There’s an internet adage that goes, “Debating an idiot is like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.” It’s funny and astute. It’s also deeply, depressingly worrying. Although we’d never say so, we all have people in our lives we think of as a bit dim — not necessarily about everything, but certainly about some things.
In 1976, Professor Cipolla published a 60-page essay describing the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as the greatest existential threat to humanity: stupidity.
He divides humanity into four main categories: Intelligent, Bandit, Helpless, Stupid. All are defined based on a win/lose concept, slightly echoing the prisoner’s dilemma.
Law 1: Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation
No matter how many idiots you suspect you are surrounded by, you are invariably underestimating the total.
Law 2: The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
There are stupid people in every nation on Earth. How many idiots are there among us? Impossible to answer. Moreover, any assumption would certainly violate the first law.
Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or group of people when he or she does not benefit and may even suffer losses.
Cipolla calls it the golden law of stupidity. A stupid person, according to the economist, is a person who causes problems for others without any clear benefit for himself.
This law also introduces three other phenotypes that, according to Cipolla, coexist with stupidity. First, there is the intelligent person, whose actions benefit both himself and others. Then comes the bandit, who gets rich at the expense of others. And finally, the abused, the defenceless person, whose actions enrich others at his own expense. Cipolla imagined the four types along a graph, like this:
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and harmful because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behaviour. An intelligent person can understand the logic of a bandit. The actions of the bandit follow a pattern of rationality: a wicked rationality indeed, but always rational. The bandit wants an advantage for his account.
With a stupid person, all this is impossible, as the third fundamental law explains. The stupid person will harass you without any reason, without any advantage, without any plan, at the most improbable times and places.
This analysis leads to law number 4:
Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals.
Non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances, dealing and/or associating with stupid people is always a costly mistake. We underestimate idiots, and we do so at our peril. This brings us to the fifth and final law:
Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
And its direct consequence: a stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
There is no defence against stupidity. The only way for a society to avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is for the non-stupid to work even harder to compensate for the losses of the stupid. When you draw the parallel with the environment, and some people trying to make up for other people’s bullshit, Cipolla was not far from the truth.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian, argues that stupidity is worse than evil because stupidity can be manipulated and used by evil. He also argues that stupidity tends to go together with acquiring power — that is, being in power means we surrender our individual critical faculties. When we know something or someone is evil, we can take steps to fight it. With stupidity, it is much more difficult.
The lesson from Bonhoeffer is to laugh at those daft, silly moments when in close company. But we should get angry and scared when stupidity takes reign, like in the U.S.
References:
The 5 basic laws of human stupidity, Thomas Wagner, Bonpote.com, 21 June 2022
Bonhoeffer’s “theory of stupidity”: We have more to hear from stupid people than evil ones, Jonny Thomson, Big Think
No comments:
Post a Comment