Stupidity: Our Worst Enemy

by Madeleine Kando

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil”

wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1943. He was a German pastor known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, for which he was imprisoned and later hanged. In prison, he wrote ‘Prisoners of War’, later published as ‘letters and papers from prison’, in which he tried to understand how Germany had entered such dark times.

Thinking about the nature of evil, he came to the conclusion it was not evil itself that was the most dangerous enemy of the good. It was stupidity.
“You can fight evil” he said. “It always makes men uncomfortable, if nothing worse. Evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction. To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread.”

“But against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. To persuade the stupid person with reason is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer points out three important facts about stupidity:

First, it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. ‘There are men of great intellect who are fools and men of low intellect who are anything but fools’. If you know that something is evil, but choose to ignore it because others ignore it, you are not only stupid but you are also immoral.

Second, stupidity is acquired rather than congenital. ‘The power of one needs the folly of the other. It is apparent that a very strong upsurge of power is so terrific that it deprives men of an independent judgment, and they give up trying […] to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. […] One feels, somehow, especially in conversation with him, that it is impossible to talk to the man himself […]. Instead, one is confronted with a series of slogans, watchwords, and the like, which have acquired power over him. He is under a curse, he is blinded, his very humanity is being prostituted and exploited.’ — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

And third, it is less common in the unsociable or the solitary than in individuals who are inclined to sociability. It is a sociological problem rather than psychological.

    

If stupidity is applied to an individual, that’s one thing. I would qualify some of my neighbors as stupid. The one who cut down a 250 year old white pine because he didn’t want to bother raking pine needles in the fall. Or another neighbor who almost burnt down his own house because he started burning brush on an extremely windy day. But when a group of people starts acting stupid, believing that the Covid vaccine is the government’s way of implanting chips in your brain, it affects me and others in society.

Although Bonhoeffer says that stupidity (he calls it folly) is ‘acquired’ rather than ‘congenital’, our species has a tendency to follow the herd when there is not enough information to make a decision. Let’s say you have to cross a river. You see others cross and think its ok, even though you do not really know if the current will be too strong. Our ancestors survived because they lived in groups, so the herd mentality is baked into our genes. 

But herd behavior is also one of the primary sources of stupidity. In his famous Conformity experiment, The Polish-American psychologist Solomon Asch asked a participant to choose which line was the same length as the target line (see illlustration). A group of fake participants purposely gave the wrong answer, the real participant coming last. Most of the time he agreed with the group, even though he knew it was the wrong answer. A bit like the Emperor without Clothes fable. Put ‘Confirmation bias’ in the mix and you have a perfect recipe for disaster. 

The internet is giving us so much (bad) information, it has Dumbed down America . My friend Jane has written off on reading. ‘Newspapers and books are a thing of the past’, she says. ‘I get my information from TV channels and YouTube. Why should I spend my time reading?’

She says I am old school, a dying breed, because I read the news and I read books to inform myself about climate change. ‘Things change so quickly these days’, she says. ‘It takes 2 years to publish a book and by that time it is already obsolete’. The Greek philosophers are obsolete, Dostoyevsky is obsolete, Camus, Sartre, Garcia Lorca, they are all obsolete. Who cares about them?

She has fallen victim to this terrible disease called ‘anti-intellectualism’. There is a very long tradition of  anti-intellectualism in America, explained brilliantly in this this article: Understanding Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S. and how it is literally killing us. I am not an intellectual, but I have great respect for intellectuals. For thinkers whose intelligence is not their main driving force, but their pursuit of knowledge, an abstract endeavor that does not yield practical results.

Jane doesn’t value the opinion of experts. They just muddy the waters of a quick, uncomplicated way of getting to what you want to know. I asked her what E=mc2 means. Neither of us knew the answer until I googled it. But isn’t it important to know that you don’t know. It is even more important to understand that there are people who do know. (See my post on The Dunning Kruger Effect).

It is collective stupidity that eliminated the Public Option* from the Affordable Care Act. It is collective stupidity that prevents President Biden from forging ahead with his much needed Build Back Better Plan. Collective stupidity has stopped us from restricting access to guns. It has allowed our government to spend too much of Americans’ hard earned money on defense and a surveillance apparatus. The real enemy of this country we can not fight with artillery or stealth bombers. It is the Government’s inability to provide decent health care, maternity leave, a reasonable minimum wage and vacation time.

Is there any way to overcome collective stupidity? Can we develop an anti-stupidity vaccine? Reach herd immunity before the stupidity virus wipes us all out? Bonheoffer, who was deeply religious, saw ‘the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God as the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.’ Replace the word ‘God’ with ‘Conscience’ and you are well on your way to fight stupidity.

Stupidity is our National Enemy. Our collective conscience might be the solution. leave comment here

* A public option is a health insurance coverage program run by the government, which would have provided competition for the private health insurance and brought prices down.

One of my sources: Bonheoffer’s Theory of Stupidity Explains The World Perfectly