The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

The basic laws assert that Cipolla (2019)

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any characteristic of that person.
3. 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.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. 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 infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Intelligence and stupidity are not the opposite of one another, nor is stupidity the lack of intelligence, but intelligence is the product, more or less unsuccessful, of a continuous series of attempts to dominate, or escape, the stupidity that constitutes everything that is human — Matthijs Van Boxsel.