The German theologian and Nazi resistance figure Dietrich Bonhoeffer defined stupidity, not as an individual intellectual deficit, but a power-borne disease spreading through the body politic, infecting a large swathe of the general population. “(E)very great explosion of power in the public sphere, whether political or religious, infects a large part of humanity with stupidity”.
His posthumously published “Letters and Papers from Prison” was written as he awaited execution after being arrested for his role as a co-conspirator in a plot to assassinate Hitler. In one landmark essay “On Stupidity”, he reflects on the scourge of moral idiocy gripping the nation under Nazi rule. His first hand account of the near identical circumstances and conditions of war time Germany still resonate in the present, as yet another holocaust goes largely unnoticed by the general population. Bonhoeffer elucidates why critical thought and moral reasoning are abandoned during a ‘power surge’, and replaced with the human equivalent of barnyard sounds.
The difference between stupidity and evil, according to Bonhoeffer, is the underlying nihilism that impels the latter to eventually self-destruct. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion”. The evil person is at least partially conscious of his own malicious nature, and acts in accordance with this self-governing principle. The word itself can be prescribed to states and individuals carrying out acts of extreme cruelty. (See Israel.) The evil-doer can be viewed through a psychological lens that factors in the circumstances that has led to his pathological ill-will towards all of humanity.
A stupid populace, on the other hand, requires greater effort to confront, owing to its diffuseness throughout different socio-economic groups without regard to intellectual acuity. Then as now, the very people you think would know better are usually the first ones to abandon their principles as soon as these superficially held and seldomly examined beliefs become a social or political liability. There are few clues or foreshadowing events to this turnaround. This particular strain of social contagion seemingly strikes without regard to an individual’s reputation as a respected or upstanding member of the community. Conversely, a person without any distinguishing moral or intellectual features may prove highly resistant to an outbreak of stupidity. Think Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who have demonstrated a moral clarity on the issue of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians utterly lacking in more sophisticated and learned liberal media circles.
Bonhoeffer considered stupidity a sociological phenomena, rather than a personality defect. The afflicted are not united by having experienced adversity or significant life challenges, but made stupid. During these times of momentous gains for a particular power structure, ordinary people function as faultily engineered cogs in a system specifically designed to grind each other down. As previously rational people relinquish their critical faculties in goose-step with the crowd, they no longer require this obsolete, friction-producing brain mechanism. Without it, they are no longer weighted down by morality, thus able to navigate present circumstances on a leaner vessel, toward the tide of public opinion.
Our sensory capabilities are deliberately eroded through relentless exposure to officialdom’s self-serving narratives. These absurdly spun tales always insist on the culpability of the other for their own crimes, projecting their own power as helpless in the face of the powerless. In this reverse engineered reality, entire societies devolve to keep apace with the latest “new normal”. Not even a genocide, live-streamed and formally acknowledged by a growing number of governments, human rights organizations and international courts, can convince this willfully blinkered majority that an actual genocide is taking place.
The effort to formulate sound judgment becomes nearly impossible once the balance of power is tipped to this vertiginous degree. Under these conditions, entire societies go into flight mode, and shed the excess weight of their conscience as they seek a safe harbor in the crowd. Taking an autonomous stance on the issues of the day became not just a personal risk, but a futile solo journey through remorseless headwinds determined to stymy any attempt to break through them.
In this day and age, it’s easy to draw too obvious parallels between braying German mobs of yore, and their equally mindless “MAGA” counterparts. Still, it would be somewhat disingenuous to attribute stupidity to this demographic alone. The kind of willful ignorance Bonhoeffer saw in his largely educated countrymen was not merely the result of the gullible hordes falling for crude propaganda, but the systemic pressures placed upon entire societies whenever the predator class feels the invisible hand of the market tightening around it’s own throat. In turn, it places a chokehold on our critical faculties, applying increased pressure to produce and perish.
How else does one react to an electric cattle prod shock, except with stupefaction? When applied collectively to human livestock populations, the herd will eventually all fall in line, and moo uselessly at the single lightbulb illuminating its slaughter pen, thinking it’s the moon.
The viral spread of stupid during an oligarchic power surge doesn’t only affect the economically disadvantaged and “uneducated”, it strikes the educated classes just as hard — if not harder. It is particularly prevalent in people who would otherwise appear resistant to emotional appeals to support state-sponsored violence. Like their right wing counterparts, they are hardly immune to state-sponsored stupidity. As lawmakers, they just as eagerly sign off on any bill that further bankrupts their country and undermines its sovereignty.
The thickness of their particular skulls isn’t the result of a congenital defect, but a fortification against information contradictory to what it has already received from on high. You can compel a large swathe of the population to “Trust the science” or “Stand with Israel” as it carries out a genocide, as long as the opponents of these murderous objectives are sufficiently scapegoated as lumpen outliers, out of step with reality, and “racist”.
