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. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.

One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. 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. I take an exception to this general view. 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. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Thus in the following pages I will denote the fraction of stupid people within a population by the symbol σ.Ĭultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. 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.

No matter how high are one’s estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:Ī) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.ī) 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. Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity. The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.Īt first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous. Le leggi fondamentali della stupidità umana A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.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 always turns out to be a costly mistake.

Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.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.The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.These are Cipolla’s five fundamental laws of stupidity:

The fundamental laws of human stupidity