Carlo Cipolla, an Italian economist who wrote this book and who I have already commented on and criticized in some of my texts. In this text, I will speculate on how these types or phenotypes/archetypes are distributed...
First, let's look at them:
The intelligent: whose actions benefit themselves and others
The bandit: whose actions benefit themselves at the expense of others
The naive: whose actions benefit others at their expense
And the stupid: whose actions harm themselves and others
I have already written a text criticizing these laws and what he wrote about them. For example, I criticized the restricted definition of the stupid type, as if the naive and the bandit could not also be considered as categories of stupid. Although I consider my criticism valid, it is not important to emphasize this point here, since it will be based on the definitions proposed by Cipolla that I will work on my speculation about their distribution among human groups.
Cipolla also wrote about what happens (obviously) in a society when there is a growing predominance of stupid people, in his fifth fundamental law of human stupidity. I include a relevant excerpt from this text to illustrate his specific thoughts on this topic, below:
Fifth law
5. The stupid person is the most dangerous person there is.
''And its corollary:
A stupid person is more dangerous than a criminal.
We can't do anything about the stupid. The difference between societies that collapse under the weight of their stupid citizens and those that transcend them is the composition of the non-stupid. Those that progress despite their stupid people have a high proportion of people acting intelligently, those who offset the losses of the stupid by bringing gains to themselves and their fellow men.
Declining societies have the same percentage of stupid people as intelligent ones. But they also have high percentages of defenseless people and, Cipolla writes, “an alarming proliferation of bandits with connotations of stupidity.”
“This change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the [stupid] fraction and makes decline a certainty,” Cipolla concludes. “And the country goes to hell.”
(I also criticized what he pointed out in this excerpt, in this text: “Critically analyzing the 5 laws of human stupidity”).
Speculative proposal on the distribution of types or categories of people defined by Carlos Cipolla
Intelligent, naive, criminal/bandit and stupid
* These types seem to be summarized definitions of compositions of personality traits and intelligence in which one of the characteristics tends to stand out more, for example, naivety.
* Between the intelligent and the stupid, the naive and the criminal/bandit can also be considered mixed types that combine traits of these phenotypes that would be more regular, precisely the first ones mentioned.
In ascending order, from the most common types to the most unusual, based on the current context, the year 2024, and considering the individual and social perspectives.
It is worth mentioning that I will not take any further risks, speculating percentages of how these types would be distributed and that therefore, even the least common type for a given population, according to my speculation, is not explicitly stated to be much less common than the others.
By geographic distribution:
Americas:
North America
USA: naive, intelligent/criminal/stupid
Canada: naive, intelligent, stupid/criminal
Mexico and Central America: naive/criminal/stupid, intelligent
Brazil and South America (excluding Argentina and Uruguay): naive/criminal/stupid, intelligent
Argentina and Uruguay: naive, criminal/stupid/intelligent
Haiti(?): criminal/stupid, naive, intelligent
Comment: a constant in many countries is the possible predominance of the "naive" type, whose actions benefit others at their expense, mainly due to the social context, since there is no country that is not socially structured in a way that produces a hierarchical pyramid of parasitism of the upper classes, at the top, in relation to the other classes, differing only in the how unequally and explicitly this parasitism is expressed, less significant, but existing, in first world "social democracies", such as the Scandinavian countries, and more significant in underdeveloped countries.
In the case of the Americas, I perceive a great difference in this distribution of human types proposed by Cipolla, in which the only two first world American countries, and which are not Caribbean tax havens, Canada and the USA, would present a less problematic distribution, even with differences between them: the first more similar to a European country, and the USA in a more singular distributive situation, due to its own internal and idiosyncratic diversity, resulting from its superlative dimensions of territory and demographics, as well as its unparallel history. My speculation also highlights something that, for many, especially Latin Americans, is considered an inconvenient truth, that it is their/our own people who, on average, contribute to keeping their/our countries in a state of underdevelopment, not only the historical guilt of the European colonizer or their political and economic "elites", if these also tend to express a lack of common character in the populations of these countries, of being representative of them. Hence the greater proportion of the "bandit"/criminal type.
I highlighted Haiti, because it is the poorest country in the Americas: half of the island of Hispaniola, marked by a history of civil wars, bloody dictatorships and predominant poverty. For a country as chaotic and precarious as this one, is it by chance the product only of its troubled history or also of its own population? (Except for its "intelligent" fraction, which definitely does not seem to consist of a majority). Furthermore, its status as a social and political pariah state, which has been going on for many decades, may also be contributing to empowering the most selfish types of its population, very abundant in its spaces of power and typical of dictatorships or authoritarian states. In any case, it is also possible to speculate whether this type is more common in this country than in others (something more intrinsic) and whether this factor would be an important part of explaining its very problematic situation.
