I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation andĮxperimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. I take an exception to this general view. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressiveĪpparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. The second basic lawĬultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life.

Thus in the following pages I will denote the fraction of stupid people within a population by the symbol σ.

The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:Ī) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.ī) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.

Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity.

The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:Īlways and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.Īt first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous.

The basic law of human stupidity