The definition of stupidity, according to Cipolla

Carlo Cipolla was an Italian economic history professor at Berkeley, who adhered to a funny tradition among Italian academics, which is to write humorous texts in 'academic style', thus giving them an air of respectability and credibility, while often being common nonsense; Umberto Eco is possibly one of the most well-known representatives of the genre.

In 1987, Cipolla published one of his most famous essays, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. In it, Cipolla proposed a brilliant theory to define what exactly is human stupidity, and how to deal with it. Instead of proposing a method of determining someone's IQ, Cipolla suggested a different approach, dividing people in two axis, according to the impact of their actions and decisions: one axis for benefitting themselves, one for benefitting others.

So, people who benefit themselves and benefit others through their actions are highly intelligent — they contribute to their own welfare while, at the same time, contributing to everyone else's welfare as well. They are usually altruist, but not necessarily in the sense that they prejudice themselves in order to benefit others — such people Cipolla labeled as naïve. Most of the 'naïve' group (also sometimes called 'helpless') will not be very clever and fall prey to others who abuse them; but Cipolla recognised that there are people that deliberately didn't want any benefits or advantages to themselves, but only wish to benefit others — and, as such, these would be moral choices from clever people.

Naturally enough, we can see that a large part of the population is not that way: most attempt to benefit themselves at the cost of exploiting others (be it directly, criminally; or indirectly, like an employer abusing the rights of their employees). These Cipolla termed 'bandits'. Of course most politicians and greedy capitalists will be bandits, but not all. What is less obvious is that all sorts of people will be in this category, believing (unrightly so) that they have somehow the 'right' to explore others — because they are dumb! — in order to benefit themselves. In fact, many parents tell their own children not to be 'idiots' and make sure they can get all advantages they need to succeed, even at the cost of others; these is a widespread educational suggestion that is passed along to the next generations. So, in a sense, Cipolla's 'bandits' are held in high esteem by large segments of the population, who somehow feel that, as being more 'clever' than others, they have to fight to get an advantage over all others, by 'outclevering' them.

The problem is not with these three groups. The problem is with the fourth group: those who (even if well-intended!) actively act against their own interests, and make matters worse for everyone. These Cipolla appropriately termed stupid: because their actions benefit nobody, not even themselves. All that they do is to make everyone's lives worse and more difficult.

From this assumption, Cipolla went much further, and started to derive a lot of hilarious laws and corollaries. The first is that all human societies include a large number of stupid people (no matter how well-educated they are). Then comes a more dangerous problem: the number of stupid people tends to increase over time, and not only due to population growth — it's a consequence of getting too many stupid people together, they spread out stupidity faster than society can act to counterbalance their stupidity. But perhaps the worse aspect of stupidity is that non-stupid people constantly underestimate the number of stupid people, and, worse, totally underestimate their ability to wreak havoc in society. Thus, concludes Cipolla, stupid people are very dangerous — because we don't recognise them as such, and their numbers grow, and all that is underestimated, ultimately stupid people will bring down the collapse of human civilisation. Cipolla goes even further by claiming that all efforts to prevent stupid people to harm themselves and others will also fail.

So the future looks bleak!

Of course, this 'academic paper' by Cipolla was a joke, and meant as such. Italian academics, such as Cipolla and notably also Eco, however, actually worried about the amount of stupidity in the world. Their hilarious work, depicting how stupid people think, was a funny way to somehow alert the world-at-large that the problem of human stupidity does exist, even if it's not as Cipolla suggested. And they hoped that their funny books would help readers to recognise better that something ought to be done to ferociously combat human stupidity... before it's too late.

Cipolla died around 2000, so he couldn't see Bush get elected; but Eco, dying at the beginning of 2016, when the US presidential campaign was just starting, already warned the world about people like Trump. Perhaps fortunately for Eco, he died before seeing Brexit and Trump becoming President of the United States of America. As we will shortly see, both are the accomplishment of Cipolla's predictions about human stupidity. Eco is quoted as 'having fought against stupidity until his death'. True. He tried hard. But if he truly believed Cipolla's articles, then he would know that he was doomed to fail.

How accurate are Cipolla's predictions?

Cipolla, of course, has some followers (and not only among Italian academics, of course). But even more funny, or more interesting, is that some researchers have actually tried to figure out if he was right or not. And by cleverly modelling populations using Artificial Intelligence, some scientists considered that, under certain parameters, Cipolla is right. Now we should naturally take this with a pinch of salt! Nevertheless, the consequences of 'thinking like Cipolla' are nefarious: suddenly you get this huge feeling of paranoia, that you may be surrounded by vast masses of stupid people, who, unknown to themselves, and no matter how well-intended they are, they spend all the time acting against their own benefit and against the benefit for the whole population. Where will it stop?

