Carlo Cipolla , a “prolific intellectual”, according to the New Republic, wrote The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity in 1976. It’s alarmingly relevant today. Stupidity drove Brexit, elected Trump, and is responsible for the global shit shower. What’s the answer, when those in power and those that put them there, don’t understand the question?
From the article: “When stupid people gain power, exponentially increasing the danger to us all [they] will have at their disposal means of destruction created by the intelligent.”
Good article, makes yer think, innit.
https://newrepublic.com/article/215721/trump-basic-laws-human-stupidity-carlo-cipolla
Who said this, pop fans?
“Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.”
Frank Zappa, of course. What fun he would have had with Trump, woke, Biden, etc.
Me and a few of my buddies are going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.
My grand sociological theory, which I’ve been espousing for years, is that humans, collectively, aren’t quite smart enough to navigate the complex world we have created. While there are many very, very bright people, I think until you have to interact with the general public in a capacity that requires reasoning and decision making, it’s easy to assume that most of the population is of average intelligence. They are not. There is a core 25-30% of people who are just plain stupid, and have limited capacity to process information and make a rational decision. Add to that another section who are bright but ignorant, and of course those who are evil and manipulative, and you have fertile meadows for populist politics to thrive.
The ignorant, idiotic and evil will be the downfall of democracy.
George Carlin: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
This is a popular quote, but I don’t understand it. “Half of them”? Half of the average person? Also, it presupposes his audience are smarter than the average – capable of thinking how stupid the average person is.
Thought provoking article. As for Carlin, all he is saying is that the average person is pretty stupid but below him/her, roughly 50%, there are some very stupid people.
Er, shouldn’t that be “more stupid” rather than “stupider”? How clever is this Carlin chap?
“Stupider” is fine. The construction of the sentence is stupid.
Looking to bring his use of the word ‘half’ into sharper focus, the first temptation might be to suggest that he means the half below the waist, but on further reflection it’s obvious that he means the half above the waist, where the brain is located.
Ah. It’s such a fine line, isn’t it?
It’s just a line.
That’s just nitpicking, really.
In terms of number of remembered lines, the most quoted movie ever? With Airplane second? Most movies are lucky to get a couple of lines lodged in popular memory.
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Is that from The Big Lebowski? There’s also something about a rug holding the room together. Dull movie I fell asleep during at LA’s famed Cinerama cinema.
Dull or not it has a far higher quote quotient than Spinal Tap, and I would venture a far longer cultural half-life.
I’ve seen the Big Lebowski once and can’t recall a single quote. I’ve seen Spinal Tap more than once and can remember loads of quotes.
I think that Says a lot.
I don’t have a dog in this fight – I unreservedly love both movies – but by way of balance, these are the Lebowski quotes I can call to mind off the top of my head, and I haven’t watched it in well over a decade:
“That rug really tied the room together”.
“Jackie Treehorn treats object like women, man”.
“I’m the Dude, so that’s what you call me… His Dudeness, or Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.”
“Sure, that and a pair of testicles”.
“We believe in nothing, Lebowski”.
“This aggression will not stand, man”.
“Careful, man – there’s a beverage here”.
“Obviously, you’re not a golfer”.
“My work has been commended as strongly vaginal”.
“This is not ’Nam. This is bowling. There are rules”.
“You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole”.
“Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes he eats you”.
“Strikes and gutters, man”.
“You’re out of your element, Donny”.
“Nobody fucks with the Jesus”.
“The dude abides”.
“Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback.”
“Well, I dig your style, too, man. Got the whole cowboy thing goin’.”
“Did you ever hear of ‘The Seattle Seven’? That was me…and six other guys.”
Two of the most quotable movies ever made. Shouldn’t be an either/or, although the Big Lebowski does have a Phoebe Bridgers album named for one of its quotes, which is a decent feather in the cap.
‘He fixes the cable?’
