A stupid person is one who causes harm to another person or group without at the same time obtaining a benefit for himself or even damaging himselfĬipolla didn’t consider stupidity a matter of intellectual quotient, but rather a lack of relational intelligence. “Whether you practice elegant circles or you take refuge among the Polynesian head cutters, you lock yourself in a monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in company of beautiful women, the fact remains that you must always face the same percentage of stupid people”, he concluded.ģ. In this analysis it was found that the distribution of stupidity was uniform, no matter how much we ascended in the educational level. He cites a study on the level of stupidity in the four large strata that make up universities: beadles, employees, students and teachers. Therefore, it’s distributed in all circles of society in a more or less similar proportion.
The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of the same personĬipolla was convinced that stupidity was another characteristic, like blond hair or black eyes. Or it’s enough going out to the street to see how many people insist on hindering us, for no apparent reason other than stupidity.Ģ. It’s enough thinking, for example, of those people we classified as intelligent but who suddenly begin to behave in a foolish and obtuse manner. He stated that “any numerical estimate would prove to be an underestimate”.
But Cipolla was convinced that we underestimated their number and influence in our lives and in society. That there are stupid people in the world is well known. Always and inevitably, each of us underestimates the number of stupid individuals in the world These are the words of the famous professor of economic history Carlo Cipolla, who taught at the universities of Pavia and Berkeley and published academic works in which he analyzed overpopulation throughout history but passed to posterity thanks to his “Theory of Stupidity”, condensed in his book “The Basic Laws od Human Stupidity”, a treatise on human stupidity with satirical overtones. “With the smile on his lips, as if he were doing the most natural thing in the world, the stupid will appear on the spur of the moment to spoil your plans, destroy your peace, complicate your life and work, make you lose money, time, good humor, productivity, and all this without malice, without remorse and without reason. They’re an unorganized group, without a leader or norm, but in spite of that, they act in perfect harmony, as guided by an invisible hand. “The stupid ones are more fearsome than Mafia, the military-industrial complex or the Communist International. The 5 basic laws of human stupidity, according to Cipolla
0 kommentar(er)
