THE BASIC LAWS
OF HUMAN STUPIDITY
by Carlo M. Cipolla
illustrations by James Donnelly
The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without
ambiguity that:
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates
the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and
horribly 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 at the most improbable moments.
The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a
specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people
within the total 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 å.
THE SECOND BASIC LAW
 Cultural
trends now fashionable in the West favour 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 if 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 a stupid man by an act of Providence.
Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they
are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce
surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity
is an indiscriminate privilege of 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 will 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 a
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 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. No 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 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 å of them were
stupid. As å'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 still were the results among the
professors. Whether I considered a large university or a
small college, a famous institution or an obscure one, I
found that the same fraction å 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, to a real elite, the Nobel laureates. The
result confirmed Nature's supreme powers: å 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's Liberation Movement will support
the Second Basic Law as it shows that stupid individuals
are proportionately as numerous among men as among women.
The underdeveloped of the Third World will probably take
solace at the Second Basic Law as they can find in it the
proof that after all the developed are not so developed.
Whether the Second Basic Law is liked or not, however,
its implications are frightening: the Law implies that
whether you move in distinguished circles or you take
refuge among the head-hunters of Polynesia, whether you
lock yourself into a monastery or decide to spend the
rest of your life in the company of beautiful and
lascivious women, you always have to face the same
percentage of stupid people - which percentage (in
accordance with the First Law) will always surpass your
expectations.
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 below).
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: Tom acted as a
bandit. Stupidity is related to area S and to all
positions on axis Y below 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.
When confronted for the first time with the Third
Basic Law, rational people instinctively react with
feelings of skepticism and incredulity. The fact is that
reasonable people have difficulty in conceiving and
understanding unreasonable behaviour. But let us abandon
the lofty plane of theory and let us look pragmatically
at our daily life. We all recollect occasions in which a
fellow took an action which resulted in his gain and our
loss: we had to deal with a bandit. We also recollect
cases in which a fellow took an action which resulted in
his loss and our gain: we had to deal with a helpless
person. We can recollect cases in which a fellow took an
action by which both parties gained: he was intelligent.
Such cases do indeed occur. But upon thoughtful
reflection you must admit that these are not the events
which punctuate most frequently our daily life. Our daily
life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money
and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness
and good health because of the improbable action of some
preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed
gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties
or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly
explain why that preposterous creature does what he does.
In fact there is no explanation - or better there is only
one explanation: the person in question is stupid.
FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION
Most people do not act consistently. Under certain
circumstances a given person acts intelligently and under
different circumstances the same person will act
helplessly. The only important exception to the rule is
represented by the stupid people who normally show a
strong proclivity toward perfect consistency in all
fields of human endeavours.
From all that proceeds, it does not follow that
we can chart on the basic graph only stupid individuals.
We can calculate for each person his weighted average
position in the plane of figure 1 quite independently
from his degree of inconsistency. A helpless person may
occasionally behave intelligently and on occasion he may
perform a bandit's action. But since the person in
question is fundamentally helpless most of his action
will have the characteristics of helplessness. Thus the
overall weighted average position of all the actions of
such a person will place him in the H quadrant of the
basic graph.
The fact that it is possible to place on the graph
individuals instead of their actions allows some
digression about the frequency of the bandit and stupid
types.
The perfect bandit is one who, with his actions,
causes to other individuals losses equal to his gains.
The crudest type of banditry is theft. A person who robs
you of 100 pounds without causing you an extra loss or
harm is a perfect bandit: you lose 100 pounds, he gains
100 pounds. In the basic graph the perfect bandits would
appear on a 45-degree diagonal line that divides the area
B into two perfectly symmetrical sub-areas (line OM of
figure 2).
However the "perfect" bandits are relatively
few. The line OM divides the area B into two sub-areas,
B1, and B2, and by far the largest majority of the
bandits falls somewhere in one of these two sub-areas.
The bandits who fall in area B1 are those individuals
whose actions yield to them profits which are larger than
the losses they cause to other people. All bandits who
are entitled to a position in area B1 are bandits with
overtones of intelligence and as they get closer to the
right side of the X axis they share more and more the
characteristics of the intelligent person.
Unfortunately the individuals entitled to a position
in the B1 area are not very numerous. Most bandits
actually fall in area B2. The individuals who fall in
this area are those whose actions yield to them gains
inferior to the losses inflicted to other people. If
someone kills you in order to rob you of fifty pounds or
if he murders you in order to spend a weekend with your
wife at Monte Carlo, we can be sure that he is not a
perfect bandit. Even by using his values to measure his
gains (but still using your values to measure your
losses) he falls in the B2 area very close to the border
of sheer stupidity. Generals who cause vast destruction
and innumerable casualties in return for a promotion or a
medal fall in the same area.
The frequency distribution of the stupid people is
totally different from that of the bandit. While bandits
are mostly scattered over an area stupid people are
heavily concentrated along one line, specifically on the
Y axis below point O. The reason for this is that by far
the majority of stupid people are basically and
unwaveringly stupid - in other words they perseveringly
insist in causing harm and losses to other people without
deriving any gain, whether positive or negative.
There are however people who by their improbable
actions not only cause damages to other people but in
addition hurt themselves. They are a sort of super-stupid
who, in our system of accounting, will appear somewhere
in the area S to the left of the Y axis.
THE POWER OF STUPIDITY
It is not difficult to understand how social,
political and institutional power enhances the damaging
potential of a stupid person. But one still has to
explain and understand what essentially it is that makes
a stupid person dangerous to other people - in other
words what constitutes the power of stupidity.
