Was Lee Kuan Yew stupid?
We need to identify stupid people. They are dangerous.
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. - Carlo M. Cipolla
Thomas Erikson in his “runaway bestseller” proclaimed that we are Surrounded by Idiots. Before fans of the book come after me with pitch forks, I know I know, the book is not so much about stupidity but failure to make sense of one another’s behaviours. And I’m cognisant that there are others would prefer to draw a distinction between stupidity and idiocy. Indeed, defining stupidity is not unproblematic. In fact, that is the motivation for my exploration of stupidity - is it even possible to define stupid? If we can define it, does it mean we can prevent it? Also, what might the consequences of our definitions be? How then do we live with being confronted by stupid people constantly?
This exploration has its roots in the YouTube algorithm. One day, it decided to push my way a video on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s analysis of the world’s travesties and how he concluded that stupid people are the cause. I recognised the theologian’s name, I was curious, so I watched. The algorithm picked up on that prolonged viewing and suggested another video about stupidity. I clicked the bait. It turned out to be rather interesting - a sharing of Carlo Cipolla’s definition of stupidity. I searched for the essay so that I might read the actual words for myself and I decided that this is probably worthy of further study.
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
The late Carlo Cipolla was Professor of Economics at University of California, Berkeley. He retired from UC Berkeley in 1991 and passed on in September 2000 back in his native Italy. The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity was first self-published back in 1976 and is originally written in English.
In his essay, Cipolla delineated five basic laws of stupidity which warrant proper reading and I will be unpacking the richness of his treatise over several articles. For the piece you are reading now, I’m concentrating on The Third (and Golden) Basic Law: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. This is quite a definition of stupidity; and one that allows the categorisation of human beings, along cartesian axes of gain and loss for self and others, into the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit, and of course the stupid (see the graph below).
A strength of Cipolla’s construct is that it is capable of challenging our cliched mental visuals of people, and perhaps even change them. We may think of the helpless as those are unable to fend for themselves and in need of rescue. However, Cipolla calls those who take losses upon themselves so that others might gain helpless; that looks more like an image of a martyr than damsel in distress. They may be helpless according to this definition but they are neither weak nor incapable. Sacrifice comes to mind. Perhaps helpless in that they are unable to prevail against circumstances to gain for themselves whilst still producing a gain for others i.e. to be intelligent.
Again, Cipolla’s definition of the intelligent conjures an image that is over and above mere cleverness; the intelligent is virtuous. We are apt today to doubt the deeds of the intelligent person though we are unable to doubt his mastery of the deed. We question in whose interest and for whom it profits, and yet who shall pay the price and lose? Cipolla’s definition does not allow for this malevolence because the intelligent produces gain not just for himself but others too. His deeds are eudaimonia. The one who gains whilst causing losses to others is the bandit.
We know the bandit. We have seen bandits. They all around us. We probably feel helpless when faced with the bandit. But then, there’s the stupid.
Was Lee Kwan Yew stupid?
When I used to teach, one of the things I least liked doing but is most requested of me is to give examples. Examples are almost always a short cut to the answer that short-circuits the need to think. Inevitably the learning activity very quickly degenerates into a form-filling exercise with pseudo-eureka moments of “Ah! That’s what you want. Why didn’t you say so earlier?” From which learners then proceed to swap words out of the example to fulfil the task in a very unfulfilling manner. But I break my own rule here because I would be lying if I do not confess to struggling with using Cipolla’s construct to dissect the chaos we live in; regardless of how intuitively attractive his treatise may be.
Our daily life is mostly, made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. - Carlo M. Cipolla (emphasis not in original)
The basket of potential losses is multiple and Cipolla professes as much. What’s more, these elements of money, time, energy, appetite, cheerfulness, and good health are not invariably positively correlated, an increase in one element does not necessarily increase the others. Indeed, the gain in money for the bandit may have come at the cost of cheerfulness (assuming he still has a conscience, without which would he then have lost his soul?). So is he still a bandit or is he stupid? Is this definition of stupidity therefore useful? To answer this, I shall give my example, one that is close to home, dare I say heart.
The late Lee Kuan Yew was Singapore’s founding Prime Minister who led the island state to independence. From a British trading outpost to an economy that boasts the second highest per capita GDP in the world, surely Lee Kwan Yew was intelligent. He gained and the nation gained along with him. By simple virtue of Singapore’s outsized economic growth and improvements in standards of living, Lee Kuan Yew was not stupid, not even his harshest critics think so. However, his many political foes, vanquished no less, sure think he was a bandit through and through! That said, surely this strong man of Asia was never helpless, or was he?
Beyond life, what more does any one of us have to give?
Ironically, the genesis of this miracle called Singapore might just have been rooted in stupidity; the moment when the guns pointed to the south and bicycles rolled in from the north.
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