We’re all stupid. To a greater or lesser extent, with a greater or lesser harmful impact on ourselves and society.
‘Never attribute to wickedness what can be adequately explained by stupidity.’ This is Hanlon’s Razor, an epigram that tries to demonstrate that, many times, bad actions, acts or events that could be linked to villainy and evil are nothing more than consequences of the most beautiful and simple stupidity.
The concepts of good and evil and their complexity have afflicted man and influenced his psyche for eons. The ancient religions, especially those that most influenced the development of the Western world and its culture, are almost always Manichean, almost never having a middle ground between right and wrong, always with absolute measures in relation to the subjects treated. Of course, in the modern world society has adapted to these concepts, learning that a truth is never absolute and that understanding right and wrong, ‘good and evil’, is actually a much more complex and difficult task (do you really get it?).
Going back to the premise that mistakes, cruel acts, and historically bad decisions are driven more by stupidity than by evil, before examples let’s look at some concepts about what stupidity actually is and how it moves and influences human decisions and interactions.
A stupid person is a person who causes harm to another person or group of people, without, at the same time, obtaining any advantage for himself or even suffering a loss, a definition by the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla, which we will delve into in the course of the next chapters.
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