Engineering Stupidity

                                     Engineering Stupidity  

                                                Dr KS Dhillon  

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity – and I’m not sure about the universe.” -- Albert Einstein

‘Never underestimate the power of human stupidity’-- Robert A Heinlein

‘The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits’--Albert Einstein

Introduction

When we reflect on our life’s experiences over the last several decades, we tend to realise, to our disappointment, that people were smarter then as compared to now. We seem to be surrounded by more stupid people and less smart people nowadays. Organizational and societal decay seems to have become a norm rather than an exception. We appear to be heading down a slippery slope. What is this trite but elusive word called stupidity? Why is there a decay in society and in organizations? Is there any solution to this harmful and dangerous trend?

What is stupidity?

The word stupidity dates back to 1541 (1).The Oxford dictionary defines stupidity as ‘behaviour that shows a lack of good sense or judgement’.The Cambridge dictionary defines stupidity as ‘the state of being silly or unwise’. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word stupid as being ‘slow of mind, given to unintelligent decisions or acts, acting in an unintelligent or careless manner and lacking intelligence or reason’. The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides 25 synonyms and a large number of antonyms and related words to describe stupidity (1).

Types of people and the problem with stupidity.

Cipolla (2) a professor of economic history at the University of California in Berkeley, USA, defined a stupid person as ‘a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses’. Human beings according to Cipolla fall into four basic categories i.e ‘the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid’. An intelligent person’s action brings gain to both parties, a helpless person’s action brings loss to himself and gain for the other party. A bandit is a person whose action brings gain to himself and a loss for the other party and a stupid person is one whose action brings loss to other parties while bringing no benefit or causing loss to himself.  Stupid people’s unreasonable behaviour is difficult for reasonable people to fathom. Most humans do not behave consistently all the time. They behave intelligently  under certain circumstances and under different circumstances the same person can be helpless. However, a stupid person on the other hand is perfectly consistent in his behaviour all the time in every endeavour.
A bandit's actions are rational and predictable whereas those of a stupid person do not conform to the rules of rationality. A bandit wants to take away something for his gain which causes a loss to another person.
It is not possible to organize a defence against stupid behaviour because the actions of a stupid person are unpredictable, erratic and irrational.
Cipolla believes that ‘non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals’ and that non-stupid people tend to forget that dealing with stupid people under any circumstance turns out to be a costly mistake. Often people believe that a stupid person will only harm himself but that is not true. Stupid people cause harm to society in general.
Generally everyone ‘always and inevitably’ underestimate the ‘number of stupid individuals in circulation’. It is impossible to put numerical value to the number of stupid people in society because any numerical estimate would be an underestimation.
Pitkin (3) believes that though, the precise number of stupid people in the world is unknown and difficult to know, ‘at least three out of every four members of our species are, in some respect, stupid enough to deserve dishonorable mention here’.  Without doubt there are intelligent people in the world but Pitkin believes that ‘for every enlightened act in human history, there have occurred fully a million deeds injurious to the race because of dull prejudice, a single-track mind, laziness, faulty reasoning, forgetfulness, pride, or malice’. It is easy to act stupid but difficult to act intelligent because intelligent behaviour involves the arduous time consuming task of  observing, analyzing, and finally organizing the details. A stupid act on the other hand does not involve any logic, analysis and organization and is easily carried out.
Cipolla firmly believes that stupidity is a genetic trait and not a trait attributable to nurture. Stupidity he says is an indiscriminate privilege which is equally distributed among all human groups. The frequency of stupidity and the percentage of stupid people remains the same irrespective the group size. Education has nothing to do with this probability because the percentage of stupid people is the same among the blue-collar workers, the white-collar employees, the students, the administrators, the professors and even of the Nobel laureates.The percentage remains the same irrespective of the nation you belong to, in developed or underdeveloped country.
If the percentage of stupid people is constant then every organization should have a comfortable mix of smart, stupid and helpless people as well as bandits for the organization to flourish. Why then should things go wrong?

Why things go wrong and problems with organizations.

While there is scarcity of literature on the depth of thinking about stupidity, there are some good studies about ‘why things go wrong’. One of the good studies on this topic is ‘Parkinson’s law--the pursuit of progress’ by Cyril Northcote Parkinson (4). Parkinson’s law is defined as “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.What it basically means is that  there a tendency for the amount of work required to complete a task increase so that it consumes all the time allocated to it. The available capacity in a given system  gets used up and no matter however extensive the resources, the demands on the resources will continue to grow till they are depleted. With this in any organization the financial outlay will continue to increase till available budget is exhausted, software continues to expand till system memory is full and the volume of data tends to grow till storage capacity is full. Financial outlay will increase to exhaust any usable budget.
The main problem with organizations is that they are like living organisms which have an inherent urge to grow and reproduce itself. This is not good for businesses, institutions, private and public services because they should only grow and expand if they are productive and there is need for more and they should shrink or disappear if they have outlived their usefulness.The reality is that this does not happen in the real world. If we look around us the organizations continue expand and they do not become leaner.
Another observation by Parkinson is his Law of Triviality which states that the amount of time and attention given by the management to a particular problem is inversely proportional to its real importance. Simply put it means that people spend a lot of time on trivial tasks and very little or not enough time on matters that are important and critical. Parkinson illustrates this law with an imaginary tale where a company’s executives meet to discuss two new projects i.e a nuclear reactor and a company bike shed.
The reactor is complex, expensive and the executives know nothing about reactors, hence no discussion takes place to avoid embarrassment, and the project gets approved in two and half minutes. The bike shed on the other hand is something everyone knows about and everyone has an opinion. The bike shed, Parkinson writes, "will be debated for an hour and a quarter, then deferred for decision to the next meeting, pending the gathering of more information".
Parkinson in another of his book (5) talks about the law of delay. It says that ‘delay is the deadliest form of denial’ and that ‘if there is a way to delay an important decision the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it’. It is common to find people in charge, when confronted with urgent, serious, complex, and taxing problems, avoiding responsibility by delegating, delaying, doubting and hesitating till the problem becomes unsolvable.
There is a common tendency to decide on things, in a hurry, that need more deliberation and thinking while putting off things that need to be decided at the right time. This leads to a vicious cycle of more blundering and build up of problems, which makes things worse. Despite the fact it is obvious, that If things are handled properly, this mess can be avoided.
Parkinson in his book, ‘Parkinson’s Law and other Studies in Administration’ (6) introduces another of society's ills which he calls ‘Injelititis or palsied paralysis’. The first sign of danger, according to Parkinson, is the appearance of an individual with a certain concentration of  incompetency and jealousy, into an organisation.These two elements apparently fuse to produce a substance called ‘Injelititis’. The presence of such an individual is obvious when you find someone who has achieved nothing remarkable for his department but is constantly interfering with other departments to gain control in the central administration. The secondary or next stage of infection in this illness is when this individual gains complete or partial control at the central organisation.The presences of such an individual is easy to recognise from his persistent efforts get rid of and prevent promotion of individuals who are more able than him. As a result of this the central administration gradually gets filled up with people who are stupider than this individual who is now the chairman, director or manager. It makes sense that if the head is second rate, he will make sure that his immediate staff are third rate and their subordinates will be fourth rate.
The next or tertiary stage of the disease is when there is no bright spark left in the organization from the top to bottom. At this stage the organisation is for all practical purpose is dead or in a coma.
Now that the disease has been described what are the symptoms of Injelititis? At the initial stage or stage one it may be difficult to see the symptoms. However it may be noticeable at the initial phase when one finds that the standards in an organization have been set low. Not only low standards are acceptable, even lower standards are acceptable. Third-rateness become the principle of the organization’s policy. The chief symptom of the second stage of the disease is smugness and that of the last stage is apathy.
Although stupidity is not mentioned in any of the Parkinson’s laws, it is obvious that the analysis as to why things go wrong is full of destructive behavior which is indeed very stupid.
Mats Alvesson and Andre Spicer (7) have studied another aspect of stupidity which is prevalent in organisations and he introduced the term functional stupidity.

