possible and at any cost–even harming others.
O.J. isn’t stupid. He’s an alcoholic doing what middle-stage alcoholics do: wield power over others capriciously with the goal of protecting themselves from the effects of ego deflation, which sometimes results in getting into trouble.