The laws of human stupidity and our current state of affairs

 By Jeffrey J Weiss

 

In an essay from an Italian academic half a century ago, Carlos Cipolla argued that every human action – or behavior – can be critiqued by asking two questions:     

 1) Does your action benefit you?   2) Does your action benefit others?

 In “The Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” published in 1976, Cipolla argued that human beings fall into four basic categories: “the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit, and the stupid.”  Stupid people behave in a manner that benefits neither themselves nor others.   In the preface to the essay Nassem Nicholas Taleb describes stupid as “someone who harms others without procuring any gain for himself or herself.”

 While burning down the neighbor’s house they burn down their own, too. 

 Stupid people, according to the author, can be found everywhere, among all classes: politicians, economists, teachers, athletes, blue collar workers, in boardrooms, and at a local bar.  There are a similar number of stupid people among professors as there is workers at a local Kum and Go.   “A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.”  (Cipolla’s definition)

 In opposition, intelligent people act in a way that benefits others and in their own self-interest. Those whose actions constitute a win-win scenario are the people who created Social Security.  A diligent student who reads books, for example, enriches his mind and may become a better citizen.

 One example of intelligent thinking in history is how the Kennedy Administration solved the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.  Diplomacy removed Soviet missiles from Cuba and in exchange, the U.S. removed its missiles from Turkey.  All of this, of course, a sound alternative to thermonuclear war. 

 In fact, the Kennedy Administration learned from the Bay of Pigs debacle, where ‘groupthink’ led to disaster. Kennedy’s team now listened to contrary opinion, and avoided the stupid thinking that embarrassed them and strengthened a foreign enemy because of their failed invasion of Cuba.

 The survival of society depends on creative thinking spread out in a population to offset the number of stupid people.   Studies suggest, however, humans might be in some peril. That is because thinking may be compromised by new technologies, including artificial intelligence.   This raises the possibility elites and educated classes addicted to machines may see cognitive abilities decline.   If this happens, more forms of ‘collective stupidity’ may infest all of us.

 

 Adolf Eichmann and collective stupidity

 

It’s worth taking a deeper dive into stupid, an offensive word to many.   Again, a stupid person engages in a series of behaviors that benefit neither themselves nor anybody else; it’s a lot of losing, not only in how they behave but more important to Cipolla, in the process of thinking that gets them to act irrationally in the first place.

 Stupidity is confounding because you can’t assign motive to make sense of the behavior. It does not appear in the self-interest of the person engaging in the behavior, nor is it good for the rest.    Cipolla writes, “Reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior.”

 Contrast stupid behavior with a criminal who robs a store. Though we don’t approve, we understand theft follows the logic of selfish self-interest. Or the person who is helpless and surrenders to a soul-numbing job.   A pawn, these people don’t puzzle us, because we see them just going along to get along.

 After observing Adolf Eichmann in person on trial at Nuremburg, Hannah Arendt wrote that it wasn’t as if Eichmann had made up his mind to do evil for himself or for others.  To Arendt, the mind of Eichmann “had been locked into a set of considerations that rendered him inhuman.”  She argues the most dangerous thing about Eichmann was “not cruelty but that he lost the capacity to think.”

  Stupidity did, in fact, infest Germany as they set the world in flames. Think of Joseph Goebbels, who had a doctorate in literature and talent for moving the masses.  In the end, Goebbels was part of a staggering number of stupid people who saw a ‘1,000 Year Reich’ last less than 20 years.

 In a recent edition of the New Yorker (July 27, 2026) former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken asks us "to question his judgement, but not his motives" in looking back at arming Israel's "plausible violations” of the Genocide Conventions (the words of a January 2024 World Court ruling) in the Gaza Strip.

 In the same interview, Blinken speaks about “freeing hostages” and “enhancing security” while, of course, not intending to participate.  I wonder how Hannah Arendt might ponder this set of considerations?

 The lesson when you combine Arendt and Cipolla is when humans lose the capacity to think in their own self-interest or the interests of others, the results can be monstrous.  The trains run on time, weapons companies seal contracts on Wall Street, and the masses are led by non-thinking leaders. Or perhaps we’ve arrived at a “spiritual death,” predicted by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. months before he was shot to death at a hotel in Memphis.

 In a country going downhill, Cipolla describes more stupid people exerting power.  The behaviors of those in government first appear as more criminal as a precursor to stupid.   All the while, the population grows in the number of helpless people.

 

 Jeffrey Weiss is a Political Science professor at Des Moines Area Community College.  He is also on the board for Circle of Peacemakers, based in Des Moines.