Functional stupidity 

Functional stupidity in an organization is best described as when smart people are discouraged from thinking  and reflecting at work. It is ‘characterized by an unwillingness or inability to mobilize three aspects of cognitive capacity: reflexivity, justification, and substantive reasoning’.
Lack of reflexivity involves inability or unwillingness to question norms, rules, routines, dominant beliefs and expectations. Employees are expected to not question organizational (im)morality and they are expected to follow the instructions from above. There is repression of skill of employees to reason, scrutinize and criticize aspects of the organization.
The second aspect of functional stupidity is lack of justification. This involves not demanding or providing reasons and explanation for what is going on in the organization. This reduces the amount of dialogue among employees and it means that there is no need to account for a decision or action. Significant critical scrutiny is bypassed and companies can adopt new practices with few or no good reasons beyond the fact that they make the company ‘look good’. Not asking for justification beyond ‘managerial edict, tradition, or fashion, is a key aspect of functional Stupidity’.
The third aspect of functional stupidity is a lack of substantive reasoning. This happens when reasoning is based on a small set of concerns that are defined by the organization and does not span the whole issue. The common example of such lack of substantive reasoning is the myopic approach where organizations focus all their efforts on achieving certain objectives with little or no questioning of the objectives themselves.
Functional stupidity involves both cognitive as well as affective issues. The affective issues have both motivational as well as emotional components.The motivational aspect is characterised by an unwillingness to use one’s cognitive capacities which is reflected by a lack of curiosity, closed-mindedness, identification of oneself as the ‘organizational person’ or a ‘professional’ who does not question the occupational paradigm. The emotional aspect is characterised by anxiety and personal insecurity at work which affects the way we relate to others.
Although this kind of organization supported stupidity can have harmful long term consequences for the organization, it can have some short term benefits. This form of functional stupidity allows for smooth running of the organization with members playing along and not asking difficult questions.
The ungrounded faith in the visions, goals, strategies, and practices of the organization helps members to control their doubts.
Organizations promote skilled incompetence among its staff by reinforcing defensive routines. The fact that some issues are undiscussable helps managers to avoid surprise, embarrassment and threat. This lack of discussion prevents the managers from learning from inquiry into difficult questions. This lack of willingness to learn and process knowledge is also stupidity just as a lack of knowledge is stupidity.
Hence functional stupidity can be defined as ‘ an inability and/or unwillingness to use cognitive and reflective capacities in anything other than narrow and circumspect ways. It involves a lack of reflexivity, a
disinclination to require or provide justification, and avoidance of substantive reasoning’ (8).

Mats Alvesson and Andre Spicer in their book ‘The Stupidity Paradox: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work’ (7) describe functional stupidity in the workplace as when intelligent people are discouraged from thinking and reflecting at work. This in the long term can be catastrophic, leading to organizational collapse and disaster. However a dose of functional stupidity in the short term can be useful because it can bring about harmony and encourage people to get on with the job. This is the paradox which the authors talk about in the book.
The authors investigated why smart firms with intelligent people did such stupid things. They found that organization would hire intelligent people and than discourage them from thinking and asking questions. This was done sometimes in subtle ways and at other times in not so subtle ways. They were often told things like 'don't think about it, just do it', and 'don't bring us problems, just bring us solutions'. So the smart people realised that thinking and asking questions will lead to awkward confrontation with the seniors. The workers very quickly realised that the best option was get on with the job at hand.
They came across many stupefying processes which discouraged workers from thinking too much. There were policies and processes which were mindlessly being enforced. They also found ‘corporate window dressing’ which were symbolic with no substance. Many of the companies were imitating other firms and copying their culture thoughtlessly.
There were however some benefits of not using one’s intelligence. Lot of time was saved by avoiding conflict which allowed these individuals to quietly work their way up the corporate ladder.
Despite some short term gain of such a culture, the long term consequence can be disastrous when people start overlooking problems and the problems continue to build up. This has been illustrated by the last financial crisis (2007-8) and also by what happened to Nokia when it did not keep up with Apple’s iPhone. Public services everywhere continue to add policies and procedures which are pointless and do not improve delivery of services.
Organizational disease has been further studied by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull (9) They coined the term “Peter Principle” and wrote about why things always go wrong in an organization.

