It's a 2-by-2 matrix, so of course it's going to be oversimplified. The stupid people often believe they're pursuing their own gain, but are too ignorant and m

It's a 2-by-2 matrix, so of course it's going to be oversimplified. The stupid people often believe they're pursuing their own gain, but are too ignorant and misguided to do so. In practice, I think the bandits are more dangerous. In a corrupt and declining society such as ours, they end up running the show. Stupid people are like the magnetic charges in a block of iron. Because their stupidity is fairly random, they tend to cancel each other out under normal conditions, and therefore are not very dangerous (except to themselves) on a macroscopic level. When those charges become aligned and they now have macroscopic pull (as we see in the modern "religious right" and the Tea Party movement) they become scary, but that can only happen when they've been manipulated by (crafty, and likely intelligent at least in the IQ sense) bandits.