In the 2006 film Idiocracy, Mike Judge sketched a future so grotesque it was meant as satire: a world so dim-witted it can no longer maintain running water, basic agriculture, or even the faintest memory of what civilization once required to function. Crops are watered with energy drinks, garbage towers choke the horizon, and the president is a former wrestler with a machine gun and a megaphone. Society collapses not through nuclear war or plague, but through the slow suffocation of reason under the weight of its own idiocy.
The premise was blunt: dumb people outbreed the smart, democracy hands the keys to the majority, and soon the collective intellect of mankind bottoms out somewhere south of a turnip. It was reductive, almost offensively so. Intelligence is not inherited like freckles, nor do societies fall apart simply because the village idiots are over-enthusiastic in the bedroom. Judge’s logic was paper-thin. But here’s the unsettling twist: nearly twenty years on, what once felt like parody now has the sour tang of prophecy. His assumptions may have been wrong, yet the spectacle of destructive stupidity—loud, proud, and endlessly multiplying—feels uncomfortably familiar.
The film was derided as nonsense when it appeared. Now, critics mutter that perhaps Judge wasn’t a comedian at all but a Cassandra. Because however flawed his thought experiment was, we cannot deny the daily evidence: stupidity isn’t just common, it is corrosive. And somehow, stupid people don’t just get by—they dominate, they multiply, and they set whole civilizations on fire while congratulating themselves for holding the torch.
This post first appeared in 2024, back when I still entertained hope that rational arguments might sway public sentiment. I’ve since remastered it—sharpened the edges, clarified the threat, and realigned it with the Grimwright ethos: use what works, discard the rest, and always—always—question the narrative. The date remains unchanged as a historical marker. The content does not.
So: how is it that stupid people manage to be so catastrophically destructive?
Let’s call Marcus Aurelius as our first witness. He would have asked: What is this thing we face? What is its true nature? Can we describe it, contain it, name its causes? And what remedies—if any—exist? Or are we doomed to watch stupidity, like mildew in a damp cellar, spread inexorably until it covers everything?
I was fifteen when I set off on what I grandly called my “lifelong quest for self-improvement.” Imagine a teenager armed with stubborn idealism, cheap notebooks, and a misplaced belief that books alone could purify the mind. It was less noble odyssey and more stumble through false trails, humiliations, and philosophical potholes. Still, books piled up.
The first that bit into me came from Josef Kirschner, an Austrian writer and TV eccentric who enjoyed parading his oddities in public. The slim paperback bore the scandalous title The Art of Being an Egoist. Not the usual fare for a provincial teenager. But its premise struck me with adolescent lightning: egoism is not the grubby sin the moralists claim, but an act of self-recognition. Know what you want, satisfy it, and you’ll be a better human—useful even to others. Help yourself first, then help the rest. A heresy I happily adopted.
Kirschner divided humanity into three camps.
First, the Wise—a vanishingly rare 2% of the population. They neither require instructions from others nor care to issue them. They accept no excuses, no scapegoats. Your life is your fault. Swallow the medicine, stop whining, and get on with it. Unsurprisingly, such people aren’t beloved in polite company. Nobody likes to be told their suffering is their own problem. But as a boy desperate to feel exceptional, I tried to claim membership. Retrospect tells me my record is, at best, patchy.
Second, the Wolves. Roughly 18%. These thrive only when others can be corralled beneath them. Bereft of followers, they sniff out new herds to exploit. They are predators dressed in human skin, supremely skilled at using people as raw material. History is littered with their kind: the con artist, the warlord, the corporate raider, the political demagogue. Think of Robespierre, whipping up revolutionary fervor only to send half of Paris to the guillotine while convincing himself he was virtue incarnate.
And third, the Sheep—the lumbering majority, 80%. They crave instruction: work here, pay there, clap when told, believe the television, respect authority, roll up your sleeve. They obey, they conform, they shuffle obediently to the pen. Kirschner’s neat marketing trick: 80–18–2. Easy to memorize, easy to sell.
It was a useful framework, but it felt off. The sheep were too diverse, lumped together in a woolly blur. Some were harmless drones; others were dangerous zealots. Surely they deserved further dissection.
Enter Carlo M. Cipolla, professor of economic history at Berkeley, who in 1976 wrote an essay of such cruel precision it should be read aloud at every parliament and boardroom. His subject: stupidity. He codified its universal laws and, more usefully, sketched four archetypes of human impact on society.
First, the Helpless. These mean well. They wish to live decently, perhaps even to contribute, but they lack the cunning to convert society’s mechanisms into personal gain. They complain, they muddle along, they rarely shift the status quo. They are ballast—heavy but not dangerous.
Next, the Wise. This is the true aristocracy of human spirit: those who enrich society while also managing to benefit themselves. Rarer than albino tigers, but luminous when found. They marry intelligence with a moral compass, and without them, civilization stalls.
Then, the Bandits. Exploiters, parasites, conscienceless opportunists. They loot society with skill and profit handsomely while caring not a whit for the damage. Think of Enron’s boardroom, or the oligarchs of collapsed states. Bandits are wolves fattened by opportunity.
And finally—the Idiots. The true scourge. These harm others, often grievously, without securing any meaningful benefit for themselves. Destruction for destruction’s sake. They are the arsonists of civilization, burning their own houses while accusing the neighbors of striking the match. The French Revolution’s September Massacres, where mobs butchered prisoners to no strategic end, are Idiocy incarnate.