Europe:
Eastern Europe: naive, criminal, intelligent, stupid
(Countries like Slovenia and Estonia would do better, at least according to their socioeconomic indicators)
Western Europe: naive, intelligent/criminal, stupid
Northern Europe (Scandinavia): naive, intelligent, stupid/criminal
Southern Europe: naive/criminal, intelligent, stupid
Comment: Stereotypes being confirmed??
Are Southern and Eastern Europeans, on average, more corruptible and, therefore, with more criminals, proportionally?
Are Northern Europeans, on average, more naive?
Perhaps reflecting the distributions of personality types themselves, in which introverts would be more common among the naive and intelligent types (more common in the north of the old continent), and extroverts among the bandit and stupid types (more common in southern Europe).
However, introverted types also seem to be more common in Eastern Europe. For a possible difference in relation to Northern Europe, which would also explain its cultural and political differences, would be the variation in personality traits, for example: melancholic types, more naive, more common in Scandinavia and choleric, more likely to be bandit, more common in Eastern Europe (based on the personality typology of the four temperaments, which I have already suggested ratifying as valid, excluding only the hypothesis related to health that was also developed in classical Greece and from which the four temperaments derive); beyond historical-contextual differences, although ethnic differences* between Nordic//Germanic and Slavic peoples seem to be deeper than exclusive results of their respective histories.
* Correlatives with variations in mental traits, personality (intensity, types) and intelligence (levels, types...)
It is even interesting to think about how these proposed types can be more comprehensive as definitions of intelligence than other ways of approaching and comparing it, such as through IQ testing, if it is not expressed only through typically considered cognitive abilities, of a technical nature, such as linguistic and mathematical abilities, but also through creativity, rationality and emotional intelligence, that is, of a contextual nature, manifesting itself in all contexts, in which the participation and influence of personality traits, considered "non-cognitive", is as important as the "cognitive" ones.
It would also be important to think about how intrinsic these types are: to what extent are they reactive reflections of the environments in which we live, of more specific contexts, and to what extent do they reflect ourselves, or our deepest dispositions...
If, for example, individual X is more naive for structural reasons or also genetic/biological/hereditary??
I would bet that it is a combination of these influences and more, in which intrinsic factors, of the individual himself, would be more influential or determining, although extrinsic factors, of the environment, also have an influential role, but more in the sense of contributing to channeling pre-existing tendencies and never of forging them without a previous context of predisposition, so that, if someone is more naive, it is not exclusively because of his environment, but also because he already has this tendency or predisposition and that it was exacerbated by his interactions in the environments in which he finds himself. Therefore, this thought suggests a constant crossing or intersection between the individual and contextual perspectives, once again, the example of the possible predominance of naive people in most countries, not only due to intrinsic disposition, but also as a reflection of how societies are organized (in a variably parasitic way that involuntarily places the majority of the population in the position of deceived or exploited subordinates).
Africa:
North Africa: bandit/naive, stupid, intelligent
Sub-Saharan Africa: bandit, stupid/naive, intelligent
Comment: forgive me all those good Samaritans who only cultivate sweet thoughts about our species, especially about certain groups that have a history and a present of poverty and civilizational backwardness (although there is a certain relativity in determining what is civilizational progress or backwardness, which can easily be problematized, such as highlighting the typically parasitic character of complex societies, excessively verticalized, in social terms). I know that this is not the habit of "left-wing" moral puritanism, but we must prioritize the facts so that we can seek truly effective approaches to combat the social, economic and/or moral problems of our species, and this will not be done by embracing beautiful but fallacious narratives... Because if it is a social environment of wars, violence and poverty that incites our most selfish side, it is still unlikely that we will all react in the same way if or when subjected to similar circumstances. The evidence corroborates my statement... It may also be, and it is very likely that it is, that a very problematic social environment primarily reflects the actions of the populations themselves, such as pointing fingers at the people who live in a neighborhood for the dirtiness of their streets rather than looking for other culprits. So, the social problems of countries that were once colonies of European metropolises, especially African and Latin American countries, are not the exclusive result of European colonialism, but mainly of their own actions, of their "elites" and of their own populations, of course, not of all, but of a potentially non-negligible part, unfortunately. An example of this is urban crime in cities like Lagos, in Nigeria, and São Paulo, here, in Brazil; in general, in the endemic lack of solidarity and respect among the inhabitants of many underdeveloped countries, even more so than in the "developed" ones, which contributes to complicating their socioeconomic situations. Always emphasizing, once again, that this is not the entire population, whether in Africa, Nigeria or São Paulo, but that it is also not a tiny minority, and even in certain cases one might think that it is a majority. And even if it is a situation that is impossible to correct or improve, but not in the politically correct, simple and cute way that many believe.
