Posted on 04/01/2021 11:45:52 AM PDT by ATOMIC_PUNK
The Five Universal Laws of Human Stupidity
We underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril.
Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their job, education level, or other traits we believe to be exclusive of stupidity. They aren’t. Which takes us to:
Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Cipolla posits stupidity is a variable that remains constant across all populations. Every category one can imagine—gender, race, nationality, education level, income—possesses a fixed percentage of stupid people. There are stupid college professors. There are stupid people at Davos and at the UN General Assembly. There are stupid people in every nation on earth. How numerous are the stupid amongst us? It’s impossible to say. And any guess would almost certainly violate the first law, anyway.
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. A stupid person, according to the economist, is one who causes problems for others without any clear benefit to himself.
The uncle unable to stop himself from posting fake news articles to Facebook? Stupid. The customer service representative who keeps you on the phone for an hour, hangs up on you twice, and somehow still manages to screw up your account? Stupid.
This law also introduces three other phenotypes that Cipolla says co-exist alongside stupidity. First there is the intelligent person, whose actions benefit both himself and others. Then there is the bandit, who benefits himself at others’ expense. And lastly there is the helpless person, whose actions enrich others at his own expense.
The non-stupid are a flawed and inconsistent bunch. Sometimes we act intelligently, sometimes we are selfish bandits, sometimes we act helplessly and are taken advantage of by others, and sometimes we’re a bit of both. The stupid, in comparison, are paragons of consistency, acting at all times with unyielding idiocy.
However, consistent stupidity is the only consistent thing about the stupid. This is what makes stupid people so dangerous. Cipolla explains:
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. 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.
All of which leads us to:
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.
We underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril. This brings us to the fifth and final law:
Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
And its corollary:
A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
We can do nothing about the stupid. The difference between societies that collapse under the weight of their stupid citizens and those who transcend them are the makeup of the non-stupid. Those progressing in spite of their stupid possess a high proportion of people acting intelligently, those who counterbalance the stupid’s losses by bringing about gains for themselves and their fellows.
Declining societies have the same percentage of stupid people as successful ones. But they also have high percentages of helpless people and, Cipolla writes, “an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity.”
“Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the [stupid] fraction and makes decline a certainty,” Cipolla concludes. “And the country goes to Hell.”
It is said that you can’t ‘fix’ stupid, you just point out their anomaly..
Then they go crazy!
It is said that you can’t ‘fix’ stupid, you just point out their anomaly..
Then they go crazy!
We should all be thankful that Obama was neither hardworking, or clever. Conversely, its good that he was lazy.
Imagine the damage he could have done had he been really focused, determined and hell bent to get results.
Fortunately he wasn’t. He was only interested in criticizing and belittling the country and the accomplishments of others.
Stupid people don’t think anyone can be smarter than them.
Interesting and very reasonable list...I would include the failure to control emotion as a major contributor to consistently stupid behavior in the voting booth etc...
I would like to add another law originally stated by myself:
Law 6: “Stupidity is a self-correcting problem.
I sometimes add this corollary “If left alone”.
“God makes better fools than you can design around.”
“Remember, people can be more stupid than you can imagine. Never underestimate what a stupid person will do.”
Old mentor would tell me that.
In all dealings with the government, stupid people think that they’re in the hands of super intelligent beings. In many cases the government reps are dumber than they are.
The reason is simple
Many fools don’t know they are fools. They believe themselves to be smarter than any one else.
So when reality doesn’t conform to what they believe it to be, after a while a few realize “Perhaps I need to rethink things”, most view it as an attack by some sort of conspiracy.
Which is why you see people pull guns and shoot someone over chicken nuggets
I don’t think the average American is stupid, but I agree that stupid people exist in all areas of life. You can tell the average American is actually quite bright because they don’t think they know everything and respect hearing new information from different people.
***********
Weakness and passivity are cousins of stupidity. Being bright doesn’t mean people will do anything about the information they absorb. They may recognize stupid and even harmful things but do nothing to change them.
The country is burning and few are rushing to put out the fire. They don’t think the conflagration will come to their neighborhood.
“the problem is few people perceive themselves to be stupid.”
Dunning Kruger Effect.
L
So when reality doesn’t conform to what they believe it to be, after a while a few realize “Perhaps I need to rethink things”...
*************
Actually the only reasons people rethink things are the recognition of some form of pain or fear that causes personal anxiety. Worried people start thinking a lot.
Law 3. Covers the last election 100%.
LOL, he sure was funny. Good comedy always has a ring of truth.
My drinking buddies and I used to have a theory.
We called it the “dumbassedness potential” (DP).
The theory was that every person had the same DP.
It was better to do small frequent dumassed things,
(like misplacing your keys,
forgetting to set your alarm clock,
or forgetting to close the garage door)
because if you didn’t do small dumassed things,
your DP would build up and suddenly release itself
in a LARGE dumbassed thing,
like pulling a Hazlewood in an Exxon Valdez moment.
Don’t attribute to stupidity that which is purely evil.
I maintain that some people are born stupid, while others work at it each and every day of their life.
The latter vastly outnumber the former.
Many of the most stupid people I know are highly educated.
stuck on stupid
can't handle the truth
clueless
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