All views and claims expressed in this article belong solely to the author.
This piece touches on politics, but, if you were looking for something that calls your most hated politician stupid while praising your chosen party this is not for you.
If you want your views to be handled with kid gloves and be pandered to, you will not find it here there is already an abundance of that elsewhere on the internet.
However, if you can tolerate or , God forbid, appreciate challenges to your assumptions then maybe something I have written here will be of value to you.
Deitrich Bonhoeffer was a dedicated and patriotic German during World War 2 – but he was not a Nazi.
He instead spent his time opposing the Nazi regime and feeding information to the resistance in the hopes of freeing his land from the popular tyranny of the time.
He was captured for his efforts in 1943 and while awaiting his final fate, he penned many letters and observations some of which is the basis for the topic: The kind of stupidity that destroys a nation.
Bonhoeffer is also famous in certain circles for saying that ‘’Stupidity is more dangerous than evil’’.
For those who made it this far and are not familiar with Bonhoeffer’s writing your head might be swimming with assumptions and if you are curious you might genuinely want to know what did he mean by stupidity?
For one, he didn’t mean everyday foolishness, or shameful but genuine mistakes. Misspelling simple words or being a perpetual malaprop are silly and embarrassing in their own ways but that is not what Bonhoeffer meant by stupidity. Nor did he include impulsive behaviour with bad outcomes nor mere ignorance which can be corrected by learning accurate information.
What he did identify as stupidity could be defined by 3 main aspects as follows:
Outsourcing your critical thinking to a third party
Willful ignorance
Conformity
When you let an individual or a group, politician, priest, pastor or influencer or even your favourite aunt do your thinking for you, then you can be said to be outsourcing your critical thinking. This outsourcing is the opposite of continuously taking in new information separating fact from fiction through a logical and coherent methodology and having a consistent and meaningful way of choosing the best option based on the information. As triggering as this is to some, letting your favourite AI do much of your thinking would be stupidity under Bonhoeffer’s definition.
Willful ignorance would be where there is an active avoidance even celebration of not knowing things rather than valuing knowledge or attainment of information. Mocking those who do have knowledge and venerating those who don’t or supporting those who advocate for your form of willful ignorance.
Conformity would be adherence to group think and allowing your group or group identity to determine how you think or what you say, and of course would also strongly influence what you do. It is inherently a surrendering of your ability to individually determine the best course of action in any given situation. It is giving up the exercise of your free will and the negating of your option to apply your own critical thinking.
Bonhoeffer made his observations while witnessing his country of Germany, one of the most if not the most educated and intellectually developed nation at the time, descend into tribal politics, oppression and suppression of both a violent and non-violent nature and eventually all-out megalomania and genocide.
Bonhoeffer’s definition doesn’t refer to either red or blue or left or right…being right or wrong. You are free to hold almost any view, but, it is the way you hold and enforce those beliefs that make you fit into his definition of stupidity; believer, non-believer, opposition or government supporter makes no difference. Blind adherence, dogmatism and faulting or venerating people more for who they are and not what they do completely ruined his nation and can easily destroy ours.
For his troubles and resistance to the Nazi regime, Bonhoeffer was captured in 1943 and eventually executed in 1944 mere weeks before the camp he was being held at was liberated by the allied army but not before leaving his very influential mark on the world and in particular morality and philosophy.
You may say to yourself that we are not Germany, you might even think ”well we are not European” and you are correct.
However, any nation or group can be in danger of falling to the same ills look to the events that led to the religious genocide in Bosnia or the slaughter of the Tutsi, and some moderate Hutu, by the dominant Hutu faction in the 1990’s.
What is the answer to this? Appeals to reasoning and better judgement alone will not help. Arguing with someone who has fallen under the Bonhoeffer’s definition of stupidity will not ever yield good-faith results. These individuals will only ever see you as an enemy or an other. No matter how logical or evidenced your argument is to such individuals you will always be the evil that must be resisted by their righteous will. What is truly terrifying is that you could have two or more individuals all possessed of this same stupidity to some degree, going at each other giving the appearance of a reasonable debater just on different sides of an idea or dispute.
As an alternative, and this is no small task, if we can correctly identify this form of stupidity and the evil it does, in ourselves included, then good and sensible people can rally to face it. With enough sensible individuals acting in common then we can and will overcome. Fostering a culture that tolerates and even encourages reasonable dissent and critical argument will go a long way to providing a remedy.
World War II Germany is but one example where blind adherence took hold, critical thinking was abandoned and a grotesque form of conformity became rampant, there are countless failed nations and ultimately violent movements all over the world that tell a similar tale. Hopefully, we don’t need to repeat the same mistakes to learn to avoid the pitfalls of the type of stupidity that has already devastated millions of lives and will continue to take its foothold here unless we actively choose to resist it.
For a more comprehensive, far superior and yet still humble look at the topic you can view this video:
