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 that 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 followed by Nemesis.
The Fifth Law of Stupidity is not to know you are impulsive and instead 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 Laws 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, even if they cannot articulate them.
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 perhaps 2500 years ago.
The Eighth Law of Stupidity: you can’t tell when someone is smarter than you and almost always think you’re smarter than they are. This is related to Scott’s Law: “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. These people have been 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 put all of this together 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
4 comments:
Another zinger! Reprinted with delight and gratitude here:
http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2013/07/everything-goes-by-laws-even-stupidity.html
Indisputably correct.
There are two kinds of stupid, Bob.
1. Stupidity driven by a low intellect - where your rules are a creed that stupid people unwittingly live by.
2. Deliberate, premeditated stupidity - the type adopted by leftists for example. At some level, those politicians KNEW they were destroying the city of Detroit. On some level, Obama and the blacks KNOW that Trayvon Martin was a thug shot by a man lawfully standing his ground - yet they tried to lynch him anyway. These types embrace stupidity and its laws as a means to profit or game the system in their favour.
I personally believe that this is an important distinction to make when addressing the problems of stupid people.
I think the second kind of a type of mental illness. I've thought for years leftists suffer from weird mental illness.
Post a Comment