Mastermind? Really?

Roberto E. Rosales/The Albuquerque Journal/AP

It drives me crazy when I see a news story about the capture of some bumbling group of criminals and their leader is referred to as the Mastermind behind their scheme. If they were such a Mastermind, why were they caught? And it's not just their being caught - it always seems to me to a lame idea in the first place. The latest story is this one:

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/17/1149464953/new-mexico-shooting-politicians-solomon-pena

There were a number of shootings at government officials house in New Mexico. It turned out all of the victims were Democrats. As evidence was gathered and suspects rounded up, the one behind all the shootings was determined to be a Republican candidate who had lost the election and claimed it was stolen from him. Sound familiar?

Among the stupid things he did in organizing the scheme was his participation in at least one of the shootings and his sending out a picture of himself with one of the other suspects. One of the suspects was pulled over with his car loaded with guns because he already had an arrest warrant out for him. It always seems like criminals can't just lie low when they are already in trouble - they seem to be compelled to get into even more trouble.

How is this being a Mastermind? Why are these people given credit as if they are so smart? As if they make such detailed, infallible plans? I am hoping that, someday, the news organizations and the police and government officials will start calling these people the correct thing - stupid idiots.

The word Master Mind (two words at that time) is said to have been coined by a man named Napoleon Hill in his 1925 book “The Law of Success." One citation of this is found in this link. He listed the benefits of working cooperatively with a a group of business colleagues. But the idea of a master mind group goes back even further to Benjamin Franklin who organized a group of his friends to meet regularly to help each other improve themselves and to also cooperate on projects for the good of their community (the Junto Club he organized helped start the first lending library, the University of Pennsylvania and a hospital. More at this link. Now, that's what I call a Mastermind! If only our modern criminal masterminds had been members of a real Mastermind Group or even a church where sinful people can come together to help out both themselves and their neighbors.

I'm not the only one saying that the use of Mastermind in these cases is not only wrong but it also an insult to the really smart people in the world. A much better written blog than mine (the Oxford University Press blog) brought this up back in 2016. It pointed to another pretty smart guy who decried the use of this word to describe horrible people. This article points to a different origin to the word but, again, it started as a positive association. We need to keep it that way. This term should never be used for a violent, evil person again.