The Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
As written by Carlo Cipolla
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1. Always and inevitably, each of us underestimates the number of stupid people in the world.
“Any numerical estimate would prove to be an underestimate”
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2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that same person.
“Whether you practice elegant circles or you take refuge among Polynesian head cutters, you lock yourself in a monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in the company of beautiful women, the fact remains that you must always face the same percentage of stupid people.”
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3. A stupid person is one who causes harm to another person or group without at the same time obtaining a benefit for himself or even damaging himself.
“There are people who with their unlikely actions, not only cause harm to other people, but also to themselves. these people belong to the superstupid genre.”
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4 Non-stupid people always underestimate the harmful potential of stupid people.
“Stupid people are dangerous and unfortunate because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand stupid behavior.”
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5. The stupid person is the most dangerous person that exists.
“All human beings are included in four fundamental categories: the naive, the intelligent, the evil and the stupid…The intelligent person knows he’s intelligent. The evil one is aware to be evil. The naive is painfully imbued with the sense of his own candor. Unlike all these characters, the stupid doesn’t know to be stupid. This contributes to give greater strength, incidence, and effectiveness to his devastating action. The stupid is not inhibited by self-consciousness.”
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An observation from Corrine Purtill on Cipolla’s Laws of Stupidity:
“Declining societies have the same percentage of stupid people as successful ones. But they also have high percentages of helpless people and, Cipollla 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 supid fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to hell.”