Status, which this particular demographic values over all else, can only be achieved or maintained through conformity to the prevailing ideology of the cloud-dwelling class above them. You don’t need a secret password to enter their realm, the right buzzwords will signal potential eligibility to attend their Venice nuptials and swanky charitable fundraisers. Believing in whatever absurdity they concoct to justify whatever atrocity they undertake for profit is a sure way to burnish one’s credentials, and make one’s lanyard stand out in a sea of credentialed strivers all vying for an invitation to the Vampires’ Ball.
Stupid’s insistence on its own virtues makes it all the more difficult to confront. Its more liberal-leaning, establishment-serving constituents have the spoils of their own stupidity to back them up. They can point to their organic wine cellars and personal vegan chef as rewards handed out to them by “The Universe” in appreciation for their goodness.
An outbreak of stupid usually occurs at a time of crisis, especially one engineered to grant extra powers to the state, and further enrich the corporate interests in partnership with this endeavor. As the latter demands more time and labor from workers to meet tighter deadlines and more ambitious targets, independent thought is de-prioritized in favor of a leaner, more economical approach to thinking. Just as we pop something pre-made into a microwave to reduce the time and effort required to eat, we apply the same rationale to how we process information: consume it quickly and move on to more important things.
Stupidity can be deployed to undermine the institutions intended to safeguard the citizenry against abuses of power, transforming them into partisan safe spaces, insulated from all viewpoints contrary to the current power structure. The current Zionist occupation of US campuses and all branches of government is part of a greater effort to remove whatever guardrails remain to prevent the entire country from falling off a cliff.
The kind of stupidity Bonhoeffer observed in his time was a conditioned response to the systemic pressures placed upon entire societies whenever the predator class feels the invisible hand of the market tightening around it’s own throat. In turn, it places a chokehold on our critical faculties, applying increased pressure to produce and perish.
How else does one react to an electric cattle prod shock, except with stupefaction? When applied collectively to human livestock populations, the herd will eventually all fall in line, and moo uselessly at the single lightbulb illuminating its slaughter pen, thinking it’s the moon.
Solitude, once an adequate defense against the kind of stupid that crowds engender, no longer guarantees a respite from groupthink inanities as screen time takes up nearly the entirety of time spent alone. We agree to the non-negotiable terms and conditions of digitized house arrest, allowing Big Tech deep tissue access to our thoughts in exchange for our brains.
It requires constant intellectual shortcuts to navigate an all-encompassing system that incentivizes a more streamlined approach to thinking. Stupidity requires an element of ingenuity; the same thought processes that turns chicken into frozen nuggets, which is often why it’s called ‘smart’. As reality has become fully absorbed into representation, it follows that context, reference and precedence are no longer required to make the leap from belief to its bumpersticker version, globalized capital to industrial scale slaughter.
Stupidity becomes the mind’s hastily constructed defense against the predatory forces of capital that control not just the upward flow of wealth, but hold the levers of power, even as it shifts from one aged out oligarch’s scepter to the next. Change in one’s circumstance is barely perceptible at first as one war-mongering dotard morphs into the next. But as accumulative power snowballs, its transformative effects are not just overwhelming, but outright dystopian – alien even. We experience the equivalent of a waking up after 20 years in a coma, distilled down to a 24 hour news cycle. You got to bed believing that genocide is bad, and wake up in a world that has reversed its stance on the issue.
The cost of thinking, like rent and food, is prohibitively high, which means we have to cut back on luxuries like skepticism. Putting recent events into some historical context is considered a wasteful expenditure like excess packaging; a morally condemnable offense committed by unrepentant polluters of the public sphere. One must simply accept, for example, that Putin — out of the blue and for no reason — just decided one day to invade the Ukraine. We are similarly meant to swallow the Israeli version of events that occurred on October 7th, the day that Hamas — out of the blue and for no reason — launched its own offensive on an “innocent” Eastern European population.
The official explanations are handed to us like a dietary supplement in capsule form, not food for thought, but a synthetic substitute formulated to prevent it. The US owes its stupidity in large part to Israel’s surging power in the US. The laws of physics dictate the consequences of this present dynamic between dog and tail, just as they determine the trajectory of a falling object. The inevitable crash will permanently sever the bonds between canine and control lever.
Gravity seems already set in motion as more and more high profile individuals are coming forward to state what has long been obvious: Israel is committing a genocide. Arguably, this altered stance has more to do with personal brand damage control than a genuine moral reckoning with the present, but it does suggest an opening of the cloud cover of stupid blanketing much of the earth.
Empire is clearly tapped out. Israel has sucked dry its already scant reserves of international good will, while robbing the American public of its every last dollar, and depriving it of its sense. By cranking itself up to “11” over the last two years, Zionist power has exceeded its limit, causing it to plunge headlong from its own recklessly scaled heights. We can all go back to not sleeping.
(Featured Image: “File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R0211-316, Dietrich Bonhoeffer mit Schülern.jpg” by Unknown author is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.)
