Today, as we witness one of the dumbest wars in history unraveling in Iran, an inept health and human services secretary working to bring back measles and polio, a Republican Party wherein only 20 percent view the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a violent insurrection but 71 percent deny Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and an administration that refuses to properly regulate AI and crypto industries that threaten the economic well-being and safety of all, Cipolla’s contention is as apt now as when he first proposed it in The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, in 1976—an era when the country, and indeed the world, was similarly roiled by sociopolitical rage and seemed on the brink of a catastrophe.
Let me point out at this juncture that most emphatically this little book is neither a product of cynicism nor an exercise in defeatism—no more than a book on microbiology is. The following pages are in fact the result of a constructive effort to detect, know, and thus possibly neutralize one of the most powerful dark forces that hinder the growth of human welfare and happiness.
Undoubtedly, you’re pondering all of the stupid people you know. But the real danger, Cipolla contended, is when stupid people gain power, exponentially increasing the danger to us all. In this scenario, the stupid will have at their disposal means of destruction created by the intelligent—armies, weapons systems, monetary levers, media influence—and will oversee industries often controlled or influenced by bandits, weakening the institutions designed to monitor them. Imagine, if you will, if an extraordinarily stupid man were to somehow become secretary of defense, jeopardizing both our soldiers and our position in the world while also promoting a testosterone-based culture that could damage our forces for years. To avoid this, Cipolla said, it is the job of the intelligent to keep the stupid in check. If they fail to do so, societies head downhill fast.
We cannot say for sure what Cipolla would have made of President Trump’s efforts to build a giant ballroom at the White House, his spending countless hours posting social media memes of himself, the nearly $200 million taxpayers have footed for his golf outings, or the UFC and Grand Prix events he hosted at the White House. In fact, it’s difficult to even say whether Trump is more a bandit or just plain stupid—or whether his administration is filled with more obvious bandits who are simply in it for themselves, like Scott Bessent and Marco Rubio, or crazy idiots who actually think they’re doing some good while sailing us toward disaster, like Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr. But it’s likely Cipolla, who died in 2000, would’ve given high marks on the stupidity scale to the administration overall, and seen it as a validation of his theory.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.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.Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake.A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
The second rule—the idea that stupidity is universal among groups and independent of other characteristics, including wealth, education, and social status—is somewhat counterintuitive, but think about some of the Ivy League fools we see in government today: Ted Cruz (Harvard), RFK Jr. (Harvard), Sam Alito (Yale), Clarence Thomas (Yale), Josh Hawley (Yale). Or rich morons like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. In fact, even more dangerous than a stupid person with power is a stupid person with power and credentials—they’re more likely to think they actually know what they’re talking about.
Among the helpless Cipolla counted those who are self-sacrificing as well as those who are perhaps just plain hapless, so the name is a bit of a misnomer. It would mean that Clara Barton, Henry David Thoreau, and Martin Luther King might be a part of that category, though one could argue, too, that each received the benefit of working toward a more just and equitable society. It’s also difficult to say that they were not intelligent, as they clearly were.
What puts the United States in an unusually dangerous position, though, is the peculiar mix of smart and stupid we’re experiencing right now. The scientists who built the atomic bomb and helped us win World War II were keenly aware of the dangers posed. After the war, Robert Oppenheimer advocated for limitations and cooperation, understanding the nuclear age we had entered. Harry Truman—a capable president—was smart enough to put our nuclear program under civilian control.
It’s like we built a hydrogen bomb, then entrusted Gordon Gekko to make a profit off it and Barney Fife to monitor him. What could go wrong?
It may be too soon to know whether we’re on that course in the U.S. We may not know until it’s far too late. But it’s alarming enough that Cipolla’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek theory from a half-century ago seems perfectly apt to the state of America today.
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