Let's consider a few examples where this is the case. Imagine the small factory which produces, say, high heeled shoes for an exclusive market. The company works at a profit, and everybody seems to be happy. But the owner is greedy. We would possibly think that he would be part of Cipolla's 'bandit' group — exploiting others for the benefit of themselves — but this is exactly what Cipolla warns us all about: we're constantly underestimating the number of stupid people! Thus, in that example, what is more likely to happen is that the owner, being greedy, starts to demand more hours for lesser wages from his employees, trying to extract the maximum work for the least pay. At the end of the day, either the workers start getting too tired to continue to work and succumb to exhaustion, or they leave the company in search of a more humane employer; in either case, the company loses its workforce and enters bankruptcy. So, that owner is not a 'bandit', but merely 'stupid', because at the end, not only his employees lose their jobs, but he himself loses his company.

Similar examples show up everywhere, and that's why Cipolla explains on one corollary that stupid people are far more dangerous than 'bandits', because 'bandits' will at least benefit themselves directly and possibly some of their friends and family. But stupid people benefit no one. And they are, as said, constantly underestimated — because here we are not talking about 'stupidity' in the sense of 'lack of cognitive abilities' (or emotional ones), but merely functional stupidity, in the sense of not even being aware about how their own actions will not only make the life of others worse, but they will themselves be much worse off.

In fact, many of the worst examples of the damage created by stupid people is that of stupid people being totally unaware of their own stupidity, but imagining — wrongfully! — that they are, in fact, bandits... when they are not. Cipolla's student and follower Piero Mella, which I have quoted before, goes further one step and proposes a further axis, one of awareness of the agent. He introduces a new subcategory among stupid people, that of incapable ones, which are the ones that are not even aware they're stupid, and reasons that this category is even more dangerous than purely stupid people, who are aware they are destroying their own lives and that of others, but who cannot do anything about it; incapable people, by contrast, tend to work hard in the misguided belief that they're exploiting others for their own personal benefit, when, in truth, they aren't — they are digging their own holes.

We can see all the types of people at work at all levels of society, but they are more notorious in the workforce, or at an associative level. Companies that succeed either have real bandits at the helm (who know how to exploit others for their own benefit) or they are truly intelligent, benefitting their employers as well as themselves. Companies with stupid (or incapable) people leading them, no matter how advanced their actual cognitive abilities are, will sooner or later go bankrupt. It's often not clear which kind of person is leading an organisation, when it's clear that they care little about their customers and employers, but only about themselves; we automatically expect them to be bandits, but it's more likely that they are merely stupid. Similarly, in non-profit organisations, which will attract many 'naïve' people, who are willing to lose some benefits (like being able to rest at home after work, for example) in order to make the lives of others a little better, stupid people can 'crawl' inside the organisation, in a misguided attempt to carve their own name and reap the fame and glory of the organisation for their own benefit, by ignoring the actual purpose of the organisation; thus, the organisation turns towards itself, it exists merely for the purpose of benefiting their leaders — and not the public in general! — and that might ultimately lead to the downfall of the organisation. Again, it's unlikely that true 'bandits' would exploit such organisations for their own purposes — they w0uld have little incentive to do so — but it's unfortunate that many stupid people, not quite understanding what the purpose of the organisation truly is, will work to destroy it (often unaware of what they're doing), and, when that happens, they lose their glamorous role as leader as well. So we can see how easy it is for stupid people to wreak havoc. And because we constantly underestimate stupid people, we often cannot believe they are really stupid (and not merely bandits!) before it's too late, and the organisation or company collapses under their misguidance.

Government and Cipolla's laws of human stupidity

Of course, nothing can be more obvious to watch Cipolla's laws at work than looking at governments. If we look at past forms of government, especially before 1775, we will see mostly organisations of bandits leading whole nations — exploiting all the people for the benefit of a very few. Autocracies and so-called benevolent dictatorships (more on that later) are excellent examples of relatively long-lived bandit organisations — so long as the autocrat, or dictator, is well aware of how far he can go in making people's lives miserable before they revolt themselves; or how he employs force to keep them in check. In general, therefore, the history of the world is a history on how bandits have ruled the world.