On a sort of similar subject, I see that Avatar is no longer the most auccessful film of all time (it’s been overtaken by the infinitely superior Avengers: Endgame). Is Avatar the least quoted really big film? Despite it and the sequels earning a squillion dollars, I’ve never heard anybody quoting a single line from them, and I doubt very few people stopped at random could name even one character from the franchise. Much smaller movies, on the other hand – the abovementioned Tap and Lebowski, plus, say, Withnail & I – are quoted all the time.
Blessed are the small movie makers.
One of the biggest tragedies in modern Hollywood history is that James Cameron has spent the last thirty years making Avatar movies.
I know they’ve innovated technically, and created new techniques that have been adopted by other films, but narratively and culturally they have left very little impact, in the West at least. And they are certainly nowhere near as interesting as what Cameron was doing previously.
For context, this is Cameron’s directorial output in the first 20 years of his career:
Terminator
Aliens
The Abyss
Terminator 2
True Lies
Titanic
And this is the 30 years that followed:
Avatar
Avatar 2
Avatar 3
Ugh.
These were popular in the seventies, have we learned nothing since then?
Circle jerk uniform.
You are speaking with some authority here?
Research based conclusion.
Incidentally, in the foggy vagueness of my memory that design is somehow linked to Eric Clapton – I think maybe he once wore one, or perhaps there’s someone on one of his album covers who does so whilst standing to Eric’s left.
He wore one at a gig at the Crystal Palace Bowl alongside Freddie King in the mid-70’s.
I wasn’t there but photos, etc.
@Beezer Oh, well remembered, sir, you’re spot-on.
I just checked my vinyl copy, and it’s visible on the rear sleeve of the fine retrospective album called ‘Freddie King (1934-1976)’ which contains a superb live performance of ‘Further On Up The Road’ featuring both Freddie and Eric in blistering form. It’s Eric with that T shirt on, cheekily standing to Freddie’s left.
You’re more than welcome. At last – I’ve paid you back (sort of) for the Grateful Dead albums you cut for me decades ago.
I don’t get it.
Tonight’s homework:
https://ia801609.us.archive.org/29/items/kaufman-s-clinical-neurology-for-psychiatrists-pdfdrive/The%20Basic%20Laws%20of%20Human%20Stupidity%20%28Carlo%20M.%20Cipolla%29%20%28Z-Library%29.pdf
Thank you! Those Five Laws at the beginning are absolute gold.
I love the fact that you can hear his tongue squishing around inside his cheek, but at the same time you know that what he’s saying is right on the money.
This isn’t the first time that a comment of yours shows an indebtedness to pornography.
Rumbled again. Takes one to know one.
“Rumbled.”
This has long been my conviction. Stupidity will indeed bring about the end of western democracy. The human race has always been stupid, but democracy has now enabled the terminally stupid to put equally stupid people with stupid ideas into positions of power. The pursuit of intelligence and thirst for knowledge have been replaced with a sense of entitlement for instant gratification and a celebration of the talentless and witless. Where will it all end? I suspect it won’t be long before we find out.
You want stupid? I’ve just encountered a man on Farcebook who robustly denied the existence of anthropogenic climate change – it’s just summer, the world has warmed before, it’s all Bill Gates’s fault, so Al Gore was wrong etc etc. Imagine my surprise when he turned out to be the regional sales manager for a company that sells solar panels and batteries in Queensland and New South Wales. Something tells me that he hasn’t quite understood why people buy the products he sells.
I do wonder what he thinks when he wakes alone at 3am and looks at his life.
Mind you, I watched Richard Tice on Question Time the other night who admitted that you could have green energy to please the cranks and hippies, but chortling about how the intense heat was great for British wine growers and climate change has been going on for millions of years. Ideal, handy specious reasoning for those so mired in mulish obstinacy and denial.
May I suggest we all take a moment? I suspect that, ah, older people (a group including myself) have been bemoaning the stupidity of others since we stepped out of the Veldt at the dawn of history.
It’s not an age thing. Nobody, least of all the prolific Cipolla, is saying the youngs are any more or less stupid than the olds. The quality of stupidity is not straned; It dropeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place benethe ectect
Yebbut my point is the young are not the ones complaining about it. And my other point is that I think we’ve been stupid forever. O tempora, o crikey etc
Of course the youngs complain about dumbness in others, especially the olds. It’s almost a defining trait.
