From: olivercranglejr@gmail.com   
      
   THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY   
   by Carlo M. Cipolla   
   illustrations by James Donnelly   
   Table of contents   
      
   The first basic law of human stupidity   
   The second basic law   
   The third (and golden) basic law   
   Frequency distribution   
   The power of stupidity   
   The fourth basic law   
   The fifth basic law   
   The first basic law of human stupidity   
      
   The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:   
      
   Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals   
   in circulation.   
      
   At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous. Closer   
   scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity. No matter how high are   
   one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled   
   by the fact that:   
      
      
   a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be   
   unashamedly stupid.   
      
   b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities   
   by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most   
   inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.   
      
   The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to   
   the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical   
   estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. Thus in the following pages I   
   will denote the fraction    
   of stupid people within a population by the symbol σ.   
      
   The second basic law   
      
   Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to   
   life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly   
   engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go   
   out of their way to prove,   
    with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men   
   are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is   
   attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general   
   view. It is my firm    
   conviction, supported by years of observation and  experimentation, that men   
   are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the   
   difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One   
   is stupid in the same way one    
   is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group.   
   A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced   
   that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of   
   genetic traits, I am not    
   a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race   
   discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege   
   of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant   
   proportion. This fact is    
   scientifically expressed by the Second Basic Law which states that   
      
   The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other   
   characteristic of that person.   
      
   In this regard, Nature seems indeed to have outdone herself. It is well known   
   that Nature manages, rather mysteriously, to keep constant the relative   
   frequency of certain natural phenomena. For instance, whether men proliferate   
   at the Northern Pole or at    
   the Equator, whether the matching couples are developed or underdeveloped,   
   whether they are black, red, white or yellow the female to male ratio among   
   the newly born is a constant, with a very slight prevalence of males. We do   
   not know how Nature    
   achieves this remarkable result but we know that in order to achieve it Nature   
   must operate with large numbers. The most remarkable fact about the frequency   
   of stupidity is that Nature succeeds in making this frequency equal to the   
   probability quite    
   independently from the size of the group.   
      
   Thus one finds the same percentage of stupid people whether one is considering   
   very large groups or one is dealing with very small ones. No other set of   
   observable phenomena offers such striking proof of the powers of Nature.   
      
   The evidence that education has nothing to do with the probability was   
   provided by experiments carried on in a large number of universities all over   
   the world. One may distinguish the composite population which constitutes a   
   university in five major    
   groups, namely the blue-collar workers, the white-collar employees, the   
   students, the administrators and the professors.   
      
   Whenever I analyzed the blue-collar workers I found that the fraction σ of   
   them were stupid. As σ's value was higher than I expected (First Law), paying   
   my tribute to fashion I thought at first that segregation, poverty, lack of   
   education were to be    
   blamed. But moving up the social ladder I found that the same ratio was   
   prevalent among the white-collar employees and among the students. More   
   impressive still were the results among the professors. Whether I considered a   
   large university or a small    
   college, a famous institution or an obscure one, I found that the same   
   fraction σ of the professors are stupid. So bewildered was I by the results,   
   that I made a special point to extend my research to a specially selected   
   group, to a real elite, the    
   Nobel laureates. The result confirmed Nature's supreme powers: σ fraction of   
   the Nobel laureates are stupid.   
      
   This idea was hard to accept and digest but too many experimental results   
   proved its fundamental veracity. The Second Basic Law is an iron law, and it   
   does not admit exceptions. The Women's Liberation Movement will support the   
   Second Basic Law as it    
   shows that stupid individuals are proportionately as numerous among men as   
   among women. The underdeveloped of the Third World will probably take solace   
   at the Second Basic Law as they can find in it the proof that after all the   
   developed are not so    
   developed. Whether the Second Basic Law is liked or not, however, its   
   implications are frightening: the Law implies that whether you move in   
   distinguished circles or you take refuge among the head-hunters of Polynesia,   
   whether you lock yourself into a    
   monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in the company of beautiful   
   and lascivious women, you always have to face the same percentage of stupid   
   people - which percentage (in accordance with the First Law) will always   
   surpass your expectations.   
      
   The third (and golden) basic law   
      
   The Third Basic Law assumes, although it does not state it explicitly, that   
   human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent,   
   the bandit and the stupid. It will be easily recognized by the perspicacious   
   reader that these four    
   categories correspond to the four areas I, H, S, B, of the basic graph (see   
   below).   
      
   Figure 1 - The basic graph   
      
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