Obviously this is not always the case. Genuine intelligent people have ruled whole nations for a long time, where they have benefitted their own people and, naturally enough, themselves. Many kings throughout history have been benevolent autocrats; even today, we have examples like the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Buthan, where a recent king forced parliamentary democracy upon his subjects, to make sure they started deciding what was best for themselves, in an effort to pull out their country from the list of the poorest in the world; the strategy is slowly bearing fruits, and the people are not only better off and even more happy than before, but their benevolent (and intelligent!) rulers are also clearly reaping the benefits from a young democracy struggling to increase the strength of their own economy.

And naturally enough we have plenty of examples of 'naïve' leaders, who, at the cost of personal struggles and suffering, became heroes of the people, after a successful revolution, and briefly ascended to power. They were fine with not getting any benefits or advantages, so long as their people would be better off than with previous tyrannical leaders. Many did not stay long in power. Many died in misery, forgotten by the subsequent generations. But such rulers traditionally existed.

However, once again, the majority of countries (even today) is not ruled by bandits, as we all imagine them to be; they are ruled by stupid people, and this is where it becomes dangerous.

Let's take the example of a random African dictator from an impoverished country — we have so many to pick from. In general, we expect them to be bandits: exploiting their country for their own benefit. A few are; but, in general, the vast majority of them go so far with their exploiting that they completely ruin their own countries — which mean that the population will either turn against their leaders, leave the country, starve, or simply let themselves be invaded (because even an enemy power is better than dealing with a corrupt leader who cares nothing about their country). The dictator gets deposed, exiled, or, more likely, shot dead; their life of richnesses comes to an abrupt end, because they were too stupid to understand how to balance out their own benefits with the wellness of the people they ruled over.

We can give an excellent example of a 'bandit' nation: China. While it's clear that the Party gets all the benefits, and is the only (real) source of political power in China, the truth is that, under them, the country is doing rather well — it has been for long now the second strongest economy in the world and is slowly climbing upwards to become #1. The people, in fact, are much happier now. So we could even argue that what started as a nation of 'bandits' has turned into a nation of 'highly intelligent' ones: because both the Party and the people overall are benefitting. This shows how Cipolla's classification, which is mostly functionalist, can so often produce strange results: in this case, the 'bandits' understood that instead of exploiting the people less, in order to reap benefits for themselves while still maintaining people happy, they could keep themselves indefinitely in power if they could actually make people happier. So, a clever bandit may become an 'intelligent' person under Cipolla's classification, even though their intention might not be the best ones.

Unfortunately, what we see around the world is exactly the opposite. Syria's Hassad is clearly stupid — he's losing more and more the strong claw he had over his own people, as he persists to anger the international community more and more, and is quickly becoming a scapegoat for the civil war that he, for all purposes, started. Ultimately, he crushed his own country and will very likely be forced to step aside as others try to build Syria back again — so, in the long run, he didn't benefit much from his attitudes. Putin, by contrast, is harder to measure. He's clearly enriching himself and his cronies while making the life of his population miserable (thanks to international economic sanctions and a crippled economy). But Russians still love him and want him to rule over them. So he seems to fit into the perfect definition of a bandit: he is clearly getting all the benefits while making everybody's life miserable, but he's clever enough to know how far he can go, and what he has to do to keep his people loving him.

What about Western democracy? Well, again, we will see a mix of bandits and stupid people constantly getting elected. The advantage of truly democratic models is that you won't get the same bandit or stupid person all the time; you will rotate among them. And because Cipolla's model is not an absolute, but has degrees of stupidity, we can often trade off a bandit-turned-stupid (because he's ruining the economy to the point of people kicking him out of his job in the next elections) to a slightly lesser stupid person (or a more cleverer bandit!) who might not harm people so much. And, of course, the real stupid ones may be put away from politics altogether — like, for instance, putting them in jail for corruption (like my own country did with our former PM). Such things can happen.

Democracy, therefore, can be seen as a system where bandits, stupids, and the occasional naïve or even intelligent people, are rotated and not left long enough in power to wreak total havoc. In other words: even if Trump becomes the worst president in the history of the United States, there is a comfort in knowing that, in the worst-case scenario, he can only be the 'worst president' for eight years. After that, anything that comes can only be better, right?

Well... here is where things go awry. Because clever people believe in how democracy prevents bandits and stupid people to harm countries too much, they have an unshakeable belief that democracy is the 'best possible' form of government, since it's the only one where stupid people cannot stay in power too long. That's true, of course, but... it assumes something very important: that citizens have access to enough data, education, and intelligence to make the best choices possible. In other words: it assumes that citizens in a country are, in their majority, intelligent in the sense of Cipolla, i.e. that they will vote according to their best personal interests and the best interests of others.

