Fifty years ago, in his most famous work, the prolific intellectual Carlo Cipolla argued that stupid people, as a group, are “much more powerful than the mafia, or the military industrial complex.”
Today, as we witness one of the dumbest wars in history unraveling in Iran, an inept health and human services secretary working to bring back measles and polio, a Republican Party wherein only 20 percent view the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a violent insurrection but 71 percent deny Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and an administration that refuses to properly regulate AI and crypto industries that threaten the economic well-being and safety of all, Cipolla’s contention is as apt now as when he first proposed it in The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, in 1976—an era when the country, and indeed the world, was similarly roiled by sociopolitical rage and seemed on the brink of a catastrophe.
An Italian economic historian and UC-Berkeley professor who’d seen fascism firsthand and was writing in the wake of the Vietnam War, Cipolla wanted to determine how advanced societies commit truly stupid acts. Originally crafted for his friends, but selling over half a million copies once published, his treatise lies somewhere between satire and serious scholarship, involving a bit of humor and speculation while also applying the laws and language of scientific inquiry and a valid argumentative style. As he wrote in the introduction:
Let me point out at this juncture that most emphatically this little book is neither a product of cynicism nor an exercise in defeatism—no more than a book on microbiology is. The following pages are in fact the result of a constructive effort to detect, know, and thus possibly neutralize one of the most powerful dark forces that hinder the growth of human welfare and happiness.
Cipolla divided people into four groups: the helpless, whose actions harm themselves but benefit others; the intelligent, whose actions benefit themselves and others; the bandits, who enrich themselves while harming others; and the stupid, whose actions harm others while producing no benefit to themselves. This latter group is Cipolla’s main concern. “No matter how high are one’s estimates of human stupidity,” he wrote, “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 at the most improbable moments.”
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
-Margeret Atwood
Getting a lot of use out of this one lately. Feels like the same point made more succinctly.
Simplifying Trump’s actions to mere stupidity ignores the conservative forces that want to roll back society to how it was a century ago and the corrupt apparatus that bribes Trump for profit at the expense of the welfare of the American public and the world at large.
Yet at the same time if you actually read the stuff these people write, it becomes abundantly clear that while they may be intelligent in terms of conniving, backstabbing, and other mendacious behavior, when it comes to their actual understanding of things like science and evidence, they don’t actually understand at all. (Seriously Curtis Yarvin is honestly a fucking idiot and he has every tech bros ear.)
Sure they were smart enough to make this happen. They are literally going to kill themselves and the planet to do it (why else would they be obsessed with bunkers?). They literally only care about the short-term gains so much so that they are willing to cause themselves pain in the future because they don’t actually care about that future version of themselves.
Their abject rejection of anything related to real science is evidence of that. I’m not disputing that they are a corrupting and conniving force that is very good at what they do in that regard, I’m disputing the idea that that makes them overall intelligent.
I do think that if deep down they reject these things (science, evidence, reason), which many of them do, that makes them fundamentally fucking stupid. Their other skills do not make them intelligent by default.
The Nazis also deeply suffered from a horrible misguided understanding of genetics because… They were fucking stupid and evil. Fascism, it’s belief in “strong men” leaders, and the desire for yes men over reality is always fundamentally fucking stupid at it’s core. We know they don’t hire the best and brightest, they hire the most loyal. Stupidity, from the top down, anyone with a fucking brain knows that knowledge trumps loyalty in the real fucking world.
Cipoola has you covered :),see 4 and 5
but you have a point, the 10% of evil people employ the vast majority of stupid people to enable them. The difference is in the self harm, see #3. You could argue Trump etal are not stupid based on that but most of his supporters definetly are.
These are Cipolla’s five fundamental laws of stupidity:
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Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
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The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
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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.
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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.
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A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
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