The basic laws of human stupidity

“Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain” – Friedrich von Schiller

How often do we run into stupid acts in our daily lives? It happened to me with a package that was supposed to arrive by mail on November 4. The parcel, which came from abroad, had been in the country for two days, and it was impossible to speed up the delivery. Finally, on the afternoon of the 13th, the package arrived at our house. But the most ridiculous part was that on November 25 I got an email from Correos de Chile, the national postal service, informing me that my package had been delivered on the 14th!

I don’t know, and I don’t want to try to understand, how logistics and systems work at that company, but the observed external behavior can be classified as simply stupid.

According to the Italian economist Carlo Maria Cipolla, a person is stupid if they cause harm to other people, or to a group of people, without getting any personal gain out of it, or even worse, possibly harming themselves in the process¹.

You see, in the world of social media, where each of us can end up with thousands of followers, the behavior of companies, and our own, is being monitored, for better or worse. We have built a great social panopticon, one that wasn’t even in Foucault’s worst nightmares.

But on the other hand, these same networks have become a means of spreading human stupidity.

Stupidity is not exclusive to people; it can become even more evident in institutions.

I learned of Cipolla’s existence through this post by Benjamí Villoslada, titled “Cipolla y el embarque por filas en el avión” (Cipolla and boarding the plane by rows), where he applies some of Cipolla’s conclusions to conclude that the behavior of airlines is essentially stupid, in this respect.

In a short work titled “Allegro ma non troppo”, Cipolla lays out the “Basic Laws of Human Stupidity”.

His short essay starts like this:

“Humanity is in a deplorable state.” In fact it has always been in that state, which is the result of the way life has been organized since its beginnings. All species of living beings have to bear their daily dose of “tribulations, fears, frustrations, pains and adversities.” But human beings must also bear the tribulations caused by a group of people whose “nature, character and behavior” is the subject dealt with here.

For Cipolla the first basic law of stupidity is the following:

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

However high our estimate of their number, we always fall short, because we keep discovering that people we had considered reasonable later turn out to be stupid. And besides, day after day we come across new stupid people who get in the way of our activities.

Cipolla’s second basic law is:

The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

Nowadays we have an egalitarian view of society, “it is a widespread opinion that I personally (Carlo M Cipolla) do not share”.

What Cipolla means by this is that there are stupid people and others who are not, but this behavior is determined by natural factors, not cultural ones. For Cipolla the proportion of stupid people is the same, always and everywhere, without exceptions (of culture, era, development, etc).

To understand the third basic law, Cipolla introduces a diagram like the following one:

In this chart we see the interaction between a person who acts and another person, a group or society as a whole, who is on the receiving end of the action.

On the horizontal axis we measure the gain this person gets from their action. The vertical axis shows the gain of whoever receives the action. Gains can be negative, zero or positive. If they are negative we call them losses, if they are positive they are benefits.

Cipolla’s third basic law says:

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.

What Cipolla does is classify people into four categories: the helpless, who are in the upper left quadrant, the intelligent, who sit in the upper right quadrant, the bandits, in the lower right quadrant, and the stupid in the lower left quadrant.

If a person takes an action and suffers a loss, but another person or group of people benefits, we will say that person is helpless.

On the other hand, if this person benefits and also benefits the others, then they are intelligent.

And if the action only benefits whoever carries it out, and harms the others, then that person is a bandit.

We human beings do not act consistently. Sometimes a person may act intelligently and other times helplessly. Only stupid people are totally consistent in every field of action.

The perfect bandit is the one who, when he acts, obtains gains equal to the losses he causes the other. The simplest example is the thief. If he robs you of CLP 10,000, he gains CLP 10,000 and you lose CLP 10,000. If we plot them, bandits will appear on the 45-degree line that divides the lower right quadrant. However, most bandits will not be on this line. The quadrant is split in two: those above the line (Mi), that is, those who obtain gains greater than the losses they cause, and those below the line (Me), those who obtain smaller gains than the harm they cause.

Those located in the Mi region are dishonest, but intelligent. Most bandits fall in the Me zone.

These divisions work for bandits, the helpless and the intelligent. But the distribution of the stupid is completely different: the stupid are concentrated along the vertical axis and below the origin point O, the center of our diagram. The reason is that most stupid people are fundamentally and unwaveringly stupid. They not only cause harm to others, but also to themselves. These last ones are the super-stupid, who will sit to the left of the vertical axis.

Like everyone else, stupid people influence other people. Some stupid people cause only limited harm, but others can cause enormous damage, not just to individuals, but to entire societies.

How is it possible for stupid people to reach positions of authority?

According to Cipolla:

“classes and castes (both lay and ecclesiastical) allowed a steady flow of stupid people into positions of power in pre-industrial societies. That role is filled today by political parties, bureaucracy and democracy. General elections are a most effective instrument for ensuring the stable maintenance of the fraction

\[of stupid people\]

among the powerful: they can harm everyone else without obtaining any gain in return for their action.”

Which brings us to the fourth basic law of stupidity:

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.

The surprising thing is that we fail to notice the destructive and devastating power of stupidity. Complacency and contempt, or the temptation to associate with the stupid person to use them for our own benefit, are telling signs of this fourth law. You only have to look at many of the political processes of recent times to notice this phenomenon even more.

All of this leads us to the last basic law of human stupidity:

A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Corollary: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Despite the existence of stupid people, we move forward as a society. The question is, what is it that leads us into decline?

The reason we move forward is that the distribution of people in three of the four quadrants is larger, fortunately. However, decline begins when:

• The stupid members of society become more active thanks to the permissiveness of the other members

• There is a change in the composition of the non-stupid population, with an increase in stupid bandits and stupid helpless people.

Every country on the rise has an unavoidable number of stupid people. But it has an unusually high percentage of intelligent individuals who keep the stupid fraction in check and produce enough gains for themselves and for society to make progress a fact. In decline, the fraction of stupid people is the same, but the stupid bandits and the stupid helpless increase, which reinforces the power of the stupid and leads the country to ruin.