As we have seen with Brexit and Trump, this is not the case (and, in fact, never has been; these two examples just show extreme examples); and neither is the case of Turkish president Erdogan, for example, on the upcoming referendum. Similarly, the push for more democracy during the 'Arab Spring' in 2011 had people to vote instead for more Islamism (and less freedoms). We can add a lot of examples where people acted in what can only be described a stupid way: in the vague hope of getting more benefits for themselves (i.e. trying to act as bandits!), they actually voted for solutions that made their own lives much more miserable than before.

And this is the problem with modern democracy: like so many forms of government, it also is a form of utopia, but not in the usual sense of the word, i.e. that everybody (including those who have been elected) lives much better off. No, it's an utopia because it wrongly assumes that people, in general, no matter what, will vote for what is best for them. And here is where the fallacy is!

We do not live in democracies, but rather in 'ilithocracies'

Plato, in his Republic, already noted this problem — that people, in general, are too stupid to make the right decisions. Again, we're not talking about cognitive abilities. A vast number of people who voted for Brexit and Trump have high IQs, had a top-notch education, are cultural icons among their peers, and possibly make a lot of right decisions every day in their jobs as doctors, lawyers, company owners, and so forth. They nevertheless voted for a solution that was worse for themselves and for all others. Why?

Plato's answer can be mixed with Cipolla to produce a simple answer to that: people in general, who have the right to vote, will vote in order to get personal benefits. In other words, they will vote as bandits. The problem is that most politicians will also be bandits — i.e. they have not the slightest intention of giving any 'benefits' to voters, but just to themselves. You can see that there is a tension building up, between bandits voting and bandits getting elected. Ideally, of course, such bandits would be clever to recognise each other, and, therefore, we would elect the lesser bandit who, in turn, would give us a few personal benefits — this would guarantee him to continue to remain in power, while the population of bandits would feel that they would get some benefits as well.

Unfortunately, the number of bandits in the population (and among politicians) is small compared to the number of stupid people. Again, we are underestimating them. We believe, when we place our vote in the urn, that we're making the best choice for ourselves; and we also believe that the person we vote for is probably not so bad as we might think, because he has promised quite a lot to make our lives better. In truth, the politician rarely has that in mind; he or she only wants to get elected for personal benefits — and being aware that they will not remain in power much time, they will do all they can to gather as many personal benefits as they can before being kicked out of their jobs. But because they are actually stupid, they will make the wrong decisions, and make everybody's lives worse, including their own. That's the problem with stupidity!

In other words: most politicians will present themselves as 'intelligent', i.e. that, if elected, they will benefit everybody as well as themselves. Secretly, we believe them to be bandits, but we hope that they are 'clever' bandits, who will not harm us too much and possibly even benefit us slightly. But in truth they are as stupid as those who have elected them: they will harm everybody, including themselves. And that's where even Plato pulled at his hairs, and suggested that the 'best' form of government was to have philosophers as kings, or at least get the kings trained as philosophers — in other words, those in power, at least, ought to be able to recognise their own stupidity and avoid it; but we should not even attempt to do the same to those who are ruled, because that will never happen — their stupidity will simply be too great, too vast, too incommensurable to be able to be overcome!

During the Age of Reason, the 18th century, when utopian democracies were established first in the US, and (for a period at least) in France, there was this notion that we could educate people, train them to be skeptical thinkers using reason and not emotion (much less religion!), and once that is accomplished to a large degree, we would get a nation of 'perfect citizens', able to judge for themselves what is best for them and for all others. For those — they argued — the best form of government would obviously be the democracy, where through intelligent debate different ideas could be argued reasonably, and put to the vote among intellectual peers who were fully aware of the consequences of their vote.

They might understand that this was utopian simply because the analphabetism rate was so high. It was impossible to raise the level of education in a pinch. That's why during the early years suffrage was not universal, but instead was bestowed upon people with means to get an education; if you wish, this was a meritocracy, not a democracy, since only 'people of merit' were allowed to vote (mostly males who had a certain income or owned a certain amount of land; the idea being that such people could afford a good education).

