by
Madeleine Kando
After last night’s debate (during which I had to mute the sound when Trump’s ramblings got too much for my poor head), I got to thinking about the possibility that he might become our next Commander in Chief.
Some people say that even if that were to pass, we should not worry too much, since at least Trump’s lack of focus and intelligence would prevent him from implementing his worst ideas.
But according to Italian economist Carlo Cipolla, stupid people are the most dangerous kind of people. He defines a stupid person as ‘someone who causes losses to another person [or group] while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses’.
In his satirical essay ‘The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity’, Cipolla enumerates the laws as follows:
1) Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2) The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3) A stupid person is a person who causes losses to others while deriving no gain to self and even possibly incurring losses.
4) Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.
5) A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit (read: evil).
Human beings fall into four basic categories: the Helpless, the Intelligent, the Bandit and the Stupid (See figure 1).
If you suffer a loss while producing a gain to someone else, you are in field H: You act helplessly.
If you make a gain while also creating a gain to others, you in area I: You act intelligently.
If you gain something, but cause someone else a loss, you are in area B: you act as a bandit.
If you do something that harms others and yourself, you fit in area S. You act stupidly.
Trump fits categorically in area S. He has harmed the Republican Party beyond repair, is a convicted criminal and has pretty much bankrupted himself.
One can understand the motives of an evil person, but what makes stupid people so dangerous is that you can not rely on their rationality to explain their actions. Rational people have difficulty understanding irrational behavior.
Because you have to be smart enough to recognize how stupid you are, a stupid person will never realize that they are stupid. They will overestimate their own competence, knowledge etc. It’s called the The Dunning-Kruger effect.
Unfortunately, it also causes those who know what they are talking about, to underestimate their own intelligence.
Kamala Harris’ facial expressions during the debate showed her amazement at how uninformed Trump was. Since it is so easy for Kamala to be smart, she assumes that Trump has some notion of what he is talking about. Which confirms the first law of stupidity. ‘Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.’
You might say that it is a cunningly deceptive strategy on the part of Trump. He wants to look stupid, but is really so smart that he knows he can outmaneuver his rational opponent by his unpredictable behavior. In that case he belongs in the Intelligent area, with a tinge of the Bandit.
That sounds too farfetched to me. This describes someone like Hitler, at least in the beginning of his career. Later on Hitler slid into the B area with one of his feet firmly planted in the S area. He was a stupid, evil leader who ruined his own country as well as most of Europe.
If stupidity is applied to an individual, that’s one thing. I would qualify some of my neighbors as stupid. The one who cut down a 250 year old white pine because he didn’t want to bother raking pine needles in the fall. Or another neighbor who almost burnt down his own house because he started burning brush on an extremely windy day.
But when a group of people starts acting stupid, believing that the Covid vaccine is the government’s way of implanting chips in your brain, it affects me and others in society.
Another brilliant thinker who wrote about stupidity is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This quote is from Bonhoeffer’s ‘Letters and Papers from Prison’ * and was written to explain the Nazi mass madness, but it also describes the MAGA phenomenon to a T.
‘The power of one needs the folly of the other. It is apparent that a very strong upsurge of power is so terrific that it deprives men of an independent judgment, and they give up trying […] to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. […] One feels, somehow, especially in conversation with him, that it is impossible to talk to the man himself […]. Instead, one is confronted with a series of slogans, watchwords, and the like, which have acquired power over him. He is under a curse, he is blinded, his very humanity is being prostituted and exploited.’ — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
'Stupidity is our worst enemy', he said:
“You can fight evil. It always makes men uncomfortable, if nothing worse. Evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction. To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread. But against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. To persuade the stupid person with reason is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Is there any way to overcome collective stupidity? Can we develop an anti-stupidity vaccine? Reach herd immunity before the stupidity virus wipes us all out?
Bonhoeffer, who was deeply religious, saw ‘the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God as the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.’
Replace the word ‘God’ with ‘Conscience’ and you are well on your way to fight stupidity. Stupidity is our National Enemy Number One. Kamala Harris kept saying: ‘Look to the future, not to the past’. She appealed to our collective conscience to overcome stupidity.
Her message goes beyond the debate. It is a choice that anyone with a sense of right and wrong must make. Before it’s too late.
leave comment here
* Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young German pastor who was executed by the Nazis in 1945 for his part in the “officers’ plot” to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
