Sierra Leone and Cipolla’s five fundamentals of stupidity.
Carlo M. Cipolla was an Italian economic historian and wrote these five laws of human stupidity. In this article, I will try to apply them to Sierra Leone.
5 Laws of Stupidity
Law 1: Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation
Law 2: The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or group of people when he or she does not benefit and may even suffer losses.
Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals.
Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
He added a quadrant which I modified and will explain after the diagram:
My interpretation with regards to Sierra Leone:
- Helpless people contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it (the masses, the bobor-pains , the people fighting on behalf of politicians).
- Intelligent people contribute to society and leverage their contributions into personal benefits; (ethical business people and professionals)
- Stupid people are counterproductive to both their and others’ interests; (you fill that out)
- Bandits pursue their own self-interest even when this poses a net detriment to societal welfare. (illegal mining, fishing, illegal timber export, building houses and factories on protected lands, cutting down trees, selling fake medicines, bringing in harmful drugs )
Declining societies have the same percentage of stupid people as prosperous societies.
But they also have a high percentage of helpless people and, ‘an alarming proliferation of bandits with accents of stupidity‘.
Does this last sentence explain why Sierra Leone is where it is?
References
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla
2. https://bonpote.com/en/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/
Wilfred Wright hopes that he is neither a bandit or belongs to the stupid people group.