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
Possibly Mark Twain.
“Possibly Mark Twain” – great name for something.
True but trump is eight years older than me I think he’s stupid but he’d disagree.
A 30 year career in Human Resources. I need no convincing about stupidity in large numbers.
Things regress to the mean. And there’s a lot of stupid people in existence lowering the mean.
Fifty years ago, there were a lot of stupid people about, but I would imagine you didn’t hear from them all that often.
Sure, you might occasionally be subjected to the braying of some heathen on the next table in the pub, or overhear a god awful opinion in the office, but such individuals were largely (albeit not always) kept away from the means by which their views might be amplified. Measures were in place to minimise the chances that their thoughts would be published, that they would appear on television, or be handed the microphone at a public event.
Stupidity was present, and it occasionally intruded on the lives of others, but it was at least partly corralled, and there were clear social disincentives to such behaviour. If you stood in the town square loudly declaring the earth to be flat, you would be despised and vilified for your idiocy. The village idiot was in no danger of collecting a following of several hundred thousand people to whom he could deliver his every burbled thought at will, because he lacked both the means and the credibility. Public opinions were at least partly tied to the mean, and the mean had a wide turning circle.
Those safeguards, imperfect as they may have been, have largely been worn away by two developments: the rise of the Internet, which hands literally the entire population a microphone and anonymity, and the rise of social media, which has brought with it an attention economy in which there truly is no such thing as bad publicity, a constant fracturing of every issue into two equally stupid false binaries and an environment in which narcissism and lack of self awareness function as rocket fuel.
Under these conditions, the public invariably gets what the public wants – and that means bad opinions, which attract at least as much attention and response as good opinions. There is no discerning, Reithian hand steering the discourse to fertile ground, no editor checking facts, no publisher curling a lip.
On the contrary, we are entirely at the whim of the market, and the market dictates that attention can be monetised. Who needs to worry about shame, or of looking/sounding like an idiot when you have everyone watching and you’re coining it off the spotlight.
The consequence of all of the above is that many of the stupidest, most base individuals in our society are able to make a very solid living off their own foolishness, we all get to hear everyone’s thoughts on everything all the time (I have no idea who decided this was a good idea), and the market for considered, careful thought has all but collapsed.
Nobody wants to read a nuanced take from an expert, because nuanced takes from experts are invariably boring and only make the issue seem more, rather than less, complex. What we want is a fuckwit telling us the problem was never complex to begin with, here’s the easy answer and anyone who disagrees is lying/evil.
It’s very easy to feel that the world has become stupider. And perhaps it has – the pumping of all that idiocy through the cultural bloodstream cannot be having a healthy effect.
But it’s impossible to gauge, for the simple reason that until quite recently we did not tend to afford the spotlight to the stupidest among us, nor did we get to hear the average person’s terrible thoughts 24/7. The stupid was always there, we just brought it out into the daylight, and now it won’t go away.
Christ, in America they’ve given one of those idiots the keys to the gun cabinet. We might be fucked here.
I’m increasingly unsure if you can talk about intelligence in some abstract sense which people apply all equally in all aspects of their lives. It’s how it works out in action. Were the two blokes who recently fitted a new kitchen sink more or less intelligent than me? They certainly did something I couldn’t. Some thinking was involved to solve problems with the weird way the existing pipes had been fitted, but they also have experience to work with as well.
Zappa clearly thought he was very intelligent and achieved a lot of what he wanted to do. But as Moon’s book shows he never thought to take out medical insurance, which I’d have thought was a basic thing to do in America. He died in debt, partly due to his huge medical expenses, and although Moon had sold her house to help pay for them.
Trouble is, if this thread were out there in the mainstream socials, we’d all be branded a bunch of out-of-touch elitists, who think we know what’s best for everyone else.
For the record, my sympathies are with the out-of-touch elitists.