Clever

This won’t be clever at all - that is there won’t be any effort to be clever. Why not? Well, maybe if I tried to be clever I’d not have succeeded anyway, but even if I did succeed, maybe underneath this pile of cleverness, concealed by it, might in truth be nothing but stupidity. Better honest stupidity any day than clever stupidity. 

So anyway if you were wondering why this doesn’t even have the appearance of cleverness, never mind the substance of it, that’s the reason: it’s an unwillingness to deceive, or, for that matter, to be deceived. It’s bad enough to be fooled by someone else’s stupidity, it’s worse again to be fooled by your own.