The Danger of Stupid People

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was an ethnic German, Polish born, Lutheran Pastor in WW2’s Germany. He was imprisoned for his unwavering stand against Nazism. He was hanged in a concentration camp, two weeks before the camp was liberated by the Americans.  During his captivity, Bonhoeffer reflected on how his country of Universities, philosophers and poets, had been taken over by a collective of criminals and murderers.

Eventually, he concluded that the root of the problem was not malice, but stupidity, and in his famous letters from prison, Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity, is a far more dangerous enemy of good than malice because we may protest against evil, it can be exposed and prevented by the use of force against it. However, we are defenseless against stupidity.

Bonhoeffer recognized that neither reason, nor the threat of force, could deter stupid people from doing harmful things. That any genuine attempt to reason would fall on deaf ears, and that a stupid person‘s reasoning simply could not be altered. Even when presented with irrefutable evidence, they would just push it aside as inconsequential or as incidental. Stupid people are self-satisfied in their ignorance, and being easily irritated, become dangerous when confronted with facts and reason. 

For that reason greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. If we want to know how to battle stupidity, we must seek to understand their nature. This much is certain: stupidity, is in essence, not an intellectual defect, but a moral one. There are human beings who are remarkably agile intellectually but stupid. Others are intellectually dull but anything but stupid. 

The truth, once realized, is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that under certain circumstances, people are made stupid, or rather, they allow stupidity to take over them. People who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals in groups, and so it would seem that stupidity, is perhaps less psychological, than sociological. 

Therefore, it becomes apparent that, with a strong upsurge of power, be of a political or religious nature, a large part of humanity is infected with blind stupidity. It is almost as if the one seeking power is in need of the stupidity of the other to advance and secure itself. 

According to Bonhoeffer, the phenomenon at work here is not that intellect suddenly fails, instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of that thought independence and more or less, consciously surrender their autonomous perceptions.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn and narrow minded, is indicative of self-imposed blindness to the fact that he or she, is no longer thought independent. For example, when dealing with such a person, you realize that instead of rational debate, they repeat the slogans and phrases they have been exposed to using catch words of the like that have taken possession of them. 

These people are under a sort of mind-control spell, blinded, misused, and exploited as useful tools to obtain the goals of those seeking power. The stupid person will also be capable of any evil, incapable of seeing that it is evil. Like the saying goes: “Those who make us believe in absurdities, can make us commit atrocities.”

Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases, a genuine internal liberation from the constant brainwashing is only possible when physical liberation has preceded it. The individual must be removed physically from the influences that control their thought and action. Until then, we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. 

According to Bonhoeffer, morality springs forth not from thought, but from a readiness to accept responsibility for one’s actions, and that the ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to it’s children.

Bonhoeffer died due to his alleged involvement in the plot against Adolf Hitler. At dawn, on April 9th, 1945, at Flossenbürg concentration camp, just two weeks before soldiers from the United States liberated the camp.