THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY
1.
The First basic law
The first basic law of human stupidity asserts that
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates
the number of stupid people in circulation.
At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague
and horrible ungenerous. Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic
veracity. No matter how high are one’s estimates of human stupidity, one is
repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:
a) people whom one had once judged rational and
intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.
b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one
is harassed in one’s activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and
unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and in most improbable moments.
The First Basic Law prevents me from
attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within
general population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an
underestimate. Thus in the following pages I will denote the fraction of stupid
people within a population by the symbol “delta”.
2. The Second Basic Law
Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favor an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature.
I take an exception to this general view. It is
my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that
men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the
difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One
is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as
one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born as a stupid man by an act of
Although convinced that fraction “delta” of
human beings are stupid and that they are so because genetics traits, I am not
reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination.
I firmly believe that stupidity is indiscriminate privilege to all human groups
and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion. This fact is
scientifically expressed by The Second Basic Law which states that
The probability that a certain person be stupid
is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
In this regard, Nature seems indeed to have
outdone herself. It is well known that Nature manages, rather mysteriously, to
keep constant the relative frequency of certain natural phenomena. For
instance, whether men proliferate at the Northern Pole or at the Equator,
whether the matching couples are developed or underdeveloped, whether they are
black, red, white or yellow the female to male ratio among the newly born is
constant, with a very slight prevalence of males. We do not know how Nature
achieves this remarkable result but we know that in order to achieve it Nature
must operate with large numbers. The most remarkable fact about the frequency
of stupidity is that Nature succeeds in making this frequency equal to the
probability “delta” quite independently from the size of the group.
Thus one finds the same percentage of stupid
people whether one is considering very large groups or one is dealing with very
small ones. Not other set of observable phenomena offers such striking proof of
the powers of Nature.
The evidence that education has nothing to do
with the probability “delta” was provided by experiments carried on in a large
number of universities all over the world. One may distinguish the composite
population which constitutes a university in five major groups, namely the
blue-collar workers, the white-collar employees, the students, the
administrators and the professors.
Whenever I analyzed the blue-collar workers I
found that the fraction “delta” of them were stupid. As “delta’s” value was
higher than I expected (First Law), paying my tribute to fashion, I thought at
first that segregation, poverty, lack of education were to be blamed. But
moving up the social ladder, I found that the same ratio was prevalent among
the white-collar employees and among the students. More impressive were still
were the results among the professors. Whether I considered a large university
or a small college, a famous institution or obscure one, I found that the same
fraction “delta” of the professors are stupid. So bewildered was I by the
results, that I made a special point to extend my research to a specially
selected group, as real elite, the Nobel laureates. The result confirmed
Nature’s supreme powers: “delta” fraction of the Nobel laureates are stupid.
This idea was hard to accept and digest, but
too many experimental results proved its fundamental veracity. The Second Basic
Law is an iron law, and it does not admit exceptions. The Women Liberation
Movement will support the Second Basic Law as it shows that stupid individuals
are proportionately as numerous among the men as among the women.
The underdeveloped of the
3. The Third (and Golden) Basic Law
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 recognized by the perspicacious reader that these four categories correspond to the four areas I, H, S, B, of the basic graph (see next page).
If Tom takes an action and suffers a loss while
producing a gain to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in field H: Tom acted
helplessly. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain while yielding a
gain also to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in area I: Tom acted
intelligently. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain causing Dick a
loss, Tom’s mark will fall in area B: he acted as a bandit. Stupidity is
related to area S and to all positions on axis “gamma”, bellow point O.
As the Third Basic Law explicitly clarifies:
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.
…
(Carlo M. Cipolla: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity; WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, spring 1987)
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