Cipolla saw stupidity as losses to other individuals or groups, often widespread, from which the naive not only derive zero benefits, but risk damage to themselves. That’s because probabilities of someone being naive are independent of characteristics such as college degrees, values, financial success, or social status. Inevitably, Cipolla inferred, numbers of stupid individuals are underestimated, enabling them to emerge at inopportune times, consistently thwarting important endeavors. In Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, economic historian Carlo Cipolla, professor at Pavia and Berkley universities, presented 5 axioms on how stupid people attain power and endanger us. No amount of instruction, only liberation, can exorcize their demons. Their acolytes and minions become tools, easily incited, blinded to iniquity by slogans and catch phrases. Cult figures and populists, parasitically, feed off those losses of moral and rational autonomy, infecting the gullible. More sociological than psychological, therefore, we allow ourselves to become stupid through tribal connections which enable political and religious powers to inflate. Because well-trained, agile minds can be foolish and those with limited knowledge wise, stupidity is more a moral defect than cerebral, usually afflicting solitary people less than groups. So, facts that contradict a stupid person’s prejudgment are simply not believed or, when irrefutable, are pushed aside as inconsequential. Evil and malice, he surmised, can be exposed and prevented.
In “Letters from Prison,” he wrote how stupidity, not malice was the root of his country’s problems. Executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp days before liberation, Bonhoeffer found “readiness for responsibility” springboards for action. No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total.“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves its children.” So wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor speaking out against Nazi atrocities. Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. Let’s take a look at Cipolla’s five basic laws of human stupidity: The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.
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