The Laws of Stupidity

The First Law of Stupidity is to blame all of your problems on someone else. This relieves you of any responsibility whatsoever for your life, and also makes the people you blame your problems on into permanent enemies. This is a highly intelligent thing to do!

The Second Law of Stupidity is to never learn from your mistakes. The smartest people learn from other people’s mistakes, the second smartest learn from their own, and the dumbest don’t even learn from their own mistakes.

The Third Law of Stupidity is to talk or act without thinking. That is, be impulsive! It’s the same thing as being ruled by your more childish, indeed infantile, feelings.

The Fourth Law of Stupidity is to think than what you feel is what is right. One of the things it’s based on is arrogance, or what the Greeks called Hubris. It is of course followed by Nemesis.

The Fifth Law of Stupidity is not to know you are impulsive and convinced that what feel is what is right. Instead, you believe you are rational and logical, even though you don’t know even one logical fallacy.

The Sixth Law of Stupidity is to not listen to good advice. This is related to the Second, Third and Fourth Law of Stupidity. In fact, all the Laws of Stupidity are related to each other, and it’s probable that all Stupid People show all of them in one degree or another.

The Seventh Law of Stupidity: you don’t know you’re stupid. In fact, you think you’re smart! Aristotle noticed this one, when he wrote about ignorant people who didn’t know they were ignorant. That was like 2500 years ago! Oh no! Stupidity is inherited! Someone get me one of those castration things that are used on sheep.

The Eighth Law of Stupidity: you can’t tell when someone is smarter than you and almost always think you’re smarter than them. This is related to what I call Scott’s Law, after a friend of mine who formulated it: “The smart understand the stupid a lot better than the stupid understand the smart.”

The Ninth Law of Stupidity is that you can have a high IQ and still be stupid. I’ve heard these people referred to as “high-IQ idiots.”

The Tenth Law of Stupidity is: “The stupid are always really surprised when they end up in prison or when someone kills them.”

It’s a bit frightening to realize there are Ten Laws of Stupidity, just as there are Ten Commandments (although “Commandments” is the wrong word – Utterances, or Words, is correct).

Let’s see if I can put all this into one sentence. Stupid people blame their problems on other people, they never learn from their mistakes, they think and act impulsively, they always think they’re right, they think they are logical and rational, they don’t know they’re stupid, they think they’re smarter than other people, they don’t listen to good advice, and they’re amazed when they get caught.

The Laws of Smartness, of course, are the exact opposite of the Laws of Stupidity.