The Peter Principle

It is essential to understand the Peter Principle in order to fathom organizational disease. The principle states that ‘in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence". The book introduces a new science called hierarchiology i.e the study of hierarchies. In a hierarchy a higher up vacancy is filled  by a person who is currently competent in his present position below in the hierarchy. Sooner or later an employee will be promoted to a position where he is no longer competent. He will remain there because he will not get a promotion, since promotions are only for competent people. This level where the employee stagnates is known as  Peter's Plateau.
According to Peter, in a hierarchy "every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties" and that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence". Over time, however, every position in the hierarchy will be filled by someone who is not competent enough to carry out his or her new duties. Dr Peter in his book clarifies that the person has not become incompetent because the new job is tougher but the incompetence is due to the fact that the new role requires new skills and competencies which the person does not possess and is unable to develop.This then leads to failure. He succulently sums up his observation as “the cream rises until it sours”. So by extrapolation, this means that almost everyone in a management level position is incompetent.
For those interested in the study of stupidity, Peter’s principle would mean that a person, who isn’t stupid (is competent) in a specific task , is moved
to a situation where he or she becomes “stupid”,  because of “incompetence” in a new role, which would mean that all at the managerial level become stupid because of the meritocratic hierarchy. As a result of this those who have not yet been promoted and are still competent are hindered in their work by reporting to those who are incompetent.
People at the top of the organization often ignore Peter’s teachings, because people at the top don’t like to be told that they have been wrong in promoting their staff and also it makes them uncomfortable that they themselves have reached an irreversible level of incompetence.
In 1996 Scott Adams generated a corollary of “The Peter Principle” which he called The Dilbert Principle which states that ‘The least competent, least smart people are promoted to where they can do the least damage: management’.
Giancarlo Livraghi (10) believes that the situation today is worse than it was in 1969 when Peter defined his principle. The concept of merit according to him is more and more confusing. People get ‘“promoted” (or chosen) because of protection by oligarchic power, superficial appearance, intrigue and other reasons that have little, if anything, to do with “competence”’.
In an attempt to solve some of the high level incompetence problems consultants have suggested several maneuvers.

1.‘The Percussive Sublimation’ - where a hopelessly incompetent person who is creating a bottleneck is moved upstairs so that he will be out of the way.
2. ‘The Lateral Arabesque’ - where an incompetent employee is given another new and longer title and an office in a remote part of the building.
3. ‘Peter's Inversion’ - refers to professional automatons aka Peter’s Inverts who are minor officials with no discretionary powers in whom we see an obsessive concern with getting forms filled out correctly, irrespective of whether the forms serve any useful purpose or not and no deviation, however slight, from the routine is permitted. Such actors always obey and they never make decisions. This according to hierarchy is competence and Peter’s Inverts are eligible for promotion. He will continue to rise till he reaches a position when he has to make decisions and he find that he has reached his level of incompetence.
4.Hierarchal Exfoliation - refers to expulsion or dismissal of a super competent person who is brilliant and productive. Such a person cannot get a promotion because in most hierarchies super competence is more objectionable than incompetence. Ordinary incompetence is a bar to promotion but not grounds for dismissal. Super-competence disrupts the hierarchy and thereby ‘violates the first commandment of hierarchal life: the hierarchy must be preserved’.
This sort of maneuvers maintain stupid people at the upper end of the hierarchy in highly visible roles. The criteria to be placed on top of the hierarchy has little to do with competence and merit. Rewards often go to people who support the winning party and not to the deserving party.

Livraghi’s in one of his famous  corollary says that ‘when the stupidity of one person combines with the stupidity of others, the impact grows geometrically – i.e. by multiplication,not addition, of the individual stupidity factors’.
The sum of stupidity factors in individuals increases as a square of the number of individuals which explains why crowds as a whole are more stupid than an individual in the crowd. Stupid behaviour and thinking can reproduce, multiply and spread so rapidly and dangerously that it can even infect intelligent people who will not realise that they have been influenced by collective stupidity. It is disturbing to know that stupidity is characterised by consistency and continuity and that nobody is totally immune to it.
The power of stupidity is usually underestimated and its consequences are unpredictable. With stupidity thinking is not involved, there is no need for planning and getting organised and this makes combination of stupidity a simple job. Hence stupid people can instantly form a ‘super-stupid’ group. Intelligence is a much more complex process, where intelligent people can only work together when they know each other and have worked together before. Organizations and communities with high number of intelligent individuals are likely to have a long term survival provided they avoid the short term impact of shared stupidity which can have a significant and devastating effect on non-stupid people.
People in power, tend to keep those interested in their own welfare and that of restricted group of people with similar interest, at the top of the pyramid. These group of people are not interested in the welfare of everyone. They  favour and protect stupidity and keep the intelligent people as far away as possible.

