A man wants to shut a door, walks up to and shuts it. This is a classic example of a successful, intentional action. Such actions must satisfy three conditions?

· There must be the intention to perform the action successful
· The task must be performed successfully
· The intention to perform the task successfully is the cause of its
successful completion.

But consider the following case: a man sets out to shut a door, stumbles, falls against it, and it shuts. The intention is the cause of the accomplishment of the task; without that intention he man would not have stumbled, and without stumbling he would have been unsuccessful. But the manner in which he accomplished the task cannot possibly be called intentional. His success was a stupid accident.

All of us dwell in the confused realm of beneficial blunders, of actions that succeed because of their failures. We operate in the area that lies between wise intention and mere fluke. And that lends an unintentionally comic aspect to all our actions. Every action that crosses the threshold of possibility and is realized in the full sense of that word contains at bottom an element of idiocy.

Slavoj Zizek, Le plus sublime des hysteriques, Paris, 1988

Who is clever enough to fathom his own stupidity?

The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity — Matthijs van Boxsel