We all have to deal with stupid people. Since the dawn of humanity people have done stupid things. So how do we get better about dealing with them, and make sure we’re not one of them?
The Problem
When I was in middle school, there were two brothers, Jack and Tom, who would come over to play with me and my brother. One summer day, Tom was over at our house and then Jack showed up, and he was pissed. Tom had gotten a flat and replaced his tube with one of Jack’s. Jack wanted his tube back right then, rather than waiting until Tom came home. He tried to get the tube out of the tire, but didn’t have the right tools to do it. So he got part of the tube out of the tire, then pulled out his pocket knife and cut the tube. We all stood there watching this incredulously as he stomped away.
Later that day, we walked Tom and his now un-rideable bike back to his house. There we found a frustrated Jack trying to staple the sliced tube back together. We tired for a moment, shook our heads, and walked inside.
Think about what happened there. Jack wanted his tube. It was right in front of him. And to get it back, he destroyed it.
He didn’t get his tube, and Tom didn’t get home on his bike. Nobody won. Jack wasn’t even doing something selfish, because a selfish person would have ended up with a working tube.
So what do you call that?
In 1976, an Italian economic historian named Carlo Cipolla published a short essay with an answer. It’s called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. It’s written with tongue firmly in cheek, but it’s one of those jokes that gets less funny the longer you think about it.
His definition is simple. A stupid person causes losses to someone else while gaining nothing, and possibly losing something too. Notice that this has nothing to do with intelligence. Cipolla doesn’t care about your grades or your IQ. He looks at what you did and who it cost.
He sorts people’s actions into four types, and we can find all four in that one bike tube.
Jack could have helped Tom patch the flat and gotten his tube back. Both of them win. Cipolla calls that intelligent.
He could have let Tom keep it and gone without. Tom wins and Jack loses. That’s what Cipolla calls helpless.
He could have taken the tube and left Tom stranded. Jack wins and Tom loses. That’s the bandit.
Or he could pull out a pocket knife. Jack and Tom both lose. That’s what Cipolla calls stupid.
And here’s where Cipolla says something surprising. He says the stupid person is more dangerous than the bandit.
That might sound wrong until you think about the tube. If Jack had been a bandit, that tube would have still existed. Somebody could have still ridden on it. A bandit moves value from one person to another. Stupidity just destroys it.
The rest of his laws follow from there.
- We always underestimate how many stupid people are out there.
- Stupidity shows up at the same rate in every group, whatever their education or status.
- And the rest of us keep forgetting how expensive it is to be anywhere near it.
Just ask Tom, who ended up walking that day because of somebody else’s temper.
Now, this is funny when it’s a bike tube and a stapler. It stops being funny when the person holding the knife is running your company or your country. Cipolla argued that declining societies don’t have a higher percentage of stupid people. What they have is more helpless people and more of what he called “bandits with overtones of stupidity.” So this also comes down to the rest of us, and how we respond.
But Cipolla only takes us so far. He tells us what Jack did. He doesn’t tell us why.
Nobody gets up in the morning and decides to destroy the thing they want. In that moment, standing in our yard with a pocket knife, cutting that tube made sense to Jack. So what did he believe that made it make sense?
The ancient Greeks had a word for this, and it doesn’t mean stupid.
The Philosophy
That word is amathia.
It's usually translated as "ignorance," but that misses what makes it interesting. Greek has another word for ordinary ignorance: agnoia. If you've never been taught how to patch a bike tube, that's agnoia. You don't know something, but somebody can show you.
Amathia is different. Socrates saw it in Alcibiades and Pericles, two of the most highly educated men in Athens. The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci translates it as "un-wisdom," the opposite of sophia. You can be smart, informed, and capable, and still be badly wrong about what actually matters.
It’s originally a Socratic idea, and the Stoics built on it. When Marcus Aurelius prepares himself each morning to deal with difficult people, he says they're this way because of their ignorance of what is good and what is evil. He doesn't mean they're dumb. He means their values are out of order.
So let's go back to Jack.
Jack knew how bike tubes work. He knew a cut tube doesn't hold air. If you'd stopped him and asked, he could have told you that. His problem wasn't information. In that moment, he believed that being wronged was intolerable, and that making it right, immediately, mattered more than the tube itself.
That's amathia. It's why he was still standing there later with a stapler.
Epictetus has a whole discourse on this. He asks why we get angry at thieves, and his answer is that we admire the things they take. Stop overvaluing your clothes, he says, and you won't be angry at the person who steals them. Jack wasn't really fighting over a tube. He was fighting for the idea that nobody gets to take what's his.
And this is where the Stoics redraw Cipolla's chart.
Cipolla's ledger counts external things: money, status, and bike tubes. Who ends up with more stuff? But the Stoics say none of that is your real good. Your real good is your character. And that changes the math.
Take the bandit. On Cipolla's chart, the bandit wins. If Jack had taken that tube and left Tom stranded, he'd have come out ahead.
But, would he? He'd have a tube, but he'd have become the kind of person who leaves his brother stranded over a tube. Marcus Aurelius clearly reminds us: "What injures the hive injures the bee." We're social creatures, so you can't damage the community without damaging yourself.
So for a Stoic, the bandit doesn't belong in his own quadrant. He's taken a loss he can't see. Every bandit is stupid. He just hasn't calculated the real costs.
The chart changes in other places too. The helpless person loses on Cipolla's chart, but someone who willingly pays a cost to do the right thing isn't helpless at all. We'll come back to that.
And the intelligent quadrant, where your good and everyone else's line up, starts to look a lot like what the Stoics mean by virtue.
Now, it’s very satisfying to hear all of this. You could walk away thinking, "Yeah, other people have amathia. I've known so many of them."
Epictetus has a question for that person. He pictures someone furious at the fools of the world, and he asks:
"How are you suddenly converted to wisdom?"
Because what does rage at a stupid person actually accomplish? It raises your blood pressure, ruins your day, and usually makes the situation worse. It costs you, it costs them, and nobody gains.
That's Cipolla's definition.
Every one of us has a pocket knife. The Stoics aren't saying there are wise people and stupid people. Stoic philosophy holds that almost none of us are sages. We all have moments when we're sure the tube has to come out right now.
So if we can't sort the world into the wise and the stupid, and we're on the list ourselves, what do we actually do when one of these people is standing in our driveway?
The Practice
The Stoics don’t promise you can avoid the damage. Sometimes you’re Tom, and you’re walking home. What they offer is two virtues that do different jobs here. Wisdom limits how much these people can cost you. Justice decides who you become in response.
Let’s start with wisdom, and I’ll use myself as the example.
Years ago, I was living in Amsterdam and looking for an apartment, which is one of the hardest things to find. I got referred to a guy who claimed to be an agent, and he showed me a great place in a part of town I wanted to be in, at a really good price. It almost seemed too good to be true. He gave me a contract and everything.
Then came the pressure. “I don’t know how long I can hold it.” So I paid to keep it on hold, and later I paid the deposit.
Then he stopped responding to my messages. And my first thought was that I was worried something had happened to him. But when I tried to call, the number had been disconnected.
He was fine. He’d defrauded me, and that fraud is on him. But I want to look at my part, because it’s the only part I could have done anything about.
My gut told me something was off. And the two things that made me suspicious, the price and the pressure, were the same two things that made me say yes. He didn’t have to talk me out of my doubts. I already wanted the apartment, so all he had to do was threaten to take it away.
Epictetus teaches that when an impression hits you, you don’t have to go along with it right away. You can stop and test it. My impression was, “This is a rare chance, and I’m about to lose it.” The question I skipped was, “Why does this have to happen before I can see if this is legit?”
So that’s the first practice: when you’re being rushed into something you badly want, slow down. Urgency is information.
The second is to expect these people. Marcus began his day by telling himself who he was going to meet. He wasn’t being cynical. If you’re not surprised, you’re much less likely to pull out your own knife.
The third is to judge by actions. Cipolla says stupidity has nothing to do with credentials, so don’t let a title or a contract stop you from thinking for yourself. Look at what someone has actually done, and who it cost. Then limit how much they can touch. Stop having the same argument. Don’t hand them more responsibility. Let go of the idea that you’re going to win this one.
But while wisdom on its own can help you protect yourself, and help you stay out of the blast radius, it leave everyone else in it. That’s where justice comes in.
Marcus gives us the simplest instruction I know for this:
“Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then, or bear with them.”
First you teach them if you can. Epictetus says that if you show people their error, many will stop. When Jack was standing there with that knife, though, no one was going to teach him anything. Sometimes all you can do is bear with them.
But bearing with someone doesn’t mean leaving other people exposed. Nobody fixed Jack that day, and nobody could have. So, we walked Tom home.
So let’s go back to Amsterdam. Once I realized what had happened, I was disappointed in him and a little frustrated with myself. I resigned myself to the fact that I had made a bad choice and there was little I could do.
But there was one thing. I filed a police report. I wasn’t really doing it for the money. In fact, I had resigned myself to the idea that I would never see it. I wanted it on record, so that if he defrauded someone else, there would be a record of other incidents.
He was eventually caught. He had defrauded ten other people. And two years later, I got my money back.
I’m glad I got it back, but that’s not why the report was the right thing to do. It would have been right if I’d never seen that money again, and right if no one had ever caught him.
Remember Cipolla’s chart? Paying a cost so someone else might benefit puts you in the helpless quadrant. The Stoics call it justice.
So you have two failures to avoid. One is doing nothing while people get hurt. The other is getting even, which is how you end up holding the knife yourself.
And in between, there’s a harder path. You make sure you set the boundary. You tell the truth. Do your best to protect the people downstream. And do it without contempt, because the person in front of you is making the same kind of error you’ve made yourself. Epictetus says:
“If you must be affected by other people’s misfortunes, show them pity instead of contempt. Drop this readiness to hate and take offense.”
That doesn’t mean they get to keep doing it. It means you don’t have to carry the hatred.
Conclusion
I still think about Jack standing there with that stapler.
When I was a kid, I thought it was one the funniest thing I’d ever seen. And it is still pretty funny. But I look at it differently now.
Because there’s a moment in that story I never really considered back then. Jack had already cut the tube. He’d gotten what he wanted, which was to make the point. Then he went home, sat down with what he’d done, and tried to fix it with the only thing he could find.
I’ve done that myself. I’ve said the thing in the meeting that I had to spend the next few days walking back. I’ve sent the email I shouldn’t have. I’ve won the argument and lost what I was arguing for.
And I’d bet you’ve done it too. Most of us have a stapler somewhere.
Cipolla says we always underestimate the number of stupid people in circulation, and he’s probably right. But the Stoics would add that the count includes you, and that you’re the only one on the list you can actually do something about.
You can’t fix the Jacks of the world. You can’t control who shows up in your driveway, who gets promoted, or who gets elected. There will be people who cost you time and money and peace, and they’ll gain nothing from it. They may even leave you walking home.
Here’s what is up to you. You can see them clearly. You can limit the damage. You can look after the people standing next to you. And you can keep your own knife in your pocket.
So here’s something to try this week. Think about the situation that’s making you angriest right now. It might be a coworker, a family member, or someone on your screen.
Then ask yourself Cipolla’s question. What am I about to do, who gains from it, and who loses?
If the honest answer is that it costs them, it costs you, and nobody gains, you know what that’s called.
Put the knife away.
Then see if anyone needs a walk home.
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