Consequently, if there is no generalization (absolute association) of causality between racial or ethnic group and behavior, then there is no genuine or objectively determined "racism" in these statements.
In the case of Africa, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, it is even possible to think of a less harsh explanation, still inevitably non-victimizing. That the human populations that live in this part of the African continent would be, for the most part, descendants of hunter/gatherers (and not of farmers or peasants), which would explain the cultural and cognitive mismatch between their average capacities for administration and social organization and the level of civilization that the colonizers imposed and left, after they passed their colonies back into the hands of their original "owners". In this sense, it can even be said that this perceived inability to manage complex societies by the majority of these populations is perfectly understandable, more understandable than in relation to populations that have evolved historically, for centuries, in civilized environments, and also do not present true civilizational excellence, which are far from it, which includes even many so-called first world countries (whether as a result of a gradual or punctual loss of this capacity, or even a chronic inability to develop it). Another relevant point that should always be emphasized is that, in addition to the proportion of these types, the way in which they are distributed hierarchically can also contribute to developing or delaying societies, such as, for example, in the case of countries in which their political and economic "elites" are definitely not composed of a large majority of intelligent individuals, but rather of criminals, even if their populations have many intelligent individuals, that is, if they are being underutilized. So, it is not enough to just know whether there are more of this or that type, but whether the worst type has predominated in spaces of power, as has been the case in practically all human societies and especially in the most chaotic ones, such as those in Africa.
Asia:
Northeast Asia: naive, intelligent/criminal, stupid (excluding China: criminal/intelligent/naive, stupid).
Southeast Asia: naive/criminal, intelligent/stupid
Indian Subcontinent: naive, stupid/criminal, intelligent
Middle East: criminal/naive, stupid, intelligent
Comment: also based on what I have noticed, types that contribute more negatively than positively, socially, seem to predominate in the less developed Asian regions, and, of course, also maintaining the high prevalence of naive people, based on the logic commented above, especially from a social context, of structural dominance of parasitism of the upper classes (especially of certain sectors) over the lower ones, in which a majority submits to the economic exploitation of a minority, literally working to enrich it, instead of there being a more egalitarian distribution of the wealth produced.
My observations:
Japan would stand out more positively in the entire Asian continent, more similar to the developed countries of the West;
China and the rest of East Asia would present a pattern more similar to the Asian continent;
Again, the underdevelopment of most Asian regions (but not only Asia) does not reflect only their historical-social context, but also the psychological and cognitive composition of the human types in their populations, such as those proposed by Carlo Cipolla, from the top to the base of their hierarchies. In fact, this composition of human types would be a more causal factor at the level of social and economic development, while the historical and social situation would be more of a dynamic reflection of this factor over time.
Social class
Rich: criminal, intelligent/naive, stupid
Middle class: naive/intelligent, criminal, stupid
Poor: criminal/naive, stupid, intelligent (?)
Comment: without wanting to "pull the wool over my eyes" for the social class in which I, theoretically and vaguely, fit, but it seems that, based on the possible perception that those in the middle class tend to have a relatively more balanced temperament, less greedy or impulsive, and also an average level of intelligence sufficient to be able to work in professions that pay reasonable salaries, that is, that they tend to express less extreme mental characteristics and that would end up reflecting in their positions in the social hierarchy, the same can be said about the other classes, however, with different tendencies: the "rich" being more prone to greed and, therefore, unscrupulous, in fact, their material wealth as a result of this, and as for the "poor", a greater disposition for impulsive behaviors and that are both respectively related to tendencies towards high and low cognitive abilities, explaining, in large part, but not all, their social situations (poverty is also a historical and arbitrary imposition of the "elites").
Religiosity
Atheist: naive, intelligent/stupid, criminal
Religious: naive, intelligent/criminal/stupid
Comment: based on what I have noticed about self-declared atheists, and disregarding those individuals who declare to have some religious belief, but it seems to be more a matter of pragmatics and/or social conformity than of a genuine disposition, this distribution of human types proposed by Cipolla for this group seems reasonable to me, with more naive and intelligent people and fewer criminals, but with a not so modest proportion of stupid people, especially due to the correlation with ideological fanaticism. In the case of self-declared religious people, it seems to me that this distribution is more balanced, especially because it is a much larger population than that of atheists, logically deducing that it contains more diversity of types. But also due to the psychological and cognitive nature of atheists, especially, a more homogeneous group, culturally, ideologically and intellectually. In any case, perhaps it would be more appropriate to compare them with religious fundamentalists. Because, for this group, I bet on a great parity between the naive, criminal and stupid types, which would not change much in relation to religious people, in general.