As time passed, and public schools became popular, and then mandatory, people started to be able to read and write, and that meant they could read newspapers and sometimes even formulate their own opinions; slowly, more and more people were allowed to vote — even women! And thanks to TV, radio, and other non-written forms of mass media communication, the requirement of needing to read and write was dropped as well — since, in fact, the analphabetism rate in contemporary democracies is so low anyway. We got universal suffrage. In some countries, they are even considering to let minors to vote, since it's not reasonable to assume that a 15-year-old is not able to make decisions as well as a 65-year-old university professor; both know very well what they want for themselves!

With universal suffrage also comes universal stupidity: in other words, the Age of Reason assumption that 'educated people are able to make better decisions for themselves and others' is a fallacy. While it's arguably correct that people using reason to make decisions generally arrive at much better conclusions, the trouble is that education, by itself, might not promote critical thinking enough to allow people to make good decisions, in this case, decisions that benefit themselves and others. Instead, what we have constantly seen is that education just gives bandits better tools to exploit the naïveté of others; and we have also seen that educati0n does not collectively raise the population out of the grasp of general stupidity. In fact, Cipolla takes that into account: no matter how much we invest in education, there will always be stupid people. And they will always be much more than we think. Finally, they will harm everybody much more than what we believe them to be able to harm.

Indeed, we can see that at work at Brexit (perhaps even better than with the election of Trump). In the mistaken belief that they would get a better Britain — in the sense of a country without immigrants stealing the natives' jobs, a country without industrial requisites to export more overseas, etc. — the United Kingdom might not even be United any more by 2019. It's obvious that the individual countries, formerly known as the UK, will not become, all of a sudden, third-world, underdeveloped countries; there is a long, long way until that happens. But it will be more than obvious that, in the expectation of reaping more benefits for themselves, British voters have instead made their own lives much more miserable, as all the potential benefits from the EU will not only be lost, but there will be new limitations and regulations (and possibly taxes!) unheard of in the past two generations, just to be able to pay the bill from leaving the EU — and that might take many, many years to fully accomplish.

Trump voters, who believed that they had elected a president who really believed 'America First', is now poised to launch two simultaneous wars, against Syria and North Korea, and has pulled all the budget into the military — leaving dozens of millions of people potentially without access to welfare. Or jobs. In fact, those who will be most affected by his policies are those who have voted in them full of vain hope of getting a few benefits for themselves, taking those benefits away from immigrants, leftists, educated people, and so forth, and giving them back to 'real' Americans. As we are already seeing, this is hardly the case.

In my own country, just like in the US, the party in power is not the one which had won the popular vote. Instead, through a complex arrangement of a colligation of parties usually all at each other's throats, a semi-populist leader has given hope to those who voted for him by selling them the idea that he could ignore the rules of basic economy, turn everything upside down, and give out money to everybody. In fact, since he has been elected, he has being giving everybody some more money — which keeps people happy. But the problem is in the long run — someone will have to pay the bill for ignoring basic laws of economy. By then, of course, this particular PM will silently fade in the background, and let the next party clean up the mess — making everything much worse for everybody again. In fact, my country has gone through a cyclical period of more populist leaders promising (and delivering) money to everybody, getting elected, bankrupting the country, and leaving the mess for the next party, who would have to step in with harsh and unpopular measures to get things back in place, which, at the end of their mandate, would get the population yearning for more money in their pockets — and kick them out, in the vain effort of believing that they could benefit themselves more by ignoring economy and electing a new leader willing to do so. In other words, for the past two decades or so, the Portuguese have alternatively voted as bandits but in reality just being plain stupid; when it was clear that they made a mistake, they voted someone in power to fix the problems (a surprisingly intelligent move!), only to kick them out again when it was clear that they wouldn't get more money in their wallets in the short term (a stupid move). Over time, however, the population went from stupid to more stupid, making it harder and harder to elect a leader able to benefit everyone long term, while making it easier and easier for semi-populist leaders to stay in power (even without a majority of the popular vote!) and wreak havoc at will — because they can always count on the greediness of stupid people to vote for them.

So, in effect, these are not democracies, in the sense of the 'rule by the people'. Instead, they are ilithiocracies — rule by the stupid. Interestingly enough, you would think that someone else would have come up with the name, and put it on Wikipedia. But no! To show how the stupid are prevalent, people still think that 'idiocracy' is the 'rule by idiots' when in truth it means 'rule by abstract thought' (i.e. idio from ideas not idiots!); but the name 'idiocracy' stuck probably because of the movie of the same name. To be perfectly honest, however, I did find a few mentions of this definition before; but it's surprising how few people really gave a real though about it!

