The "Laws"
1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."
2. "The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."
3. "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."
4. "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."
5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."
Don't think I agree with all of them, particularly the last. In my view, the most dangerous type of person is the arrogant smart guy who has no wisdom nor common sense. I also don't think I agree with the definition of a stupid person. What he has defined is a dangerous person, not a stupid person. The common meaning of the term "stupid" is at odds with his definition.
By any measure - other than the author's - Mao, Stalin, and Hitler were not stupid people, but they were the most dangerous people in all of the Twentieth Century, and most likely human history.
That the degree of dangerousness is correlated more with wisdom than with stupidity (more technically, the degree of dangerousness is inversely correlated with the degree of wisdom) is demonstrated by the fact that the U.S. only used the atom bomb twice, and only to end a conflict that had dragged on for years, killed millions, and would have taken the lives of potentially millions more to conclude by conventional arms alone, and never again used it, not to defeat the Soviets, not to defeat the Chinese communists, not to defeat the North Korean communists, not to defeat the Vietnamese communists, etc, etc, etc.
The blunt matter of fact is that if the U.S. had used the atomic bomb in the Korean war to shut down the North Korean communists and their Chinese backers, their would not have been an atomic counter-attack: the Chinese communists at that time did not possess nuclear weapons (certainly not deployable gadgets) at the time, and the Soviets would almost certainly have sat back and allowed the U.S. to weaken their enemies in Beijing. I believe that this was most likely discussed, at least at the highest levels, within the U.S. military command. But wiser heads prevailed - as they usually do in the U.S. - and the atomic bomb has never been used again since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And yet, at the end of WWII, the most dangerous country in the world - in terms of the ability to inflict harm on other people without being restrained by anyone or anything - was the U.S. Quite frankly, the Europeans were a mangled mess of potage at the end of WWII, the Soviets as well, the Chinese embroiled in internal turmoil (and technologically backward), and the Japanese worse than a mangled mess of pottage, and the remaining Commonwealth countries such as Canada and Australia not sufficiently strong, that the U.S., had it wanted to, could have conquered most of the world. Think of it, but for the wisdom of Truman, the U.S. government generally, and the American people, generally, we could have had an American Empire that would have been the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Forget the Roman Empire - pikers - forget Alexander the Great - another piker by comparison - forget the British Empire - a distant second - the American Empire would have included most countries other than, most likely, the Soviet Union, what became Eastern Europe, and most likely China. The remaining Commonwealth countries (again, Canada, Australia, etc) would have become mere satellites or dependent client states of the U.S.
But wiser heads did prevail, because the U.S., although not without plenty of its own faults and motes, has generally been a fount of wisdom when it comes to human geopolitical history.
Thus, what matters most is not the axis running from stupidity (in the conventional sense) to intelligence, but the axis running from wisdom to its antithesis. Certainly stupidity plays a role, but mostly to the extent that it incorporates implicitly a lack of wisdom.
A wise fool is usually preferable to an unwise genius.
Obama is certainly a good example of this.
