Originally conceived by Professor (
economic history) Carlo Cipolla,
U Cal.-Berekley, d.2000.
- The first basic law of human stupidity
- The second basic law
- The third (and golden) basic law
- Frequency distribution
- The power of stupidity
- The fourth basic law
- The fifth basic law
The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly
ungenerous. Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity.
No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is
repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:
a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.
b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's
activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in
the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.
The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical
value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any
numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. Thus in the
following pages I will denote the fraction of stupid people within a
population by the symbol σ.
The second basic law
Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian
approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a
perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and
sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive
apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally
equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to
nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. It
is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and
experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others
are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by
cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is
red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood
group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.
Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that
they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to
reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly
believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human
groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion.
This fact is scientifically expressed by the Second Basic Law which
states that
The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
In this regard, Nature seems indeed to have outdone herself. It is
well known that Nature manages, rather mysteriously, to keep constant
the relative frequency of certain natural phenomena. For instance,
whether men proliferate at the Northern Pole or at the Equator, whether
the matching couples are developed or underdeveloped, whether they are
black, red, white or yellow the female to male ratio among the newly
born is a constant, with a very slight prevalence of males. We do not
know how Nature achieves this remarkable result but we know that in
order to achieve it Nature must operate with large numbers. The most
remarkable fact about the frequency of stupidity is that Nature succeeds
in making this frequency equal to the probability quite independently
from the size of the group.
Thus one finds the same percentage of stupid people whether one is
considering very large groups or one is dealing with very small ones. No
other set of observable phenomena offers such striking proof of the
powers of Nature.
The evidence that education has nothing to do with the probability
was provided by experiments carried on in a large number of universities
all over the world. One may distinguish the composite population which
constitutes a university in five major groups, namely the blue-collar
workers, the white-collar employees, the students, the administrators
and the professors.
Whenever I analyzed the blue-collar workers I found that the fraction
σ of them were stupid. As σ's value was higher than I expected (First
Law), paying my tribute to fashion I thought at first that segregation,
poverty, lack of education were to be blamed. But moving up the social
ladder I found that the same ratio was prevalent among the white-collar
employees and among the students. More impressive still were the results
among the professors. Whether I considered a large university or a
small college, a famous institution or an obscure one, I found that the
same fraction σ of the professors are stupid. So bewildered was I by the
results, that I made a special point to extend my research to a
specially selected group, to a real elite, the Nobel laureates. The
result confirmed Nature's supreme powers: σ fraction of the Nobel
laureates are stupid.
This idea was hard to accept and digest but too many experimental
results proved its fundamental veracity. The Second Basic Law is an iron
law, and it does not admit exceptions. The Women's Liberation Movement
will support the Second Basic Law as it shows that stupid individuals
are proportionately as numerous among men as among women. The
underdeveloped of the Third World will probably take solace at the
Second Basic Law as they can find in it the proof that after all the
developed are not so developed. Whether the Second Basic Law is liked or
not, however, its implications are frightening: the Law implies that
whether you move in distinguished circles or you take refuge among the
head-hunters of Polynesia, whether you lock yourself into a monastery or
decide to spend the rest of your life in the company of beautiful and
lascivious women, you always have to face the same percentage of stupid
people - which percentage (in accordance with the First Law) will always
surpass your expectations.
The third (and golden) basic law...MORE
HT: Real Clear Science's
Newton blog
