Alain de Bottom

Read "A Point of View: In defence of the nanny state" and weep. It kicks off with the straw man to beat them all:

A key assumption of modern politics is that we should be left alone to live as we like without being nagged, without fear of moral judgment. Freedom has become our supreme political virtue. It is not thought to be the government's task to promote a vision of how we should act towards one another or to send us to hear lectures about parenting, chivalry or politeness. Modern politics, on both left and right, is dominated by what we can call a libertarian ideology.

Hello? What society is this turkey living in? Then we have an exegesis about Judaism, a moan about advertising and other non sequiturs. What a pile of crap.

Yeah, well I guess that's what you can expect from what the BBC construes to be a philosopher.

Carlo Cipolla's basic laws of human stupidity

I only knew the late Carlo C through his valuable Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700 (1965), but on Googling him just now I came across this 1988 essay "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity". They are:

1. Always and inevitably each of us underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a given person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic possessed by that person.
3. A person is stupid if they cause damage to another person or group of people without experiencing personal gain, or even worse causing damage to themselves in the process.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the harmful potential of stupid people; they constantly forget that at any time anywhere, and in any circumstance, dealing with or associating themselves with stupid individuals invariably constitutes a costly error.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person there is.

I think that may be the most moving analysis of the human condition I have ever read.