Why Stupidity Is More Dangerous Than Evil

Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew more than you or I probably ever knew about the line between stupidity and outright evil. A Lutheran pastor and theologian sat in the front row watching the Nazis – the most evil fools in history (or the most stupid evil people) – rise to power and come to power through terror in the 1930s and 40s.

In a letter to his friends, family and followers, written while he was awaiting execution in the Flossenbürg concentration camp for his role in the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler , Bonhoeffer detailed his thoughts on the root cause of the moral and intellectual infection that led to the Third Reich. His conclusion: This is stupidity, stupidity.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of goodness than malice,” wrote Bonhoeffer, “[evil] can be exposed and, if necessary, prevented by the use of force. Evil always bears within itself the germ of its own overthrow, for it leaves in men at least a sense of unrest. We are defenseless against stupidity.”

you are probably dumb

Before labeling a group you don’t agree with “stupid” and moving on, consider that you might be stupid. Stupid people don’t think they’re stupid after all; according to Bonhoeffer, “stupidity” is not defined by the trappings of “cleverness” anyway. “This is essentially not an intellectual defect, but a human one,” he writes. “There are people who are remarkably flexible in intellect but are stupid, and others who are intellectually rather dumb but not stupid at all.”

Stupidity, according to Bonhoeffer, is a sociological problem. “This is a special form of the influence of historical circumstances on a person, a psychological companion of certain external conditions.” Bonhoeffer defined the cause of public stupidity as follows: “Every strong rise of power in the public sphere, whether political or religious, infects a large part of humanity with stupidity. It would even seem that this is almost a sociological and psychological law.

Connectivity, technology and stupidity

If stupidity is a sociological condition, then the people who are most likely to avoid it are those who are isolated from others, as Bonhoeffer said: “[People] who live alone show this disadvantage less often than individuals or groups of people. prone to or doomed to sociability.

Bonhoeffer didn’t have to reckon with our current technology-enabled artificial connection, but I doubt he would have considered “all online” physical isolation as much of a defense against stupidity as the monastic, spiritual life he envisioned. We are all lonely these days, but that doesn’t make us any less stupid.

Not to put words into the guy’s mouth, but it seems that social networks and the Internet are just additional methods of infecting the masses with stupidity, perhaps more effective, because they completely exclude live human interaction.

Consider this description of a typical stupid person from Bonhoeffer:

“He is not independent. In a conversation with him, you almost feel that you are not dealing with a person at all, but with the slogans, catchphrases, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is bewitched, blinded, misused and insulted to the very core of his being.”

Sounds familiar, huh?

How do we fight evil?

It’s easy to fight evil. You dedicate your existence to counteracting it, while ignoring the danger you are in. Bonhoeffer opposed Nazism both publicly and privately. He rallied opposition to the Party behind the scenes among his religious colleagues and denounced Nazi racism from the pulpit in a clear and unwavering manner. He secretly worked with the German resistance to help the Allies and then refused to flee Germany even when it became clear they wanted him at the end of the rope.

The fight against evil makes sense. There are concrete steps you can take (if you have the courage). The difficulty lies in recognizing evil. Bonhoeffer had dedicated his life to studying and understanding a merciful God and had seen first hand how Jews, Gypsies, gays and others were oppressed by a bloodthirsty regime, so it was not difficult for him to point to Hitler and other Nazis and say: “They are bad!”

But the ordinary Nazis of the 40s did not consider themselves evil – they thought that Hitler was fighting for the freedom of Germany. Humans almost never see themselves as being evil or supporting evil deeds, but we are generally too stupid to know the difference—another testament to the superiority of stupidity in causing human suffering and the need to fight stupidity, not evil.

How to deal with fools?

Suppose for the moment that you and I are not stupid and that we personally have the courage to even try: what can we do with the scourge of stupidity? According to Bonhoeffer, stupidity cannot be fought with reason, facts, protests or fists, because for fools “reasons are ignored; facts that contradict one’s prejudice are simply not to be believed… and when the facts are undeniable, they are simply dismissed as irrelevant, as accidental. With all this, a stupid person, unlike an evil one, is completely self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous, going on the attack.

As for the “solution”, Bonhoeffer suggests the following:

“Only the act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that, in most cases, true inner liberation becomes possible only when it has been preceded by outer liberation. Until then, we must give up all attempts to convince a foolish person.”

I am not sure how “external liberation” can be achieved without some kind of “rise of power in the public sphere” leading primarily to stupidity – after all, how many seemingly righteous and just socio-political movements ended in bloodshed, oppression and stupidity during the whole history? I want to say “all of them” but I’m too stupid to know.

