Understanding Stupidity

by James F. Welles

crash course in the most significant events of Western civilization judged by the context of stupidity (i.e., attempting short-term goals at the expense of being able to succeed at long-term ones). An entire book chock full of concluding paragraphs from a vast array of the most amusing and intuitive historical essays.

210 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1997

Reviews

[Mark Dantonio · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a crazy book. My Dad gave me this one. I love the way it was organized. It began by talking about the way humans think. It basically said that we conform to some kind of thought convention which the author referred to as a “schema.” I liked the word having come from a database and computer background where the schema was a complete description of the data. I found myself agreeing with the author on how people tend to fall into a particular manner of thought over the ages. What was really interesting is that the author described human though in kind of an evolutionary or natural selection based manner. He showed how one way of thought was successful for a while and how it eventually failed due to changing times or better competition. He organized the book in chapters starting with a simple introduction and description of the human schema. He then went through the ages in the following format: 1) introduction, 2) Greek stupidity, 3) Roman Stupidity, 4) Medieval Stupidity, 5) Reborn stupidity, 6) Reformed stupidity, 7) Reasonable stupidity, 8) Enlightened stupidity, 9) Industrial stupidity and 10) Age of arrogance. In each of these chapters he brings up the great movements and thinkers of the time and shows how the schema of humanity changed. He also boiled down a civilization into a few sentences. For example, for Greek stupidity he said that the Greeks were excessive in their withdrawal from life. He said the Greeks sacrificed variety in favor of simplicity and ignored the complexity of human nature. The author said that the Romans failed because well to do Romans failed to educate the masses to the point that the empire could not sustain itself. He takes special care in marveling as to why to Romans lasted so long rather than why they fell. In the remaining chapters he covered how the fall of the Romans caused all kinds of discord and how the Church really became a political power. He goes all through the dark ages and the Renaissance, the age of reason, the reformation and he opines about how the Church basically lost monopoly power. I really liked his discussion of Galileo and Kepler and the letters that they exchanged. They really had a laugh at the expense of the Church officials. It was very entertaining. He covers many more, Bacon, Hume, Malthus, Newton, Hobbes, Berkeley, Darwin, Erasmus, Thomas More and many others. Anyway the author goes through the ages of how landowners abused the great unwashed and how eventually revolution destroyed the old order. He really has some great vocabulary in the book. It is worth reading just to increase your vocabulary. In the end he goes into a discussion of how capitalism arose and the good and bad parts of capitalism. He covers topics such as ethics and social responsibility and he goes over a lot of other typically human habits such as groupthink (Challenger) and arrogance (Titanic).

Mark D

[Darren Lott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this many years ago but needed to refresh my memory of its importance and found that it is even more accurate in today's world

[Jordan]

i'm currently reading this