Customer Reviews

The Encyclopedia of Stupidity

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I heard about this book a few years ago from some friends in Amsterdam who read it in the original Dutch and couldn't stop talking about it. Now I finally understand what they were laughing about.

I first realized I was interested in the nature of stupidity after reading a few editions of the Darwin Awards, the silly Internet mailings that detailed the adventures of people who died in stupid ways, or, as the creators of the awards put it, "improve our gene pool ... by removing themselves from it." But while The Encyclopedia of Stupidity honors that style (it even includes a brief discussion of the Darwin Awards), it goes beyond that.

In sum: if it's not impossible to be clever about stupidity, then that's exactly what author Matthijs van Boxsel manages to do.

On the most obvious level, this substantial volume is a simple collection of trivia, anecdotes, and ruminations. But as you read through example after example drawn from everything between myth and history to popular culture and dark humor, it becomes clear that there is a sort of "theory of stupidity" that binds the whole thing together.

Mr. van Boxsel at one point frames stupidity as "unwitting self-destruction, the ability to act against one's best wishes." In other words, the book seems to be telling us, the trait the book disects is not a lack of intelligence but a very human kind of flawed or mistaken intelligence, the darkness that makes the light true intelligence visible.

The book is more funny than serious, though there are bits of both styles on its pages. And like any encyclopedia, it is more fun to just open up to a random page and read what is there than it is to read from cover to cover. Enjoy.

Originally published in the Dutch language as De Encyclopedie van de Domheid in 1999, this revised and enlarged English edition (2003) provides a collection of short essays concerned with the follies of human behavior, rather than an alphanumeric dictionary of tabulated entries cataloguing acts of stupidity, as the title might suggest. Indeed, rather than citing the familiar and widely acclaimed retellings of the behavior of idiots and stupids, Van Boxsel treats the reader to a refreshingly new montage of the less frequently cited behavioral repertoire of select eccentrics, collectors and oddballs.


Self-reflexively, and true to his own thesis, the author's penchant for collecting the material collated in this volume, was perhaps less a result of his desire to present it in this way, than was it embarked upon in an attempt to perhaps overcome his [own] stupidity, if not its very intangibility. Although a large number of definitions and examples of stupidity are put forth throughout the books eight chapters, the reviewer was left unenlightened (though thoroughly entertained) with regards the formation of any new understanding of the evolutionary or cognitive mechanisms underlying human stupidity (seen as "not a failing, but a force." p.20). However, this in no way a failing of the book's intended purpose.


Occasionally using koans, paradoxes, jokes and catch phrases as examples, van Boxsel's writing was (at least in the earlier sections) reminiscent of D. Hofstadter's excellent use of dialogues in his Godel, Escher, Bach...., but in the Encyclopaedia of Stupidity there is little discussion or further contextualization following presentation of the examples given. This leaves further entertainment options for the reader, of course, but some may wish to be provided with more detail from the author's own point of view.


In part literary, part historical, philosophical, and large part art critical, van Boxsel's commentaries on his thoughts concerning stupidity and such considered acts, span ancient accounts (include the biblical and classical 'blind to faith' eras), through modern stupidity (where knowing too much of the wrong detail can cause the problem), to our own more post-modern forms of stupidity (our stupidity at work in what we do, not merely in what we think we are doing).


Superbly illustrated throughout, the text is perhaps poorly referenced for the reader wishing to further negotiate with the author's primary sources. An index and/or extended bibliography would also be welcome. But without wanting to give away too much here in review, van Boxsel will convince many that the true enemies of stupidity are satire and (yes, you've maybe guessed already), a good encyclopedia -- two forces which are becoming increasingly impotent in their ability to prevent our tending towards stupid behavior.

Dr. Tony Dickinson, McDonnell Center for Higher Brain Function
Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis.