“More Powerful Than the Mafia”: The Law of Stupidity, Tested on Trump

Note: At the very end of the article, you’ll find a chat room where you can discuss the article. You’ll also see a floating chat button on the right if you’re already a member. Anyone can join the discussion in real time, no registration required.

50 years ago, Carlo Cipolla wrote that stupid people as a group were “far more powerful than the Mafia or the military-industrial complex.” The sentence appeared in 1976 in a slim book about the basic laws of human stupidity. It reads as if it had been written for this week.

Look at the present. In Iran, one of the dumbest wars in history is falling apart. An incompetent health secretary is working on bringing measles and polio back. In the Republican Party, 20 percent consider the storming of the Capitol on January 6 a violent insurrection, while 71 percent deny that Joe Biden won in 2020. And a government refuses to rein in artificial intelligence and the crypto industry, which threaten everyone’s prosperity and security. In 1976, the world was similarly torn apart by rage and seemed to be standing on the edge of catastrophe.

Cipolla was an economic historian, taught at Berkeley, had seen fascism up close, and wrote in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. What drove him was the question of how highly developed societies manage to do truly stupid things. The book was intended for friends, sold more than half a million copies, and sits somewhere between satire and serious scholarship. It was “neither a product of cynicism nor an exercise in defeatism,” he wrote, “any more than a book on microbiology.” It was an attempt to recognize and possibly neutralize one of the most powerful dark forces standing in the way of human happiness.

Cipolla divided people into 4 groups. The helpless hurt themselves and benefit others. The intelligent benefit themselves and others. The bandits enrich themselves at the expense of others. The stupid hurt others without gaining anything themselves. Those last ones were his subject.

His theory has 5 laws. Everyone always and without exception underestimates how many stupid people there are. Anyone can be stupid, regardless of everything else about them. A stupid person harms others and gains nothing from it. The non-stupid always underestimate his destructive power, and getting involved with him invariably turns into an expensive mistake. The harshest law comes last, the stupid person is the most dangerous kind of human being, more dangerous than the bandit. However high one estimates stupidity, he wrote, one will still be surprised again and again when someone believed to be smart turns out to be recklessly stupid and gets in the way at the worst possible moment.

It becomes dangerous when the stupid reach power, because then the danger grows beyond measure. They have at their disposal the means of destruction created by the intelligent, armies and weapons systems, along with the levers of money and influence over the public. They rule industries owned by bandits and weaken the watchdogs meant to keep them in check. Imagine, Cipolla wrote, an exceptionally stupid man becoming defense secretary and putting his own soldiers and the standing of the country at risk. Then he plants a culture of testosterone in the force that damages it for years. The intelligent are left with the job of restraining the stupid. If they fail, things go downhill fast.

In a democracy, stupidity is especially deeply rooted. “Within a democratic system,” Cipolla wrote, “general elections are a highly effective instrument to ensure the steady maintenance of the stupid among the powerful.” Politicians have to court the stupid to stay in power, so a portion of them will always be found among officeholders.

The second law invites argument. Stupidity has no connection to wealth or education, and rank offers no protection either. Think of the fools with degrees in today’s Washington. Ted Cruz and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came out of Harvard. Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas went through Yale, as did Josh Hawley. Then there are the rich fools, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. More dangerous than the stupid powerful man is the stupid powerful man with a diploma, because he truly believes he knows what he is talking about.

Cipolla acknowledged that people can move between groups. Andrew Carnegie was first a bandit and later a smart philanthropist. Someone may seem helpless today and stupid tomorrow. What should count is average behavior, mapped out in a chart of 4 fields. The helpless also include the selfless, which is why the name is misleading. Clara Barton belonged there, as did Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, and all of them were intelligent.

If you drew the map today, the leadership of this administration would stand almost entirely in the field of bandits or the stupid. Some would put Trump himself among the stupid, and much of what he does is simply stupid. But his greed exceeds his stupidity, so he belongs among the bandits, close to the border with stupidity and as far from intelligence as possible. Mike Johnson and Marco Rubio belong in the same field, along with Scott Bessent. JD Vance and Kash Patel are there too. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth, by contrast, move into the field of the stupid, along with Tommy Tuberville.

What is making the United States dangerous right now is the strange mixture of smart and stupid. The men who built the atomic bomb and helped win World War II understood the danger exactly. Robert Oppenheimer later argued for limits and cooperation. Harry Truman, a capable president, was smart enough to put the atomic program under civilian control. Against that stands today’s failure to regulate artificial intelligence, even though the leading companies themselves warn that their technology could wipe out humanity. The strongest programs break out of their sandboxes and attack government websites, and the Republican-controlled Congress looks away while Trump babbles about renaming artificial intelligence “superintelligence.”

The image for it is glaring. Imagine building a hydrogen bomb and then handing it to Gordon Gekko to make money with and to Barney Fife, the bumbling deputy sheriff, to supervise. What could go wrong? Everything, Cipolla’s theory says. In a country going downhill, the proportion of stupid people remains the same, but among the powerful the bandits with a pull toward stupidity increase, and among the powerless the helpless increase. That makes decline certain, and the country heads to hell.

Whether the United States is on that path cannot yet be said. Maybe we will only know once it is too late. Disturbing enough that a theory written half in jest 50 years ago fits today’s America so precisely. Cipolla died in 2000, and he was spared the best proof of his own theory.