The power syndrome

There is no question about the fact that people in power are more powerful than others. Real power leads to uneven relationships where some people have greater influence over circumstances than others and at times this can lead to situations where a few people with power can do good or harm to many people. The effect of the behavior of people in power whether it is good or harmful should be measured from the point of view of the person affected by the behaviour.There is always a need for separation of powers so as to avoid exaggerated concentration of power (absolute power) which can lead to conflict and violence. This concentration of power leads to ‘The Power Syndrome’.
There are various ways in which people gain power. Occasional it is entrusted on someone by others because of his natural leadership qualities, his sense of responsibility and because he can be trusted by others. This process produces intelligent power which is rare. Such people do good for themselves but they do a lot more for others.They even sometimes do deliberate sacrifice where they do harm to themselves for the benefit of others. They deliberately place common good over personal interest. Such examples are however rare. Why?
The reason is that there is intense competition to gain and maintain power and sometimes this craving for power can be troubling, very aggressive and even fearsome. The person with intelligent power usually does not have the time and energy to gain more power or hold onto power. Those who have greed for power on the other hand concentrate all their efforts on the power struggle without regards for the impact on society.
Most people are placed somewhere in between the two ends of the spectrum of responsibility and power mongering. The manipulating individuals however predominate. Often even the generous individual over time tends to dedicate more energy to increasing power at the expense of the people around them.
Things sometimes get worse because there are megalomaniacs in position of power. For these people power is an addictive drug and they believe that they are smarter, wiser and better than people around them. Sycophants, followers and exploiters often surround the megalomaniac and they enhance the delusions of megalomaniacs.
Power is sexy they say. Instinctively humans are sexually attracted to people who are powerful but these powerful people usually do not have time to care for love, affection or emotion.
This megalomaniac power syndrome not only affects the powerful people but the disease affect all their followers and everyone else with whom the powerful person interacts. There is stupid symbiosis between the powerful and the people around them and this complicates the stupidity of power.
A strong relationship exists between stupidity, ignorance, fear and habit, as we shall see.

Stupidity and Ignorance

Of the many attitudes and circumstances that contribute to making us stupid, three are particularly important. These include ignorance, fear and habit. Ignorance can breed fear and fear can also breed ignorance. Habit is often the nourishment or excuse for ignorance and stupidity. Often all four can join forces and they can be exploited by whoever has power or leverage.
Unlike what many believe, not all ignorant people are stupid and not all stupid people are ignorant. Fear can be seen in both smart and stupid people. Habits again can good and harmless or they can be dangerous. These factors can all intermingle and interact to varying degrees. There is no direct linear correlation between stupidity and ignorance but when they combination the outcome can be disastrous. People who never notice they are stupid are actually very stupid and people who never know that they do not know are very ignorant. We keep reassuring ourselves that we are in the age of information but unfortunately we are poorly informed because information is deliberately manipulated and information management is usually careless, repetitive and shallow. The information is handled by people who are ignorant on the subject and instinctively lazy to check their source as deeply as they should.
In society there is a mischievous reciprocity of ignorance where people mutually adjust to other people's real or assumed ignorance and with that the level of dialogue spirals downwards. The amount and the quality of information exchanged spirals down to zero or becomes negative, thereby reinforcing the false or distorted notions and increasing prejudice.
We often fall back on comfortable misconceptions, that find easy agreement, to avoid the effort of thinking. Sometimes it is the path of habit and at other times it is the fear of having to tackle a difference of opinion for which we are not prepared.
Traits such as ‘arrogance, presumption, egotism, selfishness, envy, carelessness, servility, imitation, gossip, prejudice, meanness, unwillingness to listen and to understand’ are all unpleasant friends of stupidity and ignorance.  They lurk in every corner of human behavior
and communication.
There are times when we are led to believe that information from authoritative source is unquestionably accurate and believable. This principle of authority can sometimes be dangerous. Assumed authority is not synonymous with real competence because the opinions of experts are often biased by their cultural or scientific perspectives. This bias is legitimate and unavoidable but we must remember that there is no such   thing as a totally “objective” opinion.
The only way out of ignorance is insatiable curiosity which involves active
questioning, searching and understanding even when at first glance it appears unnecessary.
Albert Einstein once said: ‘I have no special talents. I am only passionately
curious’. And he explained: ‘The important thing is to never stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help
but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life,
of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to
comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity’.
Instinctive curiosity and an ability to listen is a lively, amusing and pleasant friend of intelligence and a strong antidote to stupidity.
With the world population growing at a rapid pace, is stupidity constant or is it following the trend of population growth.

Is Stupidity Growing?

