Learn, Think & Do

There are five basic laws of human stupidity as described by Carlo M. Cipolla who was an Italian economic historian, in his small book, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. The book is an essay on stupidity without any solutions on how to solve or deal with human stupidity in individual as well as in society, a quick fun read. First let me give the definition of the stupidity as per the author, which is his third law as well: a stupid person is a person who causes loss to another person or to a group of persons while himself (you can add your own pronoun, for people from “woke culture”) deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. You can look at the following picture, let’s call it stupidity graph by which Cipolla defines different kind of people, namely Intelligent, Bandit, Stupid and Helpless:

So according to Cipolla, an intelligent person is the person who works in such a way that both the parties gain something while a bandit is a person who gains from the interaction while others lose something in return. Similarly a helpless person is someone who loses something while others gain from him. Basically as you can see from the graph, intelligent and stupid are opposite of each other and that’s why they are in opposite quadrant; same with bandit and helpless.

Let’s go to first law which states that: always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. Here author warns us that whatever we might think about the number of stupid individuals we mostly underestimate it, of course without any survey because that would be impossible to carry out for every day activities makes someone a stupid person. Similar to this is the fourth law: non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. The author further writes, in particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake. This can be only seen by examples in your own life when you meet certain stupid people who cause you misery without any gain to themselves. Also, you can think of a person who behaves intelligently, as described here, in one domain but in other domains that person behaves stupidly. For example, a historian might behave intelligently on the discussions of history that is you both end up gaining something by the discussion but the same historian might behave stupidly on social issues with no gain to anybody. This brings us to the second law which says: the probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. So by this law author actually tries to propagate that stupidity is a natural phenomenon and it is found in every group, it is independent of time, race, class, gender, profession, degree, country etc. See there are no groups of these stupid people yet they behave in a collective manner and that is what makes them very dangerous, which is the fifth law, that is, a stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. And the corollary to this is that, a stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit. Because a bandit takes society forward in gaining from others while a stupid person only creates losses for the society.

I am sure you also have had a fair share of stupid people in your life. As I said in reality people have all the four qualities, it just varies from domain to domain, in some domain one can be intelligent but the same person can be stupid in the other domain same with being bandit or helpless. Well of course if you know someone who behaves stupidly in all the domains of life, you need to run away as fast as possible from that person.

References:

Carlo M. Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

Also keep yourself physically fit, run, jog, walk!