It is worth noting that this definition of intelligence by Cipolla seems to focus more on individual actions than on the quality of the intentions that lead to these actions and that is why I included the social context, since there is no way to separate them completely, especially based on this concept that was worked on by him.
Race:
Whites: naive/intelligent, bandit/stupid
Orientals: naive/intelligent/bandit, stupid
Jews (ethnicity): bandit/intelligent, naive, stupid
Blacks of African origin: bandit, stupid, naive/intelligent
Comment: possibly the most controversial comparison of all, but a necessary one, and one that has already been made above, indirectly, by nationalities. But since I do not submit to ideological filters to signal "canine loyalty" to biased narratives and discourses,including thinking that the only way to, in fact, understand a situation and seek the most effective means to begin to solve it, even more so when dealing with a situation that can be considered problematic, then, there is no way I can abstain from this battlefront against totalitarianisms, especially the "good" ones, based on emotional blackmail and/or moral fallacies and that have ulterior, third, or fourth intentions... Because here, once again, I only apply this typology to what can be perceived in the reality of human populations, categorized by racial or ethnic criteria, in which white Caucasians, especially those of European origin, and Northeast Asians, present the most favorable distributions or proportions of Cipolla's human types, with more intelligent and less stupid people, although they also present not at all modest proportions of naive people, who tend to be predominant, and of criminals, who tend to predominate at the top of their social hierarchies. What happens or has happened, until now, in this last century, especially, is a greater activity of the intelligent types that are already more abundant in these populations, compared to others. However, this relatively favorable pendulum has been regressing, particularly in Western societies, with the ideological or cultural hegemony of "wokeism", a kind of "virus" whose infection destroys the immune system of the affected society, destroying its most important bases ("social harmony", ethno-cultural cohesion...) that keep it functioning at a high level.
Sex
Men: bandit/intelligent, naive/stupid
Women: naive, intelligent/stupid, bandit
Comment: this distribution of Cipolla's human types, also according to my observations, would be more favorable to men intellectually, but not emotionally and morally. Because it is that situation that has been perceived, of there being more men among geniuses, but also among criminals, and the opposite pattern for women, of presenting less extreme statistical tendencies.
Sexual orientation
Heterosexuals: naive/bandit/intelligent, stupid
LGBTs: naive, stupid/intelligent/criminal
Comment: heterosexuals represent the human average, as they are the majority. Therefore, with a possible tendency for greater parity between naive, criminals and intelligent, although this does not mean that the proportion of chronically or predominantly stupid human beings is small. LGBTs, on the other hand, would present a greater incidence of stupid types in relation to heterosexuals.
Politicians: criminal, stupid, intelligent/naive
Artists (the group, in general): naive, stupid/intelligent, criminal
Businesspeople: criminal, intelligent/stupid, naive
Comment: three examples of professional classes and their stereotypes, if these types of Cipolla are applied, will be reiterated: both the political and merchant classes, with an abundance of criminals or chronically selfish people, while the artistic class would have a prevalence of naive types. Also note that the profile of artists would be opposite to that of businessmen.
Leftists (followers, not their political "elites" and which also applies to those below): naive/stupid/intelligent, criminal
Rightists: naive/criminal/intelligent/stupid
Comment: "conservative" rightists and "progressive" leftists, despite presenting some average differences in beliefs and behaviors, would be relatively similar in this distribution of types, with a predominance of naive people and a more equal distribution of types. They would differ in the proportion of criminals (greater among those on the right) and stupid people (greater among those on the left). And always emphasizing that the type considered less common is not necessarily insignificant in statistical terms, as it also depends on the representation of the other types in the same group or population.
Scientists: smart/criminal, naive, stupid
-- Academics: naive, smart/stupid/criminal
Teachers: naive, smart/stupid, criminal
Activists: naive/stupid, smart, criminal
4 or 3 intellectual classes and ½, the most intelligent of which would logically be that of genuine scientists, which is why I separated them from academics, a category that is vaguer in terms of the definition of science in the sense of a profession.
Teachers would be in a more intermediate position in this ranking, while activists would occupy the lowest position. It is also notable the increase in frequency of the stupid type concomitant with the decrease of the bandit type, from the highest level to the lowest, a possibly high incidence of bandits among scientists and of stupid people among academics (the vast majority of times represented by university professors and undergraduates), which seems illogical in theory, but not in reality, especially if we base ourselves on the weak criteria that have been used in the evaluation and selection processes of both groups, for example, that there is a tacit disregard for the assessment of capacity or qualitative proficiency for scientific work, essentially including adherence to and respect for the most basic principles of science, such as intellectual honesty and impartiality.
