The Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

Take two—for Two Dogs who's doin' yoeman's work outin' the idiots.

I orginally posted this monograph by Carlo M. Cipolla three years ago, but ya' humans haven't learned a thing since then. In fact, I'd say you've gone backwards. The illustrations by James Donnelly are a howl.

The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

Unless they've counted up the roster of registered Demo-cats—dead or alive, real or imagined.

THE SECOND BASIC LAW: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

THE THIRD (AND GOLDEN) BASIC LAW: A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

The fact that the activity and movements of a stupid creature are absolutely erratic and irrational not only makes defense problematic but it also makes any counter-attack extremely difficult—like trying to shoot at an object which is capable of the most improbable and unimaginable movements.

Such as a Demo-cat congress. Must be why Nancy Pelosi always has that deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes.

THE FOURTH BASIC LAW: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damanging power of stupid individuals.

Through centuries and millennia, in public as in private life, countless individuals have failed to take account of the Fourth Basic Law and the failure has caused mankind incalculable losses.

And whenever we forget it, there's an election that proves it—again…

THE FIFTH BASIC LAW: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. The corollary of the Law is that: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit..

The corollary to that is, if a stupid person is a Demo-cat member of congress, that stupid person is a bandit.

When stupid people are at work, the story is totally different. Stupid people cause losses to other people with no counterpart of gains on their own account. Thus the society as a whole is impoverished. The system of accounting which finds expression in the basic graphs shows that, while all actions of individuals falling to the right of the line POM (see fig. 3) add to the welfare of a society, although in different degrees, the actions of all individuals falling to the left of the same line POM cause a deterioration. [Emphasis mine.]

Now for the really scary stuff:

In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to [the constant] å; however in the remaining population one notices, among those in power, an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity…and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals… Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the å fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.

Or to put it in words the stupidest can understand: We're doomed…

posted by Harrison at 10:26 PM