The Encyclopedia of Stupidity

"It’s actually about people in general. Matthijs van Boxsel has been working on a long-term project, which is an encyclopaedia of stupidity. He lists all the ways in which people are stupid. His main theory is that, unlike other animals, people are self-destructive by nature. If you are self-destructive, you need to evolve some kind of ability to overcome all the bad things that you do to yourself – and that is what he calls intelligence. As a species, human beings have to overcome their own stupidity by becoming intelligent, according to him. I really like that theory. I talked to him about Dutch people. “Do we have a specific type of stupidity?” I asked him. He said, “Well, when the first people came here, there was almost no land, it was just water. They should have just rowed on, but no, they had to live here.” He says, essentially, that the Dutch have been finding ways to fight water through all these centuries and we have become very good at it. Most of our land is below sea level and we still have to fight water constantly. There’s something stupid about the stereotype of the Dutch woman, who is very bossy in a relationship, while the Dutch man is very subordinate and not very macho. There are comic books and drawings from centuries ago, in which men are warned not to marry because they will be slaves to their wives. There is something of stupidity in there by both sexes: By men, that they still fall for that and get trapped in marriage, and by women, that somehow they change, that they are very sweet before marriage and very angry and bossy after marriage. There is something self-destructive in that."