The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

by Carlo M. Cipolla

The following pages are in fact the result of a constructive effort to detect, know and thus possibly neutralise one of the most powerful, dark forces which hinder the growth of human welfare and happiness.

‘Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.’

‘The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.’

The Third Basic Law assumes, although it does not state it explicitly, that human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid.

‘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.’

Our daily life is mostly made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation – or better, there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behaviour.

Because the stupid person’s actions do not conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that: a) one is generally caught by surprise by the attack; b) even when one becomes aware of the attack, one cannot organise a rational defence, because the attack itself lacks any rational structure.

‘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 infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake.’

‘A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.’ The corollary of the Law is that ‘A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.’

When stupid people are at work, the story is totally different. Stupid people cause losses to other people with no counterpart of gains on their own account. Thus the society as a whole is impoverished.

Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or modern, or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable σ fraction of stupid people. However the country moving uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who manage to keep the σ fraction at bay and at the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the other members of the community to make progress a certainty. In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to σ; however, in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity (sub-area BS of quadrant B in figure 3) and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals (area H in basic graph, figure 1). Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the σ fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.