The actions of an idiot are especially dangerous, the professor explains, because reasonable people find it difficult to understand their unreasonable behavior. The four categories of society can be illustrated in the graph below:Īs you can see, stupid people occupy the lonesome left corner of the chart, where they produce no benefit to anyone at all. The helpless person will enrich others at his own expense. The bandit benefits himself at the expense of others’. The actions of the intelligent enrich both himself and others. This definition makes the most sense in reference to Cipolla’s four basic categories of human beings: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit, and the stupid. This principle, the professor claims, is the Golden Law of stupidity: An idiot will cause problems for the people around him without benefitting himself in the slightest. 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. It makes no difference whether they’re black, white, male, female, Asian, or South American - stupidity don’t discriminate. Cipolla examined blue collar workers and white collar workers, and on every rung of the social ladder there were a persistent proportion of simpletons. There are imbeciles with master’s degrees.
Morons can materialize in every corner of society. Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.Ĭontrary to popular belief, cultural indicators like a person’s job, their education level, or their income are not indicative of intelligence.
More idiots can always be found to “appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments,” he hilariously claims. Essentially, if we were ever to guess how many halfwits are among us, we would endlessly underestimate their numbers. We’re surrounded by more morons than we can ever truly comprehend, Cipolla asserts. Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. Understanding these would be necessary, he insisted, if the non-stupid were going to avoid being destroyed by their half-baked brethren.
He studied the fundamental traits that these simpletons share, and published an essay on the subject, in which he broke the elements of our ineptitude down to a science.Ĭipolla believed that human stupidity followed five fundamental laws. There were so many idiots, he believed, that their stupidity would inevitably become the ultimate threat to mankind’s existence.Ĭarlo M Cipolla was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, when he became fascinated with the phenomenon of human stupidity. Many years ago, a brilliant professor took a look at the world around him and startledly realized he was surrounded by idiots.
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