The Triumph of Stupidity
Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2025 10:43 amThe Triumph of Stupidity
[ https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2025/07/25/T ... ign=280725 ]
Fools pose the biggest threat, warned an Italian historian. We’re living the proof.
Andrew Nikiforuk - July 25, 2025 - The Tyee
EXCERPT: "To prevent that kind of future foretold by Cipolla (Carlo Cipolla published The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity), the U.S. writer Kurt Vonnegut, long a scholar of stupidity, offered a simple prescription in 1988.
In his open letter to the ladies and gentlemen of 2088 whom Vonnegut imagined would be sipping stupid orange drinks by their stupid computers like stupid astronauts without a home, he offered this advice.
Start listening to nature and stop polluting Earth. Teach your kids how “to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.” And “stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.”
Elon Musk, by the way, was hardly the first smart stupid person to suggest a good way to spend a trillion dollars might be to colonize space and set up a new civilization on Mars.
Forget about it, wrote Vonnegut.
The notion that our grandchildren will be OK no matter what because they will be able to flee to the Red Planet on a nice gleaming spaceship struck Vonnegut as the epitome of “mean and stupid.”
Yet that preposterous idea now dominates the fantasies of our techno-elites, who every day saw a little more into the tree limb on which they and all of humanity nervously perch. With every draw of the blade, they further demonstrate the timeless relevance of Carlo Cipolla’s five basic laws of stupidity. [Tyee] "
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[ https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2025/07/25/T ... ign=280725 ]
Fools pose the biggest threat, warned an Italian historian. We’re living the proof.
Andrew Nikiforuk - July 25, 2025 - The Tyee
EXCERPT: "To prevent that kind of future foretold by Cipolla (Carlo Cipolla published The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity), the U.S. writer Kurt Vonnegut, long a scholar of stupidity, offered a simple prescription in 1988.
In his open letter to the ladies and gentlemen of 2088 whom Vonnegut imagined would be sipping stupid orange drinks by their stupid computers like stupid astronauts without a home, he offered this advice.
Start listening to nature and stop polluting Earth. Teach your kids how “to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.” And “stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.”
Elon Musk, by the way, was hardly the first smart stupid person to suggest a good way to spend a trillion dollars might be to colonize space and set up a new civilization on Mars.
Forget about it, wrote Vonnegut.
The notion that our grandchildren will be OK no matter what because they will be able to flee to the Red Planet on a nice gleaming spaceship struck Vonnegut as the epitome of “mean and stupid.”
Yet that preposterous idea now dominates the fantasies of our techno-elites, who every day saw a little more into the tree limb on which they and all of humanity nervously perch. With every draw of the blade, they further demonstrate the timeless relevance of Carlo Cipolla’s five basic laws of stupidity. [Tyee] "
MORE . . . .