Here we see the cross-pollination. Cipolla’s Wise echo Kirschner’s 2%. His Bandits align with the Wolves. But the Sheep fracture: some are Helpless, harmless if ineffectual. Others are Idiots—the most dangerous breed of all.
Helpless folk may be inert, but they are not toxic. A society composed solely of Helpless souls would be quaint, bumbling, perhaps even utopian in its own harmless way. Idiots, by contrast, are apocalypse in human form. Unlike Bandits, who want to milk the cow, Idiots happily slit its throat, torch the barn, and then complain bitterly about the smoke. Their unpredictability is the only predictable trait. They will dance in the rubble they created, convinced it was someone else’s fault.
The grim news: Idiots cannot be reformed. At best, they may mimic reason when the pressure to conform is unbearable, but the core impulse never changes. They never recognize their own condition, for they are convinced of their superior knowledge.
Cipolla distilled their pathology into five merciless laws.
First law: Every non-idiot underestimates the number of idiots. They are legion. They sit at your dinner table, they occupy your office, they run your governments. I’d hazard that half the supposed Sheep are actually Idiots in fleece. Worse, idiocy is episodic. A person may act rationally for hours before a trigger—an opinion, a fad, a scrap of ideology—flips the switch and the Idiot emerges.
Consider the COVID years. How many perfectly sensible people you knew suddenly became hall monitors for masking toddlers outdoors, or screamed on social media about imprisoning the unvaccinated? They weren’t paid propagandists or Bandits—they were Idiots, harming others while deriving no benefit, just the self-congratulatory glow of being “on the right side of history.”
And here is the cruel paradox: education, which should inoculate against stupidity, often cultivates it instead. Idiots congregate where education is thickest. Years in universities leave them full of information but fragile in ego. Their identity is welded to credentials. To question what they “know” is to invite self-annihilation, so they ossify instead. They become brittle crusaders, guardians of orthodoxy, desperate to conceal the thinness of their understanding. Their true creed is not knowledge but fear of exposure. Elites recruit heavily from this stock, filling high offices with credentialed incompetents, brittle as porcelain, zealous as inquisitors.
Meanwhile, truly intelligent people retreat. They avoid the circus of elites and prefer the quieter dignity of obscurity. They know too well that idiots swarm in bureaucracies like locusts in grain silos. Better to live peacefully in the shadows than to wrestle with mobs of zealots who mistake credentials for wisdom.
Second law: Idiocy is democratic. It respects no class, no race, no station. Idiots infest every layer of society. True, higher education fattens their ranks, but the contagion spreads evenly across professions and backgrounds. Dean or street sweeper—it makes no difference. Flip a coin; odds are you’re dealing with an Idiot.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution is a case study. Professors denounced as “reactionaries,” students smashing violins as symbols of Western decadence, peasants burning books they couldn’t read. Idiots everywhere: at the top, in the middle, in the fields. Idiocy spared no level of Chinese society, and the result was the immolation of culture on the altar of purity.
Third law: Idiots harm others without real benefit to themselves. They are the volunteer infantry of catastrophe. They rush into battle not for riches, not for spoils, but for the intoxicating whiff of moral superiority. “I am awake. I see what you cannot. I am enlightened—unlike you.” For this vaporous prize, they will burn down the world, even if it consumes them in the process.
Look at ESG crusades. Corporations cripple their own supply chains, fire competent engineers, and swap reliable energy for fantasies of wind and sun in places where the sun barely shines. Idiots cheer these moves, not because they profit but because it lets them feel virtuous while industries collapse. Or recall the mobs tearing down statues, toppling bronze and marble as if pulverizing a sculpture could heal history. They harmed civic life, scarred cities, and gained nothing except the fleeting ecstasy of “being seen” as righteous.
Fourth law: Non-idiots underestimate just how far Idiots will go. Reasonable people project their own boundaries outward. “If I would stop here, surely others will too.” Fatal mistake. Idiots observe no boundaries. They are zealots. They will march to the ends of reason, past it, and set up camp in the wasteland beyond.
The Jacobins thought they were creating a Republic of Virtue. Instead, they filled Paris with guillotines and blood, executing not just aristocrats but their own comrades, one by one, until none remained. The logic of the Idiot has no brakes: once the purge begins, it must devour everything. Or consider today’s cult of gender ideology—what began as tolerance metastasized into surgeons amputating healthy organs from confused teenagers while politicians applaud. Reasonable people said, “Surely it won’t go that far.” But Idiots always go that far.
Fifth law: Nothing is deadlier than the Idiot. They are civilization’s most enduring parasite. Bandits may plunder, but at least they preserve the host for future harvests. Idiots torch the granary, salt the fields, poison the wells. Every man-made disaster—from collapsing empires to genocidal states—bears their greasy fingerprints.
Totalitarian regimes depend on Idiots the way lungs depend on oxygen. The Soviet Union didn’t run on secret police alone; it ran on millions of ordinary Idiots writing denunciations, cheering show trials, and starving their own villages in service to an abstract cause. The Nazis didn’t rise purely on the backs of SS officers; they rose because Idiots in every German town eagerly marched, saluted, and shouted themselves hoarse, gaining nothing but eventual ruin.
That is the bitter lesson Judge half-stumbled into, Cipolla dissected with surgical clarity, and our daily news cycle confirms with numbing regularity: stupidity is not a joke, not an unfortunate background hum, but the primary engine of destruction in human history. Civilization may survive wolves, bandits, even ordinary greed—but it cannot withstand a determined horde of idiots. And the horde is always larger than we imagine.