In any case, that's actually the system we live under: we're ruled by stupid people, elected by stupid people. Because the number of stupid people is always underestimated, they will actually vote in much more stupid ways than any predictions might have thought. And they will harm whole democratic nations in much worse ways than we could ever believe in. Actually, we fear stupid leaders — but we can always vote them out of office. The real problem comes from stupid voters — because they will be able to vote for stupid leaders all the time!

A survivor's guide for ilithiocracies

If we look at recent worldwide elections, we can see that, on average, we seem to get more and more stupid leaders. Sometimes, by sheer chance, a 'good' leader gets voted into office (it often happens when the stupid people don't vote — believing that is the 'best' chance for them!); but, in general, the quality of the leaders seems to be decreasing, not increasing.

The assumptions stated during the Age of Reason for the utopian democracy — a democracy where educated citizens participated in government — have failed to become true. Instead, we have seen the reverse: even though education is spreading (especially higher education, which we have at unprecedented levels in the history of Humankind!), this has little to no effect on the vast amount of overall stupidity; and Cipolla had predicted that all along. What he did not predict is that stupid people are voting now more than ever, and electing even more stupid people.

How did this happen?

The current populist trend is playing on those who never vote, or almost never vote, because they think it's pointless — whoever is in power, they will always be forgotten. But populist politicians are clever. They know that the number of 'establishment' voters usually vote for the parties in the centre — the moderates, who are sometimes a bit more right-wing, sometimes a bit more left-wing, but hardly extremists. People, after all, don't want big changes. Just easily manageable little ones :-) And these are the people who vote most.

Those who rarely vote... don't believe that politicians have anything to give them. This is, of course, where populism can thrive: they can appeal to a vast mass of people and convince them that they will benefit directly, if they elect the populist. And here is where we have a slight twist on Cipolla's theories: because electing populists may give people some benefit short-term, but they always (so does history tell us) will be far worse off after a while.

Here is another characteristic of ilithiocracies: stupid people just think of short-term benefits. You just need to take a look at Wall Street to see this characteristic at work. In the 19th century, people would buy shares of well-established companies (what we call blue chips) to have a regular source of income for decades, including during their retirement from active life; this was because certain companies would be very predictable, very careful with their long-term commitments, and thus act as a source of 'financial stability'. But from the 1920s onwards we started to see a shift in the investment patterns: getting large short-term benefits — immediate wealth — became the norm, while small long-term benefits would become less popular. This, in turn, meant that the long-term consequences were neither predicted, nor even considered 'important'. We can see how this ultimately lead to the expansion of the so-called virtual economy (the notion that banks emit far more currency than the current assets they have — several orders of magnitude, in fact — thus artificially creating more and more short-term wealth) in the 1980s and its foreseeable collapse; we saw this also happening with the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, and so forth. Thinking only of the short-term is also important for politicians, since they will only have a very limited time once elected into power — 4 or 5 years at most, which does not give much room for so-called 'long-term' benefits. So it all works out: more and more stupid people are perfectly willing to get short-term benefits when casting their vote and forgetting about long-term ones (where they will suffer from their bad choices); while this is exactly what stupid politicians also want; and this is reinforced by the financial markets as well. The 'new world order' feeds on stupidity tied to wishing short-term benefits regardless of what happens in the long term.

So, taking all the above in account, how can we deal with ilithiocracies?

In a sense, 'doing nothing' (and not panicking!) is, strangely enough, a good enough strategy! This is mostly because people may be stupid in the sense of Cipolla's theories, but they are not mentally impaired. Therefore, the consequences of their stupid choices tend also to manifest much sooner than they expect, and this will raise the alarm that perhaps their choices were not wise. Obviously that is not always the case; the Germans who voted for Hitler after the Great Depression saw, indeed, short-term benefits — their country, ravaged by rampant poverty which was the consequence by incompetent politicians, once again showed signs of prosperity, as new jobs became available thanks to a huge investment in infrastructure. Money flowed again in the economy, people were able not only to pay their bills but to buy things they wanted again. The consequence, of course, was having to live in a tyranny and pushed into an insane war, killing millions of innocents, displacing even more millions, and flattening down whole cities. The Germans learned their lesson the hardest way possible; it is only in the current generation — one that has never directly experienced the consequences of the war — where national-socialist thought once again starts popping up in German politics. So, while the consequences of voting Hitler had short-term benefits, but dramatic repercussions in the long term, eventually these were not permanent, and Germany could recover from its collective stupidity (always taken in the sense of Cipolla!).

