The Very Scary Theory of Stupidity

My wife recently shared this fascinating article by Philosopheasy. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Terrifying Theory of Stupidity.” I wasn’t familiar with his work before and it immediately resonated with me. Bonhoeffer was a German philosopher and theologian who was also a staunch anti-Nazi in his time. He makes a critical distinction between “evil” - the conscious choice to do harm with intent, versus “stupidity” which he frames, not as a lack of intelligence, but as the choice to release yourself from critical thinking and questioning. He argues, this is how the majority of a society can go along with evil at its upper reaches. Bonhoeffer made me think of the perhaps more famous Hannah Arendt and her Report on the Banality of Evil. The idea that Eichmann was not some brilliant, arch, self-aware mastermind but instead banal - pompous, unoriginal, ultimately a thoughtless person who would not reflect on any of his choices. His evil was buried in dull familiarity. Both Bonhoeffer and Arendt were famous free thinkers who opposed totalitarianism. It’s fascinating to me that they gravitated to ideas of stupidity and banality as the core buttresses of evil. And by implication, that everyone - all of society - has equivalent moral intelligence. No one is naturally “dumber” than another in this department. All morality comes down to choice and to ignore choice is of course a decision in itself. It’s the easiest choice actually, no matter the context. It’s easy to go along with the currents of your society unquestioningly, to relinquish agency and focus inward. Some people do it their whole lives, others live in hibernation until something happens to force them into a new behavior. Bonhoeffer and Arendt would argue, I think, that to be a truly critical free thinker is the healthiest, safest state of mind. It means you are always ready, engaged with your surroundings, questioning authority, aware of its pitfalls and lies, using your imagination to concept a better culture and a better life for yourself and your family. And most importantly, like a cave man walking through wolf-infested forests, the choice to be aware means you can see danger coming. It was our intelligence, after all, that got us out of the woods in the first place.