TheBlueNebula

With his Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, economist Carlo M. Cipolla demurred at the received notion of a  "self-evident" truth of human equality:  

"It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors."

Cipolla's Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

3. A stupid person is a person who caused 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 costly mistake.

5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

In this view, what we should be uniting ourselves against, whether as a community, society, nation, race, or whatever, is not drugs, crime, Godlessness, poverty or whatever, but rather stupidity.  However, to combat something that is truly a natural and endogenous characteristic of some individuals would entail social measures that should radically challenge our current political and ethical structures. Perhaps the political system that will supplant ours is the one that clears the egalitarian hurdle to better mitigate the inimical effects of human stupidity.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

I submit that social media content models, like living species, survive and compete by adapting to environmental and population pressures. The content-life-forms classified here as demolisticles suggest a lemming-like survival strategy that is not particularly effective and contributes little to the ecosystem as a whole.

To me, the interesting part is that, while broad appeal was often a critical success factor in pre-Internet publishing, recently social media have enabled content providers to realize a measure of popularity within very narrowly-scoped audience demographics. Such popularity does not emerge from intrinsic content value, but rather from specialized audience-specific references and relevance to a group identity.

40 Signs You Can Publish Any Old Crap Nowadays as Long as It's Well-Targeted 

Thoughts While Studying at Hanlin Academy Sent to My Colleagues at the Chi-Hsien Academy

At dawn I hasten toward the Purple Hall,
At dusk I await edicts from the Golden Gate.
I read book after book, scattering rare manuscripts all around.
I study antiquity to search for the ultimate essence.
Whenever I feel I understand a word,
I close my book and suddenly smile.
Black flies too easily defile the pure,
A lofty tune like "White Snow" finds few echoes.
By nature carefree and unrestrained,
I've often been rebuked for eccentricity.
When the cloudy sky becomes clear and bright,
I long for visits to woods and hills.
Sometimes when the cool breezes rise,
I'll lean on railings and whistle aloud.
Yen Kuang angled in his T'ung-lu Creek,
And Hsieh K'e climbed his Ling-hai Peak.
When I finish my task in this world,
I shall follow them and try my fishhook.

--Li Po (trans. Joseph J. Lee)

From Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry

"In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning."
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language", 1946

One may expect to encounter this sort of thing in many of my blog posts, too.