We can see similar things happening with, say, the dot-com bubble. Stupid venture capitalists and stupid entrepreneurs looked only at their personal, short-term benefits — and collapsed the economy when it became apparent that companies were constantly overvalued because they were founded on ideas and not solid business plans. For a while, a large sector of the economy was ravaged due to bad investments, pushing highly-qualified individuals into unemployment, while countries developed a scarcity of willingness to invest in further technological 'adventures'. Nevertheless, even though whole fortunes were ruined and banks collapsed, the Silicon Valley economy resumed its leading role in the technological markets, to the point where we are once again seeing unwise decisions being made regarding certain billion-dollar acquisitions that make no sense in the long-term. Are we condemned to repeat the same errors over and over again?

Perhaps, and perhaps not. I think that, while old mistakes tend to be repeated over and over again, they tend to be less damaging, because some checks and balances have been put into the system. In other words, we do see stupid actions at happening at a large scale, but they are not so many as during the dot-com bubble; so stupid people don't get as many opportunities to do stupid things as before.

Cipolla, however, warns us that human stupidity is unbounded (and therefore unpredictable and always underestimated). This is because there are always new stupid errors to make. We can see that with, say, Trump's election: his stupid, populist promises were impossible to enact. People nevertheless elected him, and, in the very short-term, it seemed that Trump would, indeed, stick to his stupid ideas. But what is happening is that Trump is doing a 180º turn in his politics. Suddenly he's not any more the politician that people have voted for. While some people might not have caught up with the reality yet, the truth is that soon enough they will learn that their stupid decision was, after all, worthless — because the President of the United States is prevented to act stupidly in many cases (due to constraints in America's Constitution) and pushed into actions that run against rampant stupidity (because he has a few advisors who are bandits or even intelligent people). And, last but not least, we can also see how Brexit is unfolding: clearly, what populists have promised to stupid people was impossible to implement, and Britons voted for leaving the EU have now serious causes to regret their choice. It's too late for that, of course, and the consequence will be a probable breaking up of what was formerly the United Kingdom in the case of a 'hard Brexit' (which will see Northern Ireland joining Eire and therefore remaining in the EU; and Scotland and possibly even Wales breaking apart from England, adopting the Euro as national currency, and applying for membership status in the EU and enjoying the immediate benefits of EU candidate countries until their membership is confirmed), or, eventually, a compromise for a 'soft Brexit' which will become practically indistinguishable from the pre-Brexit situation, rendering therefore the stupid vote meaningless.

Is that the only choice we have — wait and suffer the consequences of rampant stupidity, and hope that better times will come? Well, if Cipolla is correct, then the answer is 'yes'. Stupidity, unlike people thought during the Age of Reason, cannot be fought with education and literacy. All we do is to produce stupid people that can read and write, have an opinion, and go on social media proclaiming it — or supporting another stupid person's views. In fact, it has been determined that the massive rise of stupid people who went to vote comes from having others validating their stupidity: in other words, a stupid person, left by themselves, may not be able to cause much harm, since they will be ashamed of their crazy way of thinking, and, ultimately, refrain themselves from speaking out their opinion. But once their stupid opinion is proclaimed in public — and that, these days, includes the social media — then they feel a comfort in knowing that other stupid people defend the same stupid opinions as them; this pushes them to become bold and proclaim their adherence to stupidity, and, as a consequence, drive even more stupid people out of their cocoons and lose all their shame. So, better education, more access to factual data — the Internet! — better living conditions which allow people access to cheap technology and so forth, does nothing against stupidity. It only makes people with high IQ and high emotional intelligence but stupid much more able to persuade other people to follow their lead, and therefore cause much more harm. A more equanimous society, where the overall wealth is better distributed, just allows more stupid people to suddenly get in touch with other stupid people and wreak havoc at a larger scale than it was possible before. Just look at ISIS recruitment over social media. And if you think that's the only organisation that actively recruits stupid people, think again. Once again, remember that Cipolla's definition of stupidity has nothing to do with IQ, cognitive abilities, education, and so forth. The most harmful stupid people are often those who are the cleverest, the most able to manipulate and persuade others, those that have access to more resources, a higher education, and so forth. In other words: in an ilithiocracy, it's highly likely that the most able people — but stupid ones! — will rise in the hierarchy of power. That's in fact the very definition of an ilithiocracy — not, like in the 2006 movie Idiocracy, a society of perfect idiots with low cognitive abilities. Instead, it's a society where people with high IQ and cognitive abilities ascend quickly to positions of power where they can cause the most harm to others and to themselves. And this, of course, is dangerous!

