The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

by Carlo M. Cipolla

First, the author has a formal axiomatic definition of what stupid means: someone who harms others without procuring any gain for himself or herself – in contrast to the much more predictable bandit who gains something from harming you. As such, stupid persons can cause a lot of damage – unlike bandits, they have no interest in the survival of the system because they do not benefit from their stupidity.

For, as the Chinese philosopher said: ‘Erudition is the source of universal wisdom: but that does not prevent it from being an occasional cause of misunderstanding between friends.’

The First Basic Law of Human Stupidity asserts without ambiguity that ‘Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.’

At this point it is imperative to elucidate the concept of human stupidity and to define the dramatis persona. Individuals are characterised by different degrees of propensity to socialise. There are individuals for whom any contact with other individuals is a painful necessity. They literally have to put up with people and people have to put up with them. At the other extreme of the spectrum there are individuals who absolutely cannot live by themselves and are even ready to spend time in the company of people whom they do not really like rather than to be alone. Between these two extremes, there is an extreme variety of conditions, although by far the greatest majority of the people are closer to the type who cannot face loneliness than to the type who has no taste for human intercourse. Aristotle recognised this fact when he wrote that ‘Man is a social animal’ and the validity of his statement is demonstrated by the fact that we move in social groups, that there are more married people than bachelors and spinsters, that so much wealth and time is wasted in fatiguing and boring cocktail parties and that the word loneliness carries normally a negative connotation. Whether one belongs to

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. It will be easily recognised by the perspicacious reader that these four categories correspond to the four areas

‘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. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of

You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy. 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.

This is what both Dickens and Schiller had in mind when the former stated that ‘with stupidity and sound digestion man may front much’ and the latter wrote that ‘against stupidity the very Gods fight in vain’.

in the Fourth Basic Law which states that: ‘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.’

The Fifth Basic Law states that ‘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.