Dietrich Bonhoeffer‘s Theory of Stupidity

[Fleetinglife]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young pastor in Germany in the 1930s, argued that stupid people are more dangerous than evil ones. This is because while we can protest against or fight evil people, against stupid ones we are defenseless — reasons fall on death ears. Bonhoeffer's famous text, which we slightly edited for this video, serves any free society as a warning of what can happen when certain people gain too much power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc

In prison, Bonhoeffer began to reflect on how his country of thinkers and poets had turned into a collective of cowards, crooks and criminals. Eventually he concluded that the root of the problem was not malice, but stupidity.  In his famous letters from prison, Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy to good than malice, because while ''one may protest against evil; it can be exposed and prevented by the use of force, against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protestes nor use of force accomplish anything here. Reason falls on deaf ears.''

Facts that contradict a stupid person's prejudgement simply need not be believed and when they are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, incidental. In all this the stupid person is self-satisfied, and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous, by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. 

If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its 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 yet stupid, and yet others who are intellectualy dull but anything but stupid.

The impression one gains is that stupidity is not so much a congenital defect but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or rather, they allow this to happen to 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 a psychological than a sociological problem. 

It becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power, be it of political or religious nature, infects a large part of humanity with stupidity. Almost as if this is a sociological-psychological law, where the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, such as intellect, suddenly fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up on the autonomous position.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn, must not blind us from the fact that he is not independent. 

In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possesion of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil - incapable of seeing that it is evil.

Only an act of liberation, not instruction can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until hen, we must abandon all atempts to convince the stupid person.

''Action springs not from thought, but from readiness for responsibility. The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children.'' - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, After Ten Years