“We cannot bet on the idea of a critical thinking class to eliminate stupidity. Some governments might implement it many years from now, some likely never will. As we know, most countries institutionally are interested in keeping their population stupid, manipulable, and susceptible to propaganda.”
What if the defining trait of modern civilization wasn’t intelligence, but its opposite, ritualized, institutionalized self-sabotage? What if, beneath our patents and payloads, the dominant feature of Homo sapiens was not reason or innovation, but patterned, systemic self-destruction? Cezary Pietrasik’s Homo Idioticus makes exactly that claim, and does so with a forensic curiosity rarely found in popular nonfiction. This is not satire. It is a stark anatomy of failure, historical, neurological, institutional, and above all, cultural.
The book opens with a scene of catastrophe narrowly averted: the near-detonation of a nuclear warhead in October 1962 by a Soviet submarine crew misreading American depth charges. The world, Pietrasik notes, was spared not by protocol but by a single man, Vasily Arkhipov, who refused to authorize the launch.
“The world didn’t end that day,” Pietrasik observes, “but it came terrifyingly close.”
This anecdote is not an outlier, it is the urtext of the idioticus condition: systems optimized for catastrophe, interrupted by accidents of character.
Pietrasik’s thesis is deceptively simple: we are the product of Paleolithic hardware misfiring in post-industrial environments.
“Our brains are still optimized for surviving in the African savanna,” he writes.
But what gives the book its disturbing momentum is his demonstration that stupidity is no longer local. It is structured, distributed, and incentivized. We are not merely irrational; we have built architectures of idiocy, from dysfunctional tax codes to virally transmitted conspiracy theories, that reward ignorance and punish discernment.
The examples come fast and damning. Pietrasik describes the global decline in cognitive ability through the lens of the Negative Flynn Effect, which I have written extensively about on this Substack, a reversal of the 20th-century trend in rising IQ scores. He draws on data from Norway and the UK showing that each new generation performs worse than the last. He argues that we aren’t just failing to get smarter, but are in fact “going downhill intellectually”, warning that even the metrics we use to measure intelligence can’t hide the trend.
Then there’s the American healthcare system, which Pietrasik skewers as a marvel of institutionalized stupidity. Despite being the most expensive system in the world, it ranks poorly in outcomes. In a sane world, this would be a scandal. In ours, it’s a line item, arguing that bureaucracy and profit-making have supplanted wellness as the system’s core mission.
He also recounts personal entanglements with Polish bureaucracy. Similarly, I have personal experience of the inability to cancel a cable subscription because the required office no longer exists. It’s not a joke either, it’s a symptom of systems that persist out of habit, long after their functionality has collapsed.
Even absurdity has data. Pietrasik cites the viral poll in which 56% of Americans said Arabic numerals shouldn’t be taught in schools, unaware that these include the digits 1 through 9. This is what happens when ignorance goes viral, driving home that stupidity is no longer private, it is performative, contagious, and algorithmically rewarded.
In Brazil, military pensions hinge absurdly on marital status, incentivizing lifelong single status:
Imagine you’re a smart, lovely, dynamic Brazilian lady, age 25, who just graduated from university. You’ve had the same boyfriend, an equally splendid person, for three years, and things are going great. You are maybe ready to live together, get a dog, have some kids, and live happily ever after. Most people at this stage would likely consider getting married.
Not Brazilians. For many, it just doesn’t make financial sense.
In Brazil, if your father entered the Brazilian military before 2001, upon his death, you, as an unmarried daughter, are entitled to his pension for the rest of your life. Thus, Brazil’s military personnel have an abnormally high percentage of unmarried daughters. It is not because these ladies are unloved, chaste, or man haters. It’s because of the pension rules.
In the United States, gun laws and public health policy are shaped more by tradition than outcome: “We’d rather bury children than challenge eighteenth-century text.” Pietrasik's phrase, “fossils of stupidity preserved in law,” captures the essence of how idiocy endures not by persuasion but by inertia.
Beautiful Stupidity
And yet, the book’s most startling move comes not in its critique but in its generosity. In a chapter titled “Beautiful Stupidity,” Pietrasik defends a subset of irrational acts, those rooted in love, sacrifice, or transcendence, as not only forgivable but essential to our species. “Some acts of illogical courage,” he writes, “are the very fabric of our humanity.” Here, stupidity shades into grace: the firefighter who rushes into a collapsing building, the artist who labors in obscurity, the parent who chooses hope in a hopeless time. Pietrasik’s argument isn’t that all irrationality is bad, but that it must be chosen, not inherited.
Still, no analysis of the book is complete without grappling with Part III, its most urgent section: what to do about it. Pietrasik does not settle for philosophical handwringing. He offers, in clear prose, a set of prescriptive pillars:
Education: He calls for mandatory courses in logic, critical thinking, and bias detection in secondary schools. Teaching math without teaching how to think, is like giving someone a scalpel without explaining surgery.
Mindset: He argues for what he calls the ‘daily will to fight idiocy’, a kind of intellectual hygiene. Whether confronting bureaucratic nonsense, online misinformation, or lazy moralism, the antidote is not grand reform but relentless micro-resistance. He advocates for lessons in critical thinking but states:
We cannot bet on the idea of a critical thinking class to eliminate stupidity. Some governments might implement it many years from now, some likely never will. As we know, most countries institutionally are interested in keeping their population stupid, manipulable, and susceptible to propaganda.
Structural Overhaul: In his ‘benevolent dictator’ thought experiment, Pietrasik proposes sweeping changes: shifting healthcare to prevention-based models, campaign finance reform, and a legal system built around clarity, not complexity. These are not utopian proposals, they are, as he insists, ‘the minimum required to survive our own design.’
Bloom’s two sigma: As I have advocated, using AI to provide private tutoring. “Today AI can replace one-on-one tutors, which have been prohibitively expensive. With careful, thoughtful design of online, AI-driven courses, children can move ahead at their own pace.”
And yet, for all its force, Homo Idioticus is not immune to critique. Its scope, ambitious, often exhilarating, sometimes slips into overreach. The definition of stupidity he offers (“irrational behavior that produces suboptimal results”) is so encompassing it risks flattening nuance.
Is every misjudgment stupidity? Is improvisation in uncertainty also idiocy? And while Pietrasik acknowledges his Western lens, “I’ve never lived in Asia or Africa and my knowledge of those cultures is limited”, the book remains largely fixated on U.S., U.K., and Europe dysfunction. The global applicability of his thesis deserves interrogation.
There is also a faint elitism in the framing. By diagnosing mass idiocy, does Pietrasik position himself, and by extension, the reader, as an enlightened observer of a herd? The author is self-aware enough to critique his own failings, but the risk lingers: that the book might harden the very divides it seeks to transcend.
Nevertheless, Homo Idioticus is a civic act. It does not excuse itself with irony or posture. Its purpose is clear: to shake the reader from fatalism. The enemy is not stupidity per se, but its socialization, the way it becomes tradition, policy, culture. And the antidote, finally, is not doubt alone but action.
To read this book, which many should, is to receive both a summons and a manual. Its sting lies in recognition, its power in clarity. What we do with it is, inevitably, the next stupid, or beautiful, chapter.
Stay curious
Colin
Other reading
Stupidity: Our biggest threat?
Absolutely amazed at the brevity of this writing. I feel like you could have easily turned this into a 5000-word essay.
I have to ask though, have you seen "Idiocracy?" There are some really dumb moments, since it's an early 2000's comedy, but there are parts of it that are disturbingly prophetic. Even though it's a comedy, it's really tough to laugh at in the context of where we are at in 2025.
The choice of critical thinking, as exemplified by Vasily, his heroism.
The Bayesian view of checking your priors to better upgrade outcomes.
Questions rather than rote answers never to be questioned. The absurdity of the answer, “It just is.”