According to Bonhoeffer, a less stupid world will depend on “whether those in power expect more from the stupidity of people than from their inner independence and wisdom.” But this solution assumes that morality exists beyond humanity’s feeble agreement with it. For Bonhoeffer, the answer to stupidity is God: “The Bible’s saying that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom proclaims that man’s inner liberation to live a responsible life before God is the only true way to overcome stupidity.”

But Bonhoeffer’s God is clearly different from what most German Christians worshiped during the war – few Catholic or Protestant communities opposed the Nazis like the “Confessing Church” Bonhoeffer belonged to, and many Christians did not see the contradiction between worshiping God. and be a Nazi. But even if everyone in Germany agreed that Bonhoeffer’s God was who they believed in, that doesn’t explain all the non-Judeo-Christian manifestations of spirituality in the world, and it doesn’t leave hope for those of us who think all religion is crap.

The Evil, Stupid Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In the last weeks of World War II, when Russia had already entered Berlin, Bonhoeffer was sentenced to death by a kangaroo court. A Flossenbürg concentration camp doctor who witnessed the execution said that Bonhoeffer prayed quietly and then heroically climbed the gallows to meet his death. But many historians suspect that the doctor/witness was trying to lessen his guilt for overseeing Nazi executions, and it’s more likely that Bonhoeffer was tortured to death. In any case, he met his creator, if there is one.

Evil Revisited: Donald Ewen Cameron

A few years after Bonhoeffer’s hanging and the fall of the Third Reich, Dr. Donald Ewan Cameron, eminent psychiatrist and president of the American Psychiatric Association, was brought in to interview war criminals at Nuremberg to try to sort out Nazi atrocities and make sure nothing happened. how the Holocaust ever happened again. After studying German society, Cameron came to the same conclusion as Bonhoeffer. He called it “mental illness” rather than “stupidity,” but Cameron agreed that Nazism was the result of a sort of social contagion.

According to Cameron, among the four “dangerous” personality types that made up the Nazis were the “passive person” who “would stand up to anything and stand up for nothing” and the “insecure person”, whom Cameron considered “a driven mob who forces the army of an authoritarian overlord; they are the filling of conservatism …. They are afraid of the stranger, they are afraid of a new idea; they are afraid to live and afraid to die.” Again, sound familiar?

Shocked by the horror of Nazi Germany and the potential for a nuclear war to end civilization, Cameron devoted his professional and intellectual life to combating social evils, using the tools of psychiatry instead of religion. He believed that if scientific principles were used to improve human behavior, we could completely eradicate evil and stupidity. Or at least not kill everyone on earth.

By applying groundbreaking methods at the forefront of medicine, Cameron set out to break the stereotyped mindset of his patients, who mostly suffered from relatively minor mental health issues. At his research center at McGill University, Cameron drugged patients with powerful tranquilizers and paralytics that either kept them asleep or awake but left them paralyzed for weeks on end. He performed “electrical lobotomies,” hitting the brains of patients again and again with near-lethal blasts of electricity. He fed them monstrous doses of LSD and put helmets on their heads with speakers that played the same 10-second loop of their own voice at deafening volume for weeks on end.

Essentially, Cameron wiped the minds of his patients. People who came to him for help with mild depression left his horror lab intemperate after a few months, unable to remember their parents or even talk. It turns out that even if you are a famous doctor, you cannot destroy someone’s inner world and replace it with the one you like best. Oops.

Whether he knew it or not is an open question, but Cameron’s work was funded by the CIA, which used the results of this program (and others like it) to ” develop a science-based system for extracting information from ‘sustainable sources’.” In other words, torture .” Remember Abu Ghraib? It was connected with the ideas of Cameron.

Was Cameron evil? He certainly didn’t think so. His lyrics include the line “Am I not amazing ?” an atmosphere characteristic of those who consider themselves heroically good. As is often the case, society responded by rewarding Cameron’s work (at least for his public activities) with money, power, and the kind of respect accorded only to members of society’s upper echelons.

Cameron wasn’t “stupid” either, at least not in the way we usually think of the word. He didn’t develop his ideas about human behavior by passively accepting propaganda like some goddamn Nazi. He applied the academic rigor he had developed at the most prestigious universities and medical schools in the free world to conclude that the way out of depression was to put vulnerable people in torture helmets for weeks on end.

Evil or not, Cameron died of a heart attack while hiking with his son in the Adirondacks at the age of 65, never publicly (or privately, to our knowledge) admitting any misgivings or regrets about his work.