Corpus Juris Stupidicum
(Note: The sections on Cipolla’s and Livraghi’s laws are compiled from Giancarlo Livraghi’s web site and are used with his gracious permission. The remainder of this compilation is from my own observations.)
Cippola’s Five Basic Laws of Stupidity
I. We always under-estimate the number of stupid people.
II. The probability of a person being stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
III. A stupid person is one who causes damage to another person, or group of people, without any advantage accruing to himself (or herself) – or even with some resultant self-damage.
IV. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid people. They constantly forget that at any moment, and in any circumstance, associating with stupid people constitutes an expensive mistake.
V. A stupid person is the most dangerous person in existence.
Livraghi’s Corollaries to Cippola’s Laws
I. Within each of us there is a quantity of stupidity which is invariably greater than we suppose.
II. When the stupidity of one person is combined with the stupidity of others, the impact grows geometrically-by multiplication, rather than the addition of the individual stupidity factors.
III. Since the impact of combined intelligence can only grow arithmetically while stupidity grows geometrically stupidity will, in the long term, always prevail.
McDonald’s Classification of Stupidity
Class V stupidity is any act of stupidity that is of sufficient magnitude and posing such immediate, dire, and potentially catastrophic consequences that only the direct intervention of God Himself can avert the impending disaster.
Class IV stupidity is an act of stupidity that leads to 1) a direct confrontation with an overwhelmingly superior foe, 2) a situation that can only be resolved by a temporary suspension of the laws of nature, or 3) a frontal assault on the will of God.
Class III stupidity is an act of stupidity that is due to stubbornness, religious fanaticism, patriotism, nationalism, or partisan political deal-making that in turn results in a witch hunt, religious persecution, a revolution, and/or an international or a civil war.
Class II stupidity is an act of personal stupidity whose impact is felt no further than five kilometers distant, and quite often no further than fifty meters, from where the incident occurs. This type of stupidity is dangerous in that, if the act itself does not prove fatal, it induces a form of amnesia that removes all memory of the act itself and the ensuing consequences, leading to repetition of the act of stupidity for an indefinite and unpredictable number of times.
Class I is the mildest, or certainly the least pathologic, form of stupidity and is usually indistinguishable from the routine actions of daily living.
The Laws of Classical Stupidity
I. Any stupid object at rest or moving in a straight line will remain a stupid object at rest, or moving in a straight line, until it is acted upon by some external force that may or may not be as stupid as the original object.
II. Any stupidity emanating from, and acting on, another object will cause that object to exert an equally stupid force on the original object.
III. Every object in the universe that has mass (and hence stupidity) will exert a gravitational attraction on very other object in the universe that also has mass (and stupidity). In the case of gravity, the magnitude of this attraction will vary inversely with the square of the distance separating the objects. However, the effect of stupidity involving both massesdoes not decrease over distance and, in certain instances, may actually increase.
The First Law of Thermodynamic Stupidity
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form of energy into another. Stupidity, however, can only be created and cannot be destroyed.
The Second Law of Thermodynamic Stupidity
You can never take more energy out of a system that was originally used in the creation of that system. You can always remove some, but not all, stupidity from a system because the supply of stupidity will always exceed the demand.
The Third Law of Thermodynamic Stupidity
Entropy, the spontaneous disorganization of matter, is universal and always proceeds from organization to disorganization. Stupidity will invariably progress from a disorganized state to larger and larger disorganized units that will eventually consume the entire universe.
The Heisenberg Unpredictability of Stupidity Principle
An observer may measure either the location of stupidity or the amount of stupidity present but may not measure both simultaneously because the mere act of measuring one component will alter the value of the other component.
The Four Laws of Military Stupidity
I. The warring side that is the first to come up with the “unbeatable” strategy will inevitably lose the war.
II. The officer who is responsible for executing this brilliant plan will inevitably be court-martialed when it fails.
III. The one factor that no one considered when devising the perfect strategy will always arise at the worst possible moment.
IV. The government responsible for Laws I & II will either be unelected (without prejudice), overthrown (with prejudice), or shot (with extreme prejudice).
The Principle of Co-Stupidity
An act of stupidity is rarely an isolated event and, in fact, any act of stupidity can be expected to produce an equally stupid reaction. This reaction may be of a Class of Stupidity that is greater than, less than, or equal to that of the initial act of stupidity.
The Expansion Principle of Stupidity
In any open or closed system stupidity will increase until it reaches, or exceeds, the level of stupidity that originally existed within that system, in accordance with Livraghi’s Second and Third Corollaries.
The Temporal Displacement of the Consequences of Stupidity Principle
The effects of a given act of stupidity do not decrease over time but may first become known at any point in the future. The individual acts of stupidity bear no relationship to their eventual effects, but these effects will almost certainly be of more extensive impact than one might expect if the original act had been identified and dealt with promptly.
