The history of philosophy can't really have been one of thousands of years of nearly unrelenting adoration of stupidity.

I often see statements like that. "This couldn't possibly be the case", "that can't really happen", etc.

The first question we should ask ourselves when we see such statements: Why?

Usually, the person speaking is dismissing possibilities and potentialities out of hand for one of a variety of reasons, rather than having a valid and justifiable reason for discarding the contingency.

And even when there are good reasons, it's important to remember that we can always be wrong. Conservation of mass-energy is an incredibly useful and extraordinarily broad-in-application principle, and showing that a proposed idea in physics or engineering violates it is a powerful critique, but it's possible that it's not really the case.