Three climate activists were arrested and charged on Tuesday, March 5, 2024, after parking a large truck across three lanes of Melbourne’s busy West Gate Bridge, causing peak-hour traffic delays on day two of the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit.

The Extinction Rebellion Victoria activists sat on top of a truck they parked across Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge just before 8 am, and then unfolded a large banner that read ‘climate breakdown has begun’ and ‘declare a climate emergency’.

I live in Sydney, so I wasn’t physically inconvenienced by the extinction of reason among those activists, but I was deeply agitated by it – as I am by all climate activist performances. It’s the stupidity, stupid.

First of all, in a country that is defenestrating itself out of windows of rationality thanks to idiotic climate change-related policies such as Net Zero, making demands to ‘do something about the horrors of climate change’ is redundant to the point of stupidity.

Second, to harp on about a ‘climate emergency’ that is simply a mantra, not a reality, is made redundant by the UN’s Antonio Guterres’ earlier declaration that we are, actually, ‘In the era of global boiling.’ ‘Climate emergency’ is so old hat – and stupid.

Third, most climate desperates such as those who hide behind banners, are pathetically uninformed, suggesting by their actions that they believe Australia could do something (more than it already, sadly, does) to mitigate against the ‘emergency’.

Fourth, claims such as ‘climate breakdown has begun’ are plain stupid, and absurdly made up, adding infuriation to the inconvenience of those disturbed by the street theatre. Where? What? How? What breakdown? It’s a false excuse, not a reason for activism.

These arguments against climate stupidism accumulate into a tsunami of irritation that provokes a boiling of its own.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity is a short essay written by the Italian economist Carlo Cipolla. The first edition was written in English and released in 1976. It’s the bible for the anti-stupid cohort. Here are some of the laws:

1st Basic Law 

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

2nd Basic Law 

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

3rd Basic Law 

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.

Carlo Cipolla considered this the golden and most important law, never to be forgotten. He did not consider stupidity a matter of IQ, but rather a lack of relational skills. In particular, he believed that it is possible to classify people based on their behaviour. Stupid people are the ones who harm others and often themselves.

Clearly, the 3rd Basic Law especially applies to these activists.

But I detest climate activists, from soup throwers to glue warriors, mostly for the reason articulated by the late Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his letters from prison about stupidity: I am defenceless against it.

‘Against stupidity we are defenceless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.’

And achieves nothing.

I detest them because their stupidity makes me furiously impotent.

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