‘A sort of melancholy, and regret, seizes us every time we meet a sophisticated, adulterated idiot. Oh the nice fools of yestertime! Genuine, natural. Like homemade bread’. Leonardo Sciascia.

It is often said that ‘the sum of intelligence on the planet is a constant, while the population is growing’. It is also a common belief that the ‘percentage of stupidity’ remains constant although it will be impossible to prove it. It would be nonsensical to believe that a small (and proportionally decreasing) number of people has a monopoly of intelligence and that everyone else is stupid.
There is a widespread belief, without basis, among people in power that they have some sort of superior intelligence as compared to others and it makes things worse when these people are lulled into believing that it is true.
The question as to whether human intelligence is growing is silly because there is no reliable way of measuring or comparing intelligence. There are however some so-called “scientific” studies which says, yes, human intelligence is growing though there is no proof of it. The so called “IQ” standards are highly questionable and some would say totally meaningless.
Anthropologist define “intelligence” as a human “characteristic”. The scientific frontiers of knowledge have over the last four centuries, even
more so in recent years, expanded at a bewildering and fascinating pace.Though our perceptions are advanced our perspectives remain biased. It is not certain whether this is making us smarter or more confused and stupid.
When we look around us, we see on a daily basis, small and big events, which confirms the dismal effects of human stupidity. Most of the time we notice that things seem to be getting worse. We always talk about good old times. Although things appear to have been better before, the fact remains that we are as stupid as we have ever been. The only sign that we are not completely stupid is the fact we have survived and expanded despite the appalling mistakes we make.
There is a widespread feeling that stupidity is becoming more devious and it has been so in the past but an abundance of information available nowadays makes it more obvious.
Four hundred years ago, Michel de Montaigne said ‘Nobody is exempt
from saying stupid things, the harm is to do it presumptuously’. There is a growing tide of arrogant stupidity which is inundating us to an extent that it is becoming obsessively irritating. The power of stupidity is multiplied by confusing cunning with intelligence. Francis Bacon once said that ‘there is nothing more damaging to a country than shrewd people passing themselves off as being intelligent’. It’s worse when we share this delusion on a large scale.
Frequently we find that people who are supposed to be wise and bright are actually awfully stupid. This tide of stupidity catches up with us wherever we head. The size of globalised stupidity is appallingly and obnoxiously large. We allow simple problems to grow till they become so large and entrenched that it is difficult to find a solution. A good example was the last global financial crisis.
Despite the fact that stupidity factor is a constant, human stupidity is growing simple because the population is increasing. Just like infectious diseases, stupidity also spreads rapidly. Though we are not becoming more or less stupid, the power of stupidity is increasing. The vastness of the consequences of stupidity has never been so large and the speed of its multiplication has never been so fast. Though we cannot uproot stupidity we can at least try to understand it and thereby reduce its impact.
In the midst of this growing stupidity we need to remember that stupidity is not harmless.

Stupidity Isn’t Harmless

Livraghi believes that though many people perceive stupidity as
“Harmless”, in reality it can be quite dangerous. Although there are no surveys trying to measure how many people think that stupidity is harmless or dangerous and why, the fact remains that stupidity is not harmless. It is a fact that stupidity is contagious and infected people usually are not aware of their disease, hence it becomes very difficult to control the epidemic.
The people in power with their monopoly over the communication media  spread stupidity and make it appear harmless.
Many believe that stupid people are non achievers and hence can be ignored and laughed at about their miseries. This is not necessarily true and doing so can be a serious problem. Stupidity is poorly understood and not well studied because many people believe it is irrelevant and non stupid people think it is a blessing for them since they can take advantage of other person’s stupidity and even exploit it.
We find comfort in contemplating other people’s stupidity and other people's stupidity usually makes us feel cleverer. This is often the content of gossip which many people engage in.
Humour and irony apparently can be an effective remedy against stupidity provided we don’t forget that it’s a serious and dangerous problem and we can’t understand it by just laughing about it.

Are we engineering stupidity in our midst ?

