The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cippola

Core Ideas

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Citation: All text highlighted in yellow in this section is cited from – Cipolla, Carlo M.. The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity: The International Bestseller. Kindle Edition.

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1. There are more stupid people around than you estimate: You used to think someone had brains, and then bam! They do something stupid. You used to think you’d finally moved to a nice and good moron-free neighbourhood and then bam! Stupid people ambush you in the bushes. You used to think that the days of stupidity were behind us and bam! YouTube video of people doing stupid things.
   • The author denotes the percentage of stupid people in society by the greek letter “σ”.
   • This σ is hard to put a number to, just know that whatever number you are thinking of, σ will turn out to be more.
2. Stupidity is universal: It does not matter where you come from, who your forefathers were, what your skin colour is – the chance of you turning out stupid will always be σ.
   • Nature is egalitarian in the sense that it does not spare you if you are from the upper classes. Everyone gets a chance at being stupid.
   • Which also means that the slogan of all men being created equal is wrong. Some men are genuinely more stupid than others.
3. Interaction with people in unavoidable: Even if you’re trying to avoid them you have to interact with the some time or the other. And even the absence of interaction is interaction by absence, so there is a opportunity cost associated with it.
   • Whenever you interact with or avoid people the following two things happen: you gain or lose something, and the other person gains or loses something. The author depicts this on a graph where the X-axis is your gain (right of zero) or loss (left of zero), and the Y-axis is the other’s gain (above zero) or loss (below zero).
   • Important to note that while your gain (or loss) needs to be per your terms, the other person’s gain (or loss) must be on their terms. “Tom hits Dick on Dick’s head and he derives satisfaction from his action. He may pretend that Dick was delighted to be hit on the head. Dick, however, may not share Tom’s view. In fact he may regard the blow on his head as an unpleasant event. Whether the blow on Dick’s head was a gain or a loss to Dick is up to Dick to decide and not to Tom.”.
   • Then the author labels each of the resulting four quadrants:
     • Intelligent: Both you and the other person gain
     • Bandit: You gain and the other loses
     • Helpless: You lose but the other gains
     • Stupid: Both you and the other person lose

4. No points for guessing who a stupid person is then: A stupid person is someone who causes loss to the other without gaining anything or even incurring a loss to himself as well. Yep, classic stupid.
   • “Our daily life is mostly made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation – or better, there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.“.
5. Stupid people are consistently stupid:
   • In the graph above, each action could be plotted as a point depending on the gain/loss it delivers to you/the other.
   • The only exception are stupid people who are show “perfect consistency” at being stupid no matter what they do.
   • If you draw a 45° line from the “H” to “B” (which I’ll be called “the line of perfection”) in the graph above you end up with this:

6. The line of perfection is when your gain (or loss) is exactly equal to the other’s loss (or gain): Making you either a perfect bandit or a perfectly helpless person.
   • But people are not perfect, and so you will find them all across (“yellow” outlined zone in the graph).
   • Banditry must be called out here for being especially pointless because mostly people are imperfect bandits in that they gain less but cause much more loss (remember, viewed from the POV of the other). “Generals who cause vast destructions and innumerable casualties in return for a promotion or a medal fall in the same area.“.
   • But the cake goes to the stupid people, because unlike others who dot the landscape of the graph, stupid people congregate “along one line, specifically on the Y axis below point O” (see the sliver of “pink” in the graph above).
7. The amount of harm a stupid person can cause depends on two things:
   • The level of stupidity they are born with (like someone’s genetic predisposition to grow up to only 6 feet in height and not stop at 1)
   • The position of power they occupy in society. Earlier stupid people used to inherit positions of power, today they are elected. Because remember, σ percentage of the electorate is also stupid, and by the first law, higher in number than you think.
8. Humans expect to encounter rationality when dealing with other humans, and that is exactly where the stupid people get us:
   • Because they are not predictable, rational or reasonable in their behaviour. And so we are mostly caught unawares without a lot that we can do about it.
   • People who are mostly present in the “helpless” quadrant are not able to recognise the damaging power of stupid people, but for those of us who count our position in the intelligent or bandit, quadrants more than any other quadrant, we can know how damaging stupidity can be when it changes situation that could have been mutually beneficial or at least beneficial to at least one party into a complete loss-loss situation.
   • Despite this knowledge intelligent people and bandits will fall prey to stupidity, and this is just complacent behaviour per the author.
9. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit:
   • In the graph above, the area left of the line of perfection impoverishes society net-net, though at an individual level the bandit may gain.
   • But it’s the quadrant of stupidity that causes a complete loss to society as well as the individuals involved.
   • And that is why the stupid person is the most dangerous because his actions lead to total loss without any individual gain at all.
   • And that is where societies differ from each other, not because underdeveloped societies have more stupid people, no, that remains constant at σ. But rather, underdeveloped societies have given more leeway to stupid people to take decisions.