The laws of stupidity: What group are you?
Last weekend I was out fishing with some mates when we saved a dolphin.
We found it tangled up in a long line and struggling to breathe. It’s not easy dealing with a panicked dolphin, but we eventually managed to cut most of the line away and it swam off looking for its mates.
This was somewhat dangerous, as freaked-out dolphins are tricky creatures at the best of times but, when you’re both attached to the same piece of unbreakable line, things can easily head south.
I share this story not just to try and persuade you that maybe I actually do have a heart, but because while some people might think we were stupid, according to Carlo Cipolla, an Italian professor of economic history who died in 2000, this was an example of being intelligent: an act which benefits the perpetrator as well as others. We were chuffed that we had saved the poor bugger, and for others there’s one more dolphin to go around. Win, win.
Cipolla’s theories are set out in his 1976 essay, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity”, and are becoming increasingly popular as half the world struggles to understand what on earth is going on with the other half.
Cipolla splits humans into four groups based on who benefits from our acts:
Intelligent people
The only way to deal with the Stupid is if everyone else does as much as they can to offset their influence.
Cipolla defines intelligent people as those who help others at the same time as helping themselves. For example, doing your job well helps those around you and also earns you a pay rise. It doesn’t mean that they’re well educated or particularly gifted, just that they act in a helpful way.
Bandits
Bandits act to benefit themselves at the expense of others. Put simply, criminals. There are also the incredibly selfish who won’t do anything unless it benefits themselves. We all know one of them.
Helpless people
These are often the people that the Bandits prey on. They mean well but can end up as victims through their naivety.
Stupid people
These are people who do things that harm others without any express benefit for themselves. For example vandals and trolls and the deliberately unhelpful. People who vote for politicians because “they like the way they talk” even though their policies will actually work against them.
Cipolla sees the Stupid as the main danger to civilisation and derives the following laws:
Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
This is a worry.
Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of
any other characteristic of that person.
Cipolla believed that the proportion of stupid people is fixed regardless of wealth, sex, education, race, or any other factor. He also believes that stupidity is innate.
Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
I wonder if “anti-social” would be a better term, but they’re Cipolla’s theories so we’ll go with his definition. Law 4: 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.
I can’t help but feel he has somebody specific in mind here. Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Cipolla sees the Stupid as even more dangerous than the Bandits, who at least operate with a degree of logic which the rest of us can understand. Stupid people, however, are loose cannons with no discernible reason for their actions, which makes them hard to predict and counteract.
It’s up to us
Cipolla believes the only way to deal with the Stupid is if everyone else does as much as they can to offset their influence: “The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the nonstupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.”
So come on everyone, roll your sleeves up.
That sounds like a hell of a lot of dolphins we need to save.