Are there stupid people around us? The answer has to be a yes since the percentage of stupid people in society is relatively fixed. What is needed is a larger percent of intelligent people around us. Do we have more intelligent people in our midst? The answer is a definite no.
We will come across stupid people all the time in our daily life whether we are at work, on the way to work or at social gathering. We often wonder why these people are hurting not only themselves but also everyone around them. On the way to work we see irrational stupid behaviour of motorist on the road. At work you see the irrational stupid behavior of others. Their unreasonable behaviour is difficult for reasonable people to fathom. Though in many people their behaviour may vary from day to day but among stupid people you notice that their behaviour is perfectly consistent all the time in every endeavour. Behaviour involving observation, analysis, and organization is sadly lacking in people around us. Behaviour involving prejudice, a single-track mindedness, laziness, faulty reasoning,forgetfulness, pride, and malice is commonly seen.
If we reflect on our experiences over the last few decades we sadly become aware of the fact the stupidity is much more common now than it was few decades ago. Why is stupidity growing around us?
Increasing population may be one of the reasons but stupidity around us is disproportionately high as compared to increase in the population. There are other factors responsible for increasing stupidity. These include the organizational disease, functional stupidity, Peter’s principle and the power syndrome.
There is a tendency, according to Parkinson’s law, for the amount of work required to do  something increases so that it consumes all the time allocated to it. There is a tendency for all available capacity in a given system to be used up. This means that no matter however extensive your resources, the demands on the resources will continue to grow till they are depleted. The financial outlay of the organization continues to increase till available budget is exhausted. The organization continues to grow and this is not good for businesses, institutions, private and public services because they should only grow and expand if they are productive and there is need for more and they should shrink or disappear if they have outlived their usefulness. That however does not happen.
Parkinson’s Law of Triviality highlights the stupidity of organizations where the amount of time and attention given by the management to a particular problem is inversely proportional to its real importance. Simply put it means that people spend a lot of time on trivial tasks and very little or not enough time on matters that are important and critical.
It is common to find people in charge, when confronted with urgent, serious, complex, and taxing problems, avoiding responsibility by delegating, delaying, doubting and hesitating till the problem becomes unsolvable. On the other hand there is a common tendency to decide on things, in a hurry, that need more deliberation and thinking while putting off things that need to be decided at the right time. This leads to a vicious cycle of more blundering and build up of problems, which makes things worse.
Another illness in society is what Parkinson calls ‘Injelititis or palsied paralysis’. We commonly see in an organization the appearance of an individual with a certain concentration of  incompetency and jealousy.These two elements apparently fuse to produce a substance called ‘Injelititis’. Such an individual who has  achieved nothing remarkable for his department would constantly interfere with other departments to gain control in the central administration. Once such an individual gains complete or partial control at the central organisation he will make persistent efforts to get rid of and prevent promotion of individuals who are more able than him. As a result of this the central administration gradually gets filled up with people who are stupider than this individual who is now the chairman, director or manager. It makes sense that if the head is second rate, he will make sure that his immediate staff are third rate and their subordinates will be fourth rate. This is why we tend to see more stupid people around us.The next or tertiary stage of the disease is when there is no bright spark left in the organization from the top to bottom. At this stage the organisation is for all practical purpose is dead or in a coma.
Another reason why we see more stupid people around us is because of the existence of functional stupidity in organizations. Smart people in organization are are discouraged from thinking  and reflecting at work. The people in such organizations are not allowed to question norms, rules, routines, dominant beliefs and expectations. They are not expected to question organizational (im)morality and they are expected to follow the instructions from above. There is repression of skill of employees to reason, scrutinize and criticize aspects of the organization. The employees are not allowed to ask  for justification but are told to follow managerial edict or tradition. Organizations promote skilled incompetence among its staff by reinforcing defensive routines. Such organizational practices engineers more stupidity.
To understand organizational disease further one has to understand the Peter Principle. The principle states that ‘in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence". In an organizational hierarchy a higher up vacancy is filled  by a person who is currently competent in his present position below in the hierarchy. Sooner or later an employee will be promoted to a position where he is no longer competent. He will remain there because he will not get a promotion, since promotions are only for competent people. This level where the employee stagnates is known as the Peter's Plateau. In such a hierarchy "every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties" and that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence". Over time, however, every position in the hierarchy will be filled by someone who is not competent enough to carry out his or her new duties.
The person who is promoted does not become incompetent because the job is tougher but the incompetence is due to the fact that the new role requires new skills and competencies which the person does not possess and is unable to develop.This then leads to failure. A person, who isn’t stupid (is competent) in a specific task , is moved to a situation where he or she becomes “stupid”, So by extrapolation, this means that almost everyone in a management level position becomes incompetent (stupid).
In 1996 Scott Adams generated a corollary of “The Peter Principle” which he called The Dilbert Principle which states that ‘The least competent, least smart people are promoted to where they can do the least damage: management’.
The stupidity problem takes on a different meaning when we are dealing with stupid people who are in power and control the destiny of many others below them in the hierarchy. Although the person on top in the hierarchy has a lot of power which he can wield on others below him, in a democracy we expect that this should be subject to control by the rest of the people and in an organization there should be no bureaucracy, centralization or formal discipline. There should instead be leadership, motivation, distributed responsibility, sharing and personal empowerment. However in reality this does not happen in a democracy or in an organization.
This concentration of power leads to ‘The Power Syndrome’.Things often get worse when there are megalomaniacs in position of power. For the megalomaniacs power is an addictive drug and they believe that they are smarter, wiser and better than people around them. Sycophants, followers and exploiters often surround the megalomaniac and they enhance the delusions of megalomaniacs.
This megalomaniac power syndrome not only affects the powerful people but the disease affect all their followers and everyone else the powerful person interacts with. There is stupid symbiosis between the powerful and the people around them and this complicates the stupidity of power.
Another phenomenon which we commonly observe around us is what is known as ‘Peter's Inversion’ which refers to professional automatons aka Peter’s Inverts who are minor officials with no discretionary powers in whom we see an obsessive concern with getting forms filled out correctly, irrespective of whether the forms serve any useful purpose or not and no deviation, however slight, from the routine is permitted. Such actors always obey and they never make decisions. This according to hierarchy is competence and Peter’s Inverts are eligible for promotion. He will continue to rise till he reaches a position when he has to make decisions and he find that he has reached his level of incompetence.

Conclusion

Stupidity is a term which makes many people uncomfortable though stupid behaviour is so common and we see it all around us. The number of stupid people is not going to reduce in the future. Stupidity grows by multiplication and not by addition. It is definitely not harmless. In fact it is causing a lot of harm to society. Ignorance, fear and habit contributes to stupidity. Ignorance aside we are guilty of aggressively engineering stupidity in our midst. Organizations are getting controlled by power hungry (megalomaniacs) and incompetent people and they are promoting skilled incompetence among their staff. Functional stupidity has permeated most organizations where smart people are discouraged from thinking  and reflecting at work. Policies and processes which bring no benefit to organization are being mindlessly enforced.
Traits such as ‘arrogance, presumption, egotism, selfishness, envy, carelessness, servility, imitation, gossip, prejudice, meanness, unwillingness to listen and to understand’ lurk in every corner of human behavior and communication.
We cannot uproot stupidity but we can at least try to understand it and thereby reduce its harmful impact. Humour and irony apparently can be an effective remedy against stupidity provided we don’t forget that it’s a serious and dangerous problem and we can’t understand it by just laughing about it.
The percent of stupid people in both progressive and nonprogressive nations is the same. Progressive nations, however, have a larger number of intelligent people as compared to nonprogressive nations. The solution to the decay in society and in organizations, created by stupidity is to increase the number of intelligent people and to revamp the hierarchy in organizations to make them smart and lean.

References

1. Merriam-Webster at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stupidity. Accessed on 6/7/17. 
2. Carlo M. Cipolla. The basic laws of human stupidity at https://archive.org/details/The_Basic_Laws_of_Human_Stupidity_by_Carlo_M._ Cipolla. 
3.  Walter B. Pitkin.1932. A short introduction to the history of human stupidity at https://ia801605.us.archive.org/8/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.218548/2015.218548.A-Short_text.pdf.
4. Cyril Northcote Parkinson.Parkinson’s law--the pursuit of progress’ . Published by John Murray London, 1958.
5. Cyril Northcote Parkinson. The Law of Delay: Interviews and Outerviews. Ballantine Books (March 12, 1972).
6. Cyril Northcote Parkinson. PARKINSON'S LAW AND OTHER STUDIES IN ADMINISTRATION. Houghton Mifflin Cornpony, Boston, Mass. 1957.
7. Mats Alvesson and Andre Spicer. The Stupidity Paradox:The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work. Profile Books. 2016.
8. Mats Alvesson and André Spicer. A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations. Journal of Management Studies 49:7 November 2012
9. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6486.2012.01072.x.
10. Laurence J. Peter, Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle Why Things Always Go Wrong. 1969. Harper Collins.
11. Giancarlo Livraghi . 2009. The Power of Stupidity.