In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley, Carlo M. Cipolla, published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity. You can find the book on Amazon.
These are Cipolla’s five basic laws of human stupidity:
Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
I kinda feel like Cipolla was being unnecessarily generous with this one.
Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
This explains so much. For instance, how a person you might expect to be smart, such as a doctor or a lawyer, can turn out to be monumentally stupid. And not simply because we disagree with their point of view – that can actually be a very good indicator that we are stupid.
Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Cipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. I would consider it more of a definition. The more unconscious or even unintentional the losses are, the stupider the person is. Anyone is capable of gross negligence – stupid people practically make a religion of it.
Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. 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 always turns out to be a costly mistake.
This is possibly the most painful truth amongst these laws. Intelligent people go about trying to help stupid people improve, to help them become ‘functional members of society’. This is usually a huge mistake unless you are a very special kind of person. People who go into Social Services can tell you the full truth of this. After a while it just feels like trying to push water uphill. Many do want to change, to improve. Many do not. Of those who do want to change, their stupid family members or friends simply wear them down until they quit.
Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
And its corollary:
A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
You see, a bandit will try to do harm to others while improving himself. So, some actual improvement is happening. Just not much, and only for the bandit. Helpless people, on the other hand, are always trying to improve other people’s situations, while ignoring their own worsening condition. They seem to consider it selfish to tend to their own needs as well, I suppose. So, some improvement is being done, just at the expense of the improver. An intelligent person, by contrast, will improve the lives of others while improving their own position as well. But a stupid person will wreck other people’s situations and their own at the same time, and never see the stupidity. No one profits from the actions of a stupid person. Worse yet, intelligent persons cannot help the stupid, because the intelligent are not able to understand the illogic of the stupid, and the stupid will simply soak up the proffered help and continue their stupid ways.
Cipolla posits that the difference between advancing societies and declining societies can be reduced to the percentage of intelligent people to stupid people. This actually boils down to the total number of intelligent people, as the percentage of stupid people in any society tends to remain the same. The intelligent people in any society have to work twice as hard at improving the society in order to overcome stupid people’s downward drag on the society. This only becomes a lighter burden as the total percentage of intelligent people increases. One way to do this is to attempt to enlist the helpless people into the ranks of intelligent people and frustrate the bandits. Do not try to make the stupids less stupid – ever.
It does not follow that creating a new society with only intelligent people (perhaps cutting the stupids loose to flounder and die) would actually work for any conceivable length of time. Stupid people would appear, as if by magic, in the ‘smart person’ society, and it might take a long while for them to be spotted as stupids. They would immediately set about their destructive ways, unnoticed by the others around them, because the attitude ‘that can’t happen here’ would be too pervasive. Hence, a perfect ‘workers’ society’, or even Roddenberry’s wide-eyed socialist future, is impossible. Hubris is a horrible thing.
So, what’s the answer here? Can we reverse the trend toward the world of Idiocracy, back into a more enlightened society, or are we doomed to be pulled under the foaming waters of history by the weight of the stupids? I would love to be able to point to a period in history – any period – where a society learned to keep its stupids under control and agreed to be led by the intelligent people. There isn’t one. If you look closely, you might find some periods that did better than others, where great strides in knowledge and in the rights of individuals were made. But there’s always evidence of the rampage of the stupids. For instance: the Italian Renaissance, with all its wonderful arts and the beginnings of science was still rife with ridiculous wars between countries and city-states simply to ease the boredom. And let’s not forget the Rationalist Period, where it was actually popular to appear well-read and intelligent. Revolutions in thought, in science, medicine and technology started to make a real difference in the lives of the common people. It also produced the French Revolution – one of the worst bloodbaths in history.
So, it seems the best we can hope to do as a society is to steer people back toward scientific thought, and toward literacy (not just reading ability). Also, to show up ‘throw-away’ culture and the constant hunger for glitz and the worship of celebrity as the ridiculous wastes of time and energy that they are. However, that doesn’t look like the way things are trending. We are marketing and advertising ourselves into oblivion, because those bulwarks of rapacious capitalism are aimed directly at the lowest common denominator in society – the stupids. It has gotten so bad, that the stupids are now running the country – every country – from both sides of the aisle. Our water is not drinkable, our food is not nourishing, our jobs are soul-crushing. Even our arts and entertainment are insipid and pointless – because they’re non-threatening, non-challenging, just the way the stupids like it. We are strangling ourselves and our civilization is crumbling, because somewhere along the line, we decided “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. We are working overtime to make all of us stupid. I wish I had a more positive way to wrap up this blog, but the truth is just overwhelming. Nobody has an answer for this. Stupid R Us.
May God have mercy on our souls.
TGC