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging
because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine
and understand unreasonable behaviour. 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 manoeuvres 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. Because the stupid person's actions do not
conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that:
a) one is generally caught by surprise by the attack;
b) even when one becomes aware of the attack, one cannot
organize a rational defense, because the attack itself
lacks any rational structure.
The fact that the activity and movements of a stupid
creature are absolutely erratic and irrational not only
makes defense problematic but it also makes any
counter-attack extremely difficult - like trying to shoot
at an object which is capable of the most improbable and
unimaginable movements. This is what both Dickens and
Schiller had in mind when the former stated that
"with stupidity and sound digestion man may front
much" and the latter wrote that "against
stupidity the very Gods fight in vain."
THE FOURTH BASIC LAW
That helpless people, namely those who in our
accounting system fall into the H area, do not normally
recognize how dangerous stupid people are, is not at all
surprising. Their failure is just another expression of
their helplessness. The truly amazing fact, however, is
that also intelligent people and bandits often fail to
recognize the power to damage inherent in stupidity. It
is extremely difficult to explain why this should happen
and one can only remark that when confronted with stupid
individuals often intelligent men as well as bandits make
the mistake of indulging in feelings of self-complacency
and contemptuousness instead of immediately secreting
adequate quantities of adrenaline and building up
defenses.
One is tempted to believe that a stupid man will only
do harm to himself but this is confusing stupidity with
helplessness. On occasion one is tempted to associate
oneself with a stupid individual in order to use him for
one's own schemes. Such a manoeuvre cannot but have
disastrous effects because a) it is based on a complete
misunderstanding of the essential nature of stupidity and
b) it gives the stupid person added scope for the
exercise of his gifts. One may hope to outmanoeuvre the
stupid and, up to a point, one may actually do so. But
because of the erratic behaviour of the stupid, one
cannot foresee all the stupid's actions and reactions and
before long one will be pulverized by the unpredictable
moves of the stupid partner.
This is clearly summarized in the Fourth Basic Law
which states that:
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.
Through centuries and millennia, in public as in
private life, countless individuals have failed to take
account of the Fourth Basic Law and the failure has
caused mankind incalculable losses.
THE FIFTH BASIC LAW
Instead of considering the welfare of the individual
let us consider the welfare of the society, regarded in
this context as the algebraic sum of the individual
conditions. A full understanding of the Fifth Basic Law
is essential to the analysis. It may be parenthetically
added here that of the Five Basic Laws, the Fifth is
certainly the best known and its corollary is quoted very
frequently. The Fifth Basic Law states that:
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of
person.
The corollary of the Law is that:
A stupid person is more dangerous than a
bandit.
The result of the action of a perfect bandit (the
person who falls on line OM of figure 2) is purely and
simply a transfer of wealth and/or welfare. After the
action of a perfect bandit, the bandit has a plus on his
account which plus is exactly equivalent to the minus he
has caused to another person. The society as a whole is
neither better nor worse off. If all members of a society
were perfect bandits the society would remain stagnant
but there would be no major disaster. The whole business
would amount to massive transfers of wealth and welfare
in favour of those who would take action. If all members
of the society would take action in regular turns, not
only the society as a whole but also individuals would
find themselves in a perfectly steady state of no change.
When stupid people are at work, the story is totally
different. Stupid people cause losses to other people
with no counterpart of gains on their own account. Thus
the society as a whole is impoverished. The system of
accounting which finds expression in the basic graphs
shows that while all actions of individuals falling to
the right of the line POM (see fig. 3) add to the welfare
of a society; although in different degrees, the actions
of all individuals falling to the left of the same line
POM cause a deterioration.
In other words the helpless with overtones of
intelligence (area H1), the bandits with overtones of
intelligence (area B1) and above all the intelligent
(area I) all contribute, though in different degrees, to
accrue to the welfare of a society. On the other hand the
bandits with overtones of stupidity (area B2) and the
helpless with overtones of stupidity (area H1) manage to
add losses to those caused by stupid people thus
enhancing the nefarious destructive power of the latter
group.
All this suggests some reflection on the performance
of societies. According to the Second Basic Law, the
fraction of stupid people is a constant å which is not
affected by time, space, race, class or any other socio-
cultural or historical variable. It would be a profound
mistake to believe the number of stupid people in a
declining society is greater than in a developing
society. Both such societies are plagued by the same
percentage of stupid people. The difference between the
two societies is that in the society which performs
poorly:
a) the stupid members of the society are allowed by
the other members to become more active and take more
actions; b) there is a change in the composition of the
non-stupid section with a relative decline of populations
of areas I, H1 and B1 and a proportionate increase of
populations H2 and B2.
This theoretical presumption is abundantly confirmed
by an exhaustive analysis of historical cases. In fact
the historical analysis allows us to reformulate the
theoretical conclusions in a more factual way and with
more realistic detail.
Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or
modern or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact
that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable å
fraction of stupid people. However the country moving
uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent
people who manage to keep the å fraction at bay and at
the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the
other members of the community to make progress a
certainty.
In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of
stupid people is still equal to å; however in the
remaining population one notices among those in power an
alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of
stupidity (sub-area B1 of quadrant B in figure 3) and
among those not in power an equally alarming growth in
the number of helpless individuals (area H in basic
graph, fig.1). Such change in the composition of the
non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the
destructive power of the å
fraction and makes decline a
certainty. And the country goes to Hell.
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