A friend points me at this article in Quartz on the scholarly work of Professor Carlo M. Cipolla of University of California, Berkeley in 1976 on stupid people. He identifies 5 laws of human stupidity, and #3 sparked a thought (no, not that thought):
Law 3. 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.
Cipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. A stupid person, according to the economist, is one who causes problems for others without any clear benefit to himself.
The uncle unable to stop himself from posting fake news articles to Facebook? Stupid. The customer service representative who keeps you on the phone for an hour, hangs up on you twice, and somehow still manages to screw up your account? Stupid. …
However, consistent stupidity is the only consistent thing about the stupid. This is what makes stupid people so dangerous. Cipolla explains:
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. 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 maneuvres 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.
So … I can’t help but wonder how Law 1 (“Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation“) can possibly hold, right? After all, the life span of a stupid person should be substantially shorter than that of the average competent person.
But we all know of really stupid people. No, I’m not talking about Trump voters, although no doubt a few of them, according to to Cipolla’s First Law, are just out and out stupid. But we all know folks who consistently make bad decisions. The kids playing Nerf Wars while driving and ending up dead, for example. So how do they survive?
Why, we’ve all enabled it, haven’t we? Remember the Zero-risk society? It all seemed like such a great idea – minimize risk at all times, put the responsibility on the manufacturers for the safe use of their products, keep workplaces exceedingly safe. I suppose it’s a side-effect of the idea that all life is sacred. Well, all human life, anyways. And dog life.
Don’t forget Cat life. Yeah, that’s a dirty look.
So through the indiscriminate valuation of human life, we end up with stupid people persisting far longer in the population – and annoying the rest of us – than they might otherwise do. That suggests the obvious solution:
Stop the absurd driving of risk to zero.
Maybe offer high school classes in not being stupid, but leave it at that. Someone wants to run their radio in the bathtub, hey, great. Just make sure your Last Will and Testament is filled out. Maybe hospitals shouldn’t be required to treat idiots who accidentally shoot themselves.
Policy changes of this order may drive mortuary business to new highs, momentarily, but it’ll certainly result in a reduction of stress for the rest of us.
But then we’d have to stop being so stupid.
It’s a conundrum, isn’t it?
See also: “The Marching Morons,” by C. M. Kornbluth.
