Note:: I am not claiming humanity can avoid these idiocies. In fact, I doubt we can. Humans are the first animals on the planet just barely bright enough to bang two rocks together to make three rocks. As with the dancing bear, the wonder is not that humans think badly, but that we think at all. But the moth's inability to resist the lure of the candleflame does not make its suicidal behavior rational or even adaptive — only tragic.
Contagious diseases are unavoidable. It is inevitable that the occasional E Coli strain will exploit its host rather than cooperate with it. It is inevitable that the occasional gene will go viral and become self-propagating by inducing its host to sneeze. It is inevitable that the occasional madness will become self-propagating by inducing its host to proselytize.
But we do not encourage patients suffering from contagious diseases like typhoid or HIV to infect others, whereas as a civilization we do encourage patients suffering from contagious mental diseases to infect others.
How does one measure the cost of tens of thousands of childred led to death or slavery in a Children's Crusade organized by a religous fanatic?
By encouraging infection, we impose needless costs upon humanity.
Every time a few dozen people die from poisoned pudding fed to them by their head fanatic, that is a needless cost.
Every time a few hundred people die from poisoned Kool-Aid fed to them by their head fanatic, that is a needless cost.
Every time a few billion people die in a war led by their head fanatics, that is a needless cost.
Idiotic!
Every activity has external effects. Some activities harm others, some activities help others. Elementary economics dictates that society internalize these external costs to reduce net loss of wealth to them. Efficiency requires that we tax or fine behaviors which harm others to reduce their frequency toward the social optimum. Similarly it requires that we reward behaviors which benefit others to increase their frequency toward the social optimum. We tax cars because every additional car on the road increases congestion, imposing a cost upon all other drivers. We subsidize subways and buses because every additional rider increases the frequency of service, benefitting all other riders.
But in all too many cases perverse incentives are instituted, actively rewarding antisocial behavior. To take just one example, tobacco smoking has killed hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Taking GM's classic valuation of $100,000 per life, that represents a direct cost to humanity of tens of trillions of dollars. Yet human civilization provides tens of billions of dollars of subsidies to tobacco farmers to promote this activity.
Idiotic!
It is elementary economics that once one has made a sunk investment, it pays to make maximum use of that investment. No corporation installs a blast furnace and then forbids its employees from using it. No sane parents buy clothes for their children and then forbid wearing of them.
Once software has been written, society generates maximum return on that investment by encouraging as many people as possible to improve productivity by using it. Charging for software is a way of ensuring that much — often most — of the potential benefit of developing a software package is lost to human civilization, thus impoverishing humanity as whole.
The charge mechanism does enrich a tiny minority, but only at the the expense of enormously larger losses to human civilization as a whole.
Idiotic!
Given two engineering solutions, one of which is clearly better than the other, any rational being would encourage use of the better solution.
Not humans!
Humanity has instituted an elaborate system to levy fines on engineers who use known-best solutions in their designs.
The fines are called "royalties" because they hark back to medieval royal monopolies.
The result is to drain trillions of dollars of wealth from human civilization by systematically encouraging pointless re-invention of the wheel, pervasive use of inferior wheels, and multi-decade delays in widespread adoption of badly needed techniques and tools.
Idiotic!
Digging a hole sometimes makes sense.
Filling in a hole sometimes makes sense.
But digging a hole only to fill it in again never makes sense. It is always more efficient to just not dig the hole in the first place.
Any critter more intelligent than a cockroach could work that out.
Not humans.
Humans have been putting up cities only to knock them down again for ten thousand years. Which is to say, for as long as we've been putting up cities at all — the oldest known cities all have defensive walls.
The Great War — the "War to End War" — was the most expensive idiocy in human history until it had to be renamed to make way for World War II, which destroyed even more wealth.
World War III has already drained tens of trillions of dollars of wealth from human civilization — and it hasn't even started yet.
Ultimately it will result in the complete extermination of humanity — the highest price humanity will ever pay and greatest idiocy humanity will ever commit.
Let's all drink to that — an end to human idiocy!
Cheers!