USE YOUR VOICE

EM TODAS AS SOCIEDADES EXISTE UM IMPULSO PARA A CONFORMIDADE

"A imposição de padrões pelas sociedades aos seus extremamente diversificados indivíduos tem variado muito em diferentes períodos históricos e diferentes níveis de cultura. Nas culturas mais primitivas, onde as sociedades eram pequenas e ligadas a tradições muito estreitas, a pressão para o conformismo era naturalmente muito intensa. Quem ler literatura de antropologia ficará espantado com a natureza fantástica de algumas das tradições às quais os homens tiveram de se adaptar. A vantagem de uma sociedade grande e complexa como a nossa é permitir à variedade de seres humanos expressar-se de muitas maneiras; não precisa de haver uma adaptação intensa, como a que encontramos em pequenas sociedades primitivas. Mesmo assim, em toda a sociedade há sempre um impulso para a conformidade, imposto de fora pela lei e pela tradição, e que os indivíduos impõem sobre si mesmos, tentando imitar o que a sociedade considera o tipo ideal.

A esse respeito, recomendo um livro muito importante do filósofo francês Jules de Gaultier, publicado há cerca de cinquenta anos, chamado "Bovarismo". O nome vem da heroína do romance de Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, no qual essa jovem mulher infeliz sempre tentava ser o que não era. Gaultier generaliza isso e diz que todos temos tendência a tentar ser o que não somos, a querer ser o que a sociedade na qual crescemos julga desejável. Ele diz que todo mundo tem um "ângulo bovarístico", e que o de algumas pessoas é bastante estreito; aquilo que elas são intrinsecamente, pela hereditariedade, não difere muito do que tentam fazer de si mesmas pela imitação. Mas algumas pessoas têm ângulos bovarísticos de noventa graus, outras até de cento e oitenta, e tentam ser exactamente o oposto daquilo que são por natureza. Os resultados são em geral desastrosos. Mesmo assim, um dos mecanismos através dos quais a sociedade consegue que as pessoas se conformem a ela é criar um ideal e fazer com que as pessoas o imitem voluntariamente. ( Não é por nada que o livro provavelmente mais lido e mais influente da devoção cristã se chama Imitação de Cristo ).

Infelizmente, como vemos muito bem pelo estudo da delinquência juvenil, nem sempre o ideal que imitamos é o melhor. Há a imitação de Al Capone, infelizmente, e a imitação do jovem duro que anda por aí a porrada nas pessoas; há imitação de cantores de rock-and-roll, e assim por diante. O processo sempre existe, em qualquer sociedade, e sempre existirá. O que devemos descobrir é algum método para aproveitar ao máximo esse impulso social de conformidade, salvaguardando, ao mesmo tempo, a variabilidade genética dos indivíduos.

(...) Em primeiro lugar, liberdade e tolerância são de enorme importância, e, em segundo lugar, um ambiente decente — igual para todos e melhorando igualmente para todos — é decisivo. É vital não pressionar pessoas geneticamente diferentes para que sejam como todo o mundo, e, dentro dos limites da lei e da ordem, tentar e permitir que todo o indivíduo se desenvolva conforme as leis do seu próprio ser, e conforme o princípio religioso de que a alma individual é infinitamente valiosa. O nosso ideal deveria ser o que o filósofo de Chicago, Charles Morris, descreveu no seu livro "The Open Self": uma sociedade aberta, constituída de eus abertos. "

Aldous Huxley, in 'A Situação Humana'

THE SECOND BASIC LAW (2) -by Carlo M. Cipolla

Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. 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. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination.

I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion. This fact is scientifically expressed by the Second Basic Law which states that:

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

In this regard, Nature seems indeed to have outdone herself. It is well known that Nature manages, rather mysteriously, to keep constant the relative frequency of certain natural phenomena. For instance, whether men proliferate at the Northern Pole or at the Equator, whether the matching couples are developed or underdeveloped, whether they are black, red, white or yellow the female to male ratio among the newly born is a constant, with a very slight prevalence of males. We do not know how Nature achieves this remarkable result but we know that in order to achieve it Nature must operate with large numbers.

The most remarkable fact about the frequency of stupidity is that Nature succeeds in making this frequency equal to the probability quite independently from the size of the group.

Thus one finds the same percentage of stupid people whether one is considering very large groups or one is dealing with very small ones. No other set of observable phenomena offers such striking proof of the powers of Nature.

The evidence that education has nothing to do with the probability was provided by experiments carried on in a large number of universities all over the world. One may distinguish the composite population which constitutes a university in five major groups, namely the blue-collar workers, the white-collar employees, the students, the administrators and the professors.

Whenever I analyzed the blue-collar workers I found that the fraction å of them were stupid. As å's value was higher than I expected (First Law), paying my tribute to fashion I thought at first that segregation, poverty, lack of education were to be blamed. But moving up the social ladder I found that the same ratio was prevalent among the white- collar employees and among the students. More impressive still were the results among the professors. Whether I considered a large university or a small college, a famous institution or an obscure one, I found that the same fraction å of the professors are stupid.

So bewildered was I by the results, that I made a special point to extend my research to a specially selected group, to a real elite, the Nobel laureates. The result confirmed Nature's supreme powers: å fraction of the Nobel laureates are stupid.

This idea was hard to accept and digest but too many experimental results proved its fundamental veracity. The Second Basic Law is an iron law, and it does not admit exceptions. The Women's Liberation Movement will support the Second Basic Law as it shows that stupid individuals are proportionately as numerous among men as among women. The underdeveloped of the Third World will probably take solace at the Second Basic Law as they can find in it the proof that after the developed are not so developed.

Whether the Second Basic Law is liked or not, however, its implications are frightening: the Law implies that whether you move in distinguished circles or you take refuge among the head-hunters of Polynesia, whether you lock yourself into a monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in the company of beautiful and lascivious women, you always have to face the same percentage of stupid people - which percentage (in accordance with the First Law) will always surpass your expectations.

(to be continued...)

"THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY" (1) - by Carlo M. Cipolla

« The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:

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

At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous. Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity. No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:

a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.

b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.

The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. Thus in the following pages I will denote the fraction of stupid people within a population by the symbol å.

to be continued...»