Stupid, Stupid Stupid!
“Stupid, stupid, Stupid, You’re stupid all the time” Junior Brown Stupid Blues.
Why is it that so many people seem incredibly stupid these days? You see it everywhere, well educated people who somehow think there are more than 2 genders, or normal rational people defending the rampant fraud, waste and abuse in all our levels of government. You see talking heads on T.V. spouting the most insipedly stupid stuff and it really makes you wonder. How can somebody who on the surface seems intelligent, who talks in complete sentences, is obviously not some drooling moron, but seems to be profoundly STUPID! For example, The CBS Margeret Brennen interview with Secretary of State, Marco Rubio where she said that in Nazi Germany “free speech was used to conduct a genocide.” You don’t have to be a Rhode Scholar to know that is one of the stupidest things you may have ever heard. Another prime example is Georgia Representative Hank Johnson. Johnson was questioning Admiral Robert Williard in a House Armed Services Committee hearing in 2010 about sending 8,000 Marines to Guam when he actually said, “My biggest fear is that the whole Island will become so overly populated, that it will tip over and capsize.” To his credit, Admiral Willard didn’t bust out laughing, he kept a straight face and replied “We don’t anticipate that.” Then you have supposed comedienne Chelsey Handler revealing on Jimmy Fallon’s show that “I didn’t know until I was 40 years old, that the sun and the moon were not the same thing.” You mean to tell me that in 40 years of living on planet Earth she NEVER saw the sun and the moon in the sky at the same time?
It’s not just politicians, actors and comedians saying stupid stuff. I watch a YouTube channel from a fellow who goes by the handle of KeroNGB. Kero goes to college campuses around the country and asks students basic questions, like “how many dimes in a dollar,” or “how many minutes are in a quarter hour,” or “name 2 countries that border the United States,” real “Who’s in Grants tomb” type questions. Of course he’s mostly going to show people giving stupid answers, and he does show some college kids who know the correct answers, but the number of college kids that can’t tell you what 3 cubed is, is frightening. He even makes it easy for them, instead of 3 cubed, he’ll ask “what’s 3x3x3?” These college academics still get it wrong. What’s really scary is that before he interviews them, he asks them to rate their intelligence on a scale from 1 to 10, and most of these kids think they’re around an 8, but can’t name the Capital of the United States!
So once again I ask, why are people so stupid these days? It’s a question my wife and I have discussed on numerous occasions. She found an answer a couple of days ago when she watched a video about a guy named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I guess I’m showing my own stupidity by not knowing anything about him. It turns out that Bonhoeffer was a truly amazing person, there is not nearly enough space in a blog to go into any great detail about his life, and his contributions to mankind. He was a theologian, born in 1906 Germany, and died at the hands of the Nazis in 1945. During his all to short life, he went from being a passivist, to becoming a double agent in Germany’s intelligence service, to plotting with others to assassinate Hitler. It was that conspiracy that led him to being incarcerated and ultimately hanged just days before Germany surrendered. The rise of Nazism led Bonhoeffer to question how people he knew to be intelligent, rational, MORAL individuals could come to accept and participate in the monstrosity of Hitler’s Third Reich. It was while he was imprisoned that he issued, what I believe is maybe the most important theory about human society ever devised. The theory of stupidity.
Like Bonhoeffer himself, there is not nearly enough space in a blog to delineate all of his theory, I strongly urge everyone to study not only his theory of stupidity, but also the corollary works of Hannah Arendt and Bertrand Russell. These 3 thinkers are almost always used in conjunction with one another, and when linked together illustrate clearly the current problems facing society.
To put it simply, Bonhoeffer’s theory says that stupidity is far more malevolent than malice or evil. Malice has intent, it can be identified. You know evil when you see it. Whereas stupidity is a blinding force, certain of its own righteousness. Stupidity emphasizes the emotional over the intellectual. You can fight evil’s intentions, because its visible, but you can’t argue with someone who refuses to think critically. A good example would be the protests for Hamas and Palestine by the group calling themselves “Queers For Palestine.” If they applied any logic or critical thinking they would know that if they were in Gaza they would be executed for being queer. Yet they protest for the very people who would kill them, an emotional response over an intellectual response. Bonhoeffer also made the distinction between ignorance and stupidity. You can educate an ignorant person, but a stupid person refuses to be educated, or persuaded, instead they cling to their blind servitude to stupidity. You see everywhere in today’s society, on both sides of the political aisle.
Hannah Arendt followed this up by linking the theory of stupidity with what she termed “the banality of evil.” She studied Adolph Eichmann, one of the major architects of the Holocaust. She described Eichmann as not inherently evil, but as a simple bureaucrat, blindly following orders. