According to a Dropbox survey published last week, most people believe that “only 68% of their work colleagues” are capable of the job.

This is a staggering figure. Why so high? Nobody’s capable of the job. Nobody’s capable of anything.

You seriously think only 32% of your colleagues are idiots? But everyone’s an idiot! You think 68% of them know what they’re doing? Nobody knows what they’re doing! (Although I can tell you what they’re doing right now: sitting around thinking you’re an idiot. Rightly.)

I say that. You may think I’m an idiot. You’d be right. We’re all idiots. I mean, look at the state of the place.

Needless to say, I secretly believe I’m not an idiot. Don’t we all? I believe it most of the time, anyway. As long as I’m not trying to find my way out of a car park, grasp the principle of time difference, reinstall Outlook, follow the plot of The Wire, have an elegant conversation with a vicar or someone I slightly fancy, wheel a pushchair through a revolving door, programme the central heating or pronounce the word “wolf” correctly, I don’t feel like an idiot. I feel as if I’m on top of matters and everyone else is an idiot.

I mean, just look at them. Dithering about, struggling with everything, getting it all wrong. The words “Oh, just give me that… ” are rarely off my lips.

This is the process of growing up: as a teenager, you imagine everyone knows what they’re doing except you. As a young working adult, you start to realise that half the people you encounter have no idea what they’re doing: they let you down, they cock things up, they muff the simplest catches.

And finally you realise that it’s not just half and it’s not just the people you know. The chumps are everywhere, like satanists in Rosemary’s Baby. It’s all of them. You stop fondly kidding yourself that some people are grown-ups. Teachers, policemen, customs officers, home secretaries, they’re all just clumping about forgetting what they went upstairs for.

Hence the perfect negativity of Brexit. Remainers are writhing with frustration that the vote was so incompetently handled, the facts so fumbled, the campaign so lazy and stupid: our peace and prosperity wrecked for generations by the sheer twattishness of the people who put this on the table.

Meanwhile, Brexiters are gnashing their teeth that the deal is being so openly bungled, the negotiation so clownishly conducted, the detail so fudged, the principle so misunderstood: the opportunity of a lifetime botched by the sheer wazzockry of those inexplicably responsible for it.

Nobody can do anything. That’s why nothing important should ever be attempted.

If the grown-ups are all idiots, where does that leave our immediate colleagues and employers (or employees)? In our hearts, we’re Basil Fawlty, an emperor of skill and suavity driven mad by everyone else’s incompetence, smashing saplings against car bonnets and screaming for a smoother world.

Unfortunately, so are they. Always remember: at any given time, somebody else is thinking you’re an idiot. And they’re correct.

So perhaps it’s time to ask: what’s so terrible about being an idiot anyway? Perhaps we should be readier to admit it – and, indeed, to cherish it in others. After all, if someone’s an idiot then at least you can see through them. If they’re an idiot then all their moves are visible; they aren’t secretly screwing you over with a nefarious agenda.

I know what you’re thinking: what about Donald Trump? But he can’t possibly have a secret nefarious agenda, when his open nefarious agenda is so completely open and nefarious.

Anyway, Trump’s danger is not the idiocy, it’s the refusal to embrace it. There’d be no problem if he were happy to just sit there on his gold yacht, in his gold swimming trunks, pissing more of his father’s money into the sea. He could have been a perfectly charming, harmless moron. The problem is, he wants to pretend he knows how to negotiate foreign policy.

The problem with the internet is not idiots per se, it’s the idiots who think they’re clever. First base for the idiot who thinks he’s clever is always cynicism and attack. Suddenly, the world is full of people who think it looks smart to call other people wankers, to dismiss ideas, to denigrate hope, to criticise everything – with an easy publishing mechanism by which they can do it. Overnight, we’re all lazy newspaper columnists. Not just me.

“What’s my take on this?” thinks everybody, furiously. “I’ll look stupid if I just say I like it. God forbid I seem stupid. Shrewd and cynical, that’s the way to be.”

Last week, Ed Sheeran was publicly hammered by an aid watchdog for a Comic Relief video in which he offered to help a homeless boy in Liberia. “Literally poverty tourism!”, snarled the watchdog, adding that the Disasters Emergency Committee’s East Africa appeal, featuring Eddie Redmayne, was “close to poverty porn”.

That must sound so clever to the speaker, but what does it actually mean? The East Africa appeal raised £60m for people in the grip of an immediate humanitarian crisis. This year’s Comic Relief raised more than £73m. Of course, you can pick them apart stylistically, find the holes, spot the lapses in political correctness, wave a big flag over the bits you think aren’t clever, but isn’t it better to be one of the people raising money than one of the people standing on the sidelines blowing raspberries? The key question about these videos is surely not: “Are they poverty porn?” but: “Are they true?”

I’m probably wrong. I’m an idiot. But at the moment I’m starting to wonder if that’s really the worst thing to be.