Bandits, victims and idiots

I don't enjoy politics, I don't know enough about it, and my privilege greatly insulates me from its negative effects, and so I don't talk about it much on this blog. My intention in creating the blog lo these decades ago was to make a friendly, human, competent public face to my team at Microsoft, and to get information out about languages that was not in the official documentation; it was not ever intended to be a soapbox. Only a couple times have I commented on political situations, and today will be the third apparently.

I have been thinking many times these last four years, and much more these last few days about the late Italian economic historian Carlo Cipolla. Not because of his economic theories, of which I know very little, but rather because of his theory of stupidity. You can read the principles in brief for yourself at the link above, or the original paper here, but I can summarize thus:

• Powerful smart people take actions that benefit both themselves and others.
• Victims lack the power to protect themselves. They are unable to find actions that benefit themselves, and are victimized to the benefit of others.
• Bandits take actions that benefit themselves at the expense of victims.
• Stupid idiots take actions that benefit neither themselves nor others.

These are value-laden terms so let's be clear here that neither I nor Cipolla are suggesting that victims, bandits or idiots are not intelligent:

• No matter how intelligent you are and how many precautions you take, you can be victimized by a bandit or an idiot. Victims are not to blame for their victimization. We'll come back to this in a moment.
• Bandits are often very intelligent; they just use their skills to victimize others. Whether that's because they are genuinely not intelligent enough to make a living helping others, or because they are that intelligent but psychologically enjoy being a bandit, or are bandits for other reasons, it doesn't matter for our purposes. Assume that bandits are extremely intelligent and devious, but motivated by gain.
• Idiots, ironically, are often very intelligent; a great many idiots have fancy degrees from excellent colleges. As Cipolla points out in his paper, there is no characteristic that identifies idiots other than their inability to act in a way that benefits anyone including themselves. That includes intelligence or lack thereof.

Some key consequences of this model have been on my mind these last few days:

• Bandits, even the psychopaths, are motivated by self-interest and recognize actions that benefit themselves. You can reason with a bandit, but more importantly, you can reason about a bandit, and therefore you can make use of a bandit. You can make an offer to a powerful bandit and count on them to take it up if it maximizes their gain.
• You cannot reason with an idiot. You can't negotiate with them to anyone's advantage because they will take positions that harm themselves at the same time as they harm others. There are no useful idiots"; any attempt to use an idiot to benefit yourself will backfire horribly as they manage to find a way for everyone to lose.
• When the idiots are in power, there is no bright line separating the smart from the victims; rather, there is just a spectrum of more or less power and privilege. Victims by definition lack the power to defend themselves, and the more privileged have no lever to pull to change the course of the idiot, who will act with such brazen disregard for the well-being of everyone including themself that it is hard to devise a strategy.

All this is by way of introduction to say: the position that I am seeing on Twitter and in the media that soon" is a good time to re-start the economy" is without question the stupidest, most idiotic position I have ever heard of in my life and that includes let's invade Afghanistan for no strategic purpose with no plan on how to ever leave". There is no way that ends well for anyone, and that includes the billionaires who are temporarily inconvenienced by a slight dip in the flow of cash into their coffers.

I'll leave you with how Cipolla finishes his essay, because it sums up exactly how I feel at this moment in history.

In a country which is moving downhill [...] one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals. Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the stupid fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.