So why do I claim that there is nothing to do but wait and see? Well, Cipolla never claimed that stupid people are in the majority. He just says that they are always underestimated and are a large group, but not necessarily a majority. Evolutionarily thinking, this makes sense: if we became more and more stupid, ultimately we would get our species extinct. We came very close to it during the peak of the Cold War. Fortunately for us, those who had the power to destroy us were not stupid people, not even bandits who care little what happens to others, but just think about themselves and their welfare. Instead, and no matter what ideology they had (some of which was quite stupid), there were relatively intelligent people in power — those who could use their power, and their restraint, to benefit everybody (by at least not throwing them into a nuclear apocalypse) while at the same benefitting themselves as well (remaining in power for their wise decisions, and maintaining the control of a society not crippled by radioactive fallout...). This, I believe, is the nature of things, or we would indeed not have survived: even though we might push our societies into ilithiocracies now and then, they will recover, at least enough to allow us to survive another generation, hoping that at least the next batch of humans will be intelligent enough to recognise stupidity and avoid it.

Because stupidity is also prone to become infectious. Stupid memes, if propagated enough, will slowly transform the minds of previously un-stupid people into stupid ones. Nothing propagates stupid memes faster than the Internet; and because it's so easy now for stupid people to get access to the Internet and propagate their memes, they reach a much vaster amount of people than it was ever before possible. This is more dangerous than old-fashioned, pre-Internet methods of propagating stupid memes — like gluing posters on walls, distributing pamphlets, or organising rallies — because it works faster and theoretically can reach more people. But it also has a few drawbacks, namely, that people get bombarded every day with so much 'information overdrive' that they might skip some stupid memes at first, or even disregard them. Also, stupid people will be affected more than non-stupid ones. In other words: it takes much more effort to turn a non-stupid person into a stupid one, than to get a stupid person to accept a stupid meme. That's why usually people are not going to commit the same error twice. Well, at least the same people won't make the same mistake; unfortunately, this doesn't happen in subsequent generations, because they don't learn history properly, and don't understand that the purpose of learning history is to recognise crisis situations by tell-tale signs and know how people will react in such circumstances. In other words: history is the ultimate anti-stupid tool, but, perhaps not surprisingly, as the old saying goes, 'the only thing that we learn in history is that people never learn anything from history'. This is just because we are always underestimating the power of stupidity, and how powerless we are to actively fight stupidity.

We can only minimise their impact. How? By making sure that their power or their reach is properly curbed, with checks and balances that they have forgotten or overlooked (even if they are clever and meticulous). This, of course, requires a good understanding of stupidity and how it works against the benefit of everyone, and the ability to recognise stupidity and know what to do to prevent it from spreading. I would say that at this very moment, and with the state-of-the-art of the Internet as we know it today, we are powerless at either recognising stupidity or at devising mechanisms to prevent it from spreading. It's good that social media like Facebook and Google are introducing mechanisms to prevent fake news from spreading, but I remain sceptic about such mechanisms. There will always be an underestimation of stupid people. If some programming wizard at Facebook or Google thinks something like 'it's impossible that someone is so stupid as to actually do this, so I will step over it and deal with the more important issues first' then you can be sure that stupid people will use exactly that loophole to spread their stupidity. That's what it means to constantly underestimate stupid people. They will always surprise us in how far their stupidity can go.

But, eventually, I think that there is also an universal law — not defined by Cipolla and his followers! — that there is just a maximum amount of stupidity that the human species can endure. Because stupid people are not in the majority, we will eventually outnumber them when it comes to make decisions, and that means, generally speaking, pushing society towards a direction where everybody will get more benefits. In other words: the direct negative effects of stupidity are short term, and this should not be surprising, since stupid people will focus much more on the short term. While we certainly have examples of stupid people managing to keep stupidity afloat in the long term — decades, or even generations — these are atypical exceptions to the rule. When, due to the consequences of sheer stupidity, everyone hurts, then people will start to rise against stupidity, and, since they will be in the majority, at the end of the day, they will succeed. The problem is that underestimating stupidity and its effects makes such massive rise against stupidity a rare event, which only happens in extremis, when even some stupid people suddenly realise that they are acting stupidly. This requires things to really, really be in a terrible state!

In the mean time, while the current rise of stupidity is not averted, we will have to endure the consequences of living in ilithiocracies. But the recent Dutch election has shown that some people are starting to have doubts about even the short-term success of maintaining an ilithiocracy by electing stupid people to 'change things'. Maybe stupid people, after all, aren't the best kind to put in power.