Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity
It was the darkest chapter in German history. A time when mobs threw stones at innocent shopkeepers' windows and women and children were brutally humiliated in the streets. It was during this time that the young pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer began to publicly speak out against the atrocities.
After years of trying to convince people to change their minds, Bonhoeffer returned home one evening. His own father informed him that two men were waiting in his room to arrest him.
In prison, Bonhoeffer began to reflect on how his country of poets and thinkers had become a collective of cowards, swindlers and criminals. He eventually came to the conclusion that the root of the problem was not anger, but stupidity.
In his famous Letters from Prison, Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of good than evil. After all, โif we can protest against evil, expose and prevent it with the help of violence, then we are defenseless against stupidity. Neither protests nor the use of force have any effect here. Arguments remain unanswered.โ
Facts that contradict the prejudices of a stupid person are simply not believed, and if they are irrefutable, then they are simply brushed aside as unimportant, as irrelevant.
Despite all this, a stupid person is complacent. He is easily provoked and becomes dangerous when he goes on the attack.
For this reason, greater caution is required when dealing with a stupid person than with an evil one. If we want to know how to overcome stupidity, we must try to understand its nature.
This is certain: Stupidity is, in fact, not an intellectual, but a moral flaw. There are people who are amazingly intellectually developed and at the same time stupid. - And there are intellectually stupid - but ** whatever, but not stupid.
It seems that stupidity is not so much a birth defect as it is that people become stupid under certain circumstances. Or rather, they allow it to happen to them.
In people living alone, this defect occurs less frequently than in people living in groups. So it seems that stupidity is not so much a psychological problem as a sociological one.
It turns out that every strong growth of power, be it political or religious, infects the majority of humanity with stupidity.
Itโs like a sociological-psychological law, according to which the power of one person requires the stupidity of another.
It is not that some human abilities - such as intelligence - suddenly fail.
Rather, what we are talking about is that, under the overwhelming influence of growing power, a person is deprived of internal independence and more or less consciously abandons his autonomous position.
The fact that stupid people are often stubborn should not distract us from the fact that they are not self-determining.
When you talk to them, you almost get the feeling that you are not dealing with them as individuals, but with slogans, phrases and the like that have taken possession of them.
He is bewitched, blinded, used and abused of his being. A fool who has become a weak-willed instrument is also capable of any evil - and he does not realize that this is evil.
Only the act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that true internal liberation in most cases becomes possible only when it is preceded by external liberation.
Until then we must give up all attempts to convince a stupid person.
Bonhoeffer was executed at Flossenbรผrg concentration camp at dawn on April 9, 1945 for his role in a plot against Adolf Hitler. Just two weeks after this, the camp was liberated by US soldiers.
"Action does not come from thought, but from the willingness to take responsibility. The highest test of a moral society is what kind of world it leaves to its children," Bonhoeffer once said.