This was recommended by a commentator yesterday and I share it as I thought it was worth listening to:
The argument is that there are more stupid people than you think and they are the most dangerous people in the world.
A secondary argument, but as important, is that stupidity is unrelated to apparent intelligence or educational achievement. It's because people do not appreciate this that they vote Tory.
Links to the original argument, plus neat summaries of it are to be found here.
Right now my summary is, know your enemy. Differentiating the bandits from those who are helpless and stupid matters. And sure it is simplistic, but so are all models. The question is, do they help? This one might.
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Taking a slightly different angle: I am currently engaged in a lobbying effort for EU energy market reform & am working with various like-minded people. Opposed to us are a mixture of:
“stupid people” – they don’t know enough to understand what is going on (or what is coming down the track) & what needs to change
“religious people” – current structures (market rules ok!) are treated as holy text (the Nicene creed of markets) with I and others treated as heretics (or ignored).
When the two groups blend together you end up with something quite horrible. The points made in the Youtube vid are pretty good – but focus on the personal (losses to me, losses to you). The problem is that the stupid people I come across tend to fall into the “helpless people category” –their refusal to take action (or to recognise that action needs to be taken) means losses to society of which they are a part.
The point about highly intelligent people being stupid is a good one, but again, I would modify this with the “religious” point – they become blinded by an ideology/belief system & are incapable of seeing beyond it.
Good vid, needs to be integrated with Bonhoffers points about stupidity and evil.
I should share one on Bonhoeffer
Interesting.
But if it is truly to be social analysis, I think it has to be related to other concepts such as power hierarchies, and how they generate pathological thinking patterns in society
Any ‘theory’ has to be rooted in reality.
The way I see it is that it is banditry (Neo-liberal/Libertarian ideology) that promotes stupidity and helplessness in people.
People are made this way – deliberately – out of the self interest of bandits. Stupidity and especially helplessness are used as controls and have been used before by the Nazis for example.
All of us have the propensity to be stupid at times. But we must see this as a human vulnerability and develop ethics that prevent its exploitation. That way, stupidity is less likely to be used in judgement between groups.
The other issue I have with the self interest segment of this theory is that it does not seem to distinguish between short-term and long-term versions.
As I said, it is a model
All models are limited
We can use more than one
If they help thinking they are useful
……I’m not saying it’s not useful – just looking for dynamics and synergies with existing theories/models that’s all as a way to triangulate, getting my head around it. etc., Tim Snyder’s ‘politics of inevitability’ and Anna Arendt’s observations (echoed here) on the rise of fascism come to mind.
Who are the stupid this model? You seem to be suggesting the voter is. But what about the politicians who unwittingly un-question their beliefs or toe the party line? Within politics there are I suggest a mix of bandits and stupid people.
Theories – good ones – come from observation after all.
But in Western philosophy, there seems to be an emphasis on identifying and documenting differences – typologies, taxonomies etc., without looking for more unifying themes which leads to more division and conflict.
What solves these problems is seeing that differences or not, we are all human beings. And that proper politics is win/win which is also what this model proposes.
Most Tory polticians seem to be bandits
This is a better link to Cipolla’s ‘Laws of Human Stupidity’: http://www.extremistvector.com/content/stupid.html. Yours gives some biographical details not present in the preceding link. The extended essay was turned into a short book obtainable from relevant outlets.
Thanks
I sense this is unrealistic. For reasons I can’t immediately put my finger on, I also find it quite an unattractive way of looking at things. This may be partly for its contempt for what it calls the naive, and its indulgence of the bandits. It’s also very transactional. One feels that as philosophy of life it’s the kind of thing that only an economist could come up with. I hold on to the idea that there’s more to life than this.
I also don’t think it’s a theory that really sets out to explain why people vote Tory and can’t do so. It doesn’t and I suspect it can’t – after all if stupidity is evenly distributed, as is suggested, it would surely follow that it was as likely among Labour/Green/LibDem/SNP MPs and voters as among Tories.
I suspect too stupidity doesn’t really work like this. If I’m asked to fix the sink, I am going to be pretty stupid. If you need a contract drafting I will hope to be better. We can be good at some things and bad at others. And stupidity in either case has nothing really to do with benefiting myself or benefiting others, or not. It’s about what one can and cannot do. So if I want my sink fixed, I’d much prefer a stupid person (ie a stupid person according to this definition) who could actually do it, than a supposedly intelligent person who could not.
And when it comes to ideas, and holding to particular ideas, political, economic, social or otherwise, the test for stupidity (of the ideas and of those who hold them) has to do with the coherence of those ideas and with the values which are embodied in them.
It’s a no from me, as they say.
No problem
As I said a model is only oof use of it works for you
The suggestion here was to what stupid means, divorced from intelligence and even knowledge, seems very useful to me
I am not sure you have got that point by the way: stupidity is not ignorance
I agree stupidity and ignorance are not the same thing (though I might say to embrace ignorance is a kind of stupidity). But you don’t need this “model” to be able to tell them apart.
I can’t help thinking the idea of thinking of this as a “model” is a pretty unhelpful one, particularly when we’re led to talking about whether as a model it works for us as individuals. What might it mean for it to work for me in this context? That it produces results that I like, for example that Tory voters are fools? Great, that may be a comfort, and I do kind of like it.
But surely there has to be some consideration of whether what is asserted is true, or not. Or at least whether the model is a good one, irrespective of how I might feel about it. Does it fit the facts? Does it explain? Does it predict?
But let’s just suppose for a moment that it was a good one. How would it help? Does it point the way to wean people off their stupidity? I don’t think it does, and without such a plan it becomes simply an insult. But not only does the model entail no such plan, it says, I think, that there is nothing that can be done about it. Once stupid always stupid.
I’m liking this less and less the more I think about it.
Adrian, you seem to be liking it less and less because you expect it to be doing something it wasn’t designed to do. It was only designed to show how certain traits relate to one another in a given matrix.
A problem I have with it is an issue that Cipolla was not concerned with, and this is that there is no discussion of psychopathy. We know that there are intelligent and unintelligent psychopaths, and that there are ordered and disorder psychopaths. Most of them are charming at first meeting. Over time, however, for sensitive souls, the charm wears off and the psychopath can be seen as they really are.
Another dimension that is missing is what Germans call Fachidiots, those who are superb at one thing and an idiot at everything else. This is related to part of your comment but I realize that it is not what you had in mind.
One could argue that a single matrix can not do everything. However, I think it does what it was set out to do rather well.
The last point you make was my feeling too
No model is good beyond its limits
Let’s not forget the Peter Principal and Dunning Kruger Effect. They have permeated every tier of of government, from Parish to Parliament. They affect the elected, civil servants and consumers alike. Neither of them discriminate.
See- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
See- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
And last but not least, The Incompetence Opera, where both are more than adequately explained.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cNGusIvpVxc
China unified from a tiny fiefdom to become the Qin Dynasty through a process known as Legalism. They were convinced that they did not need clever people to crush their enemies but merely convince the “stupid majority” to turn against them.
Whilst they the “Stupid” argue and fight over divisive issues the the “Leaders” gained an ever increasing hold over all. Through incremental legal changes that eroded the old consensus Confucianism way.
Echoes of that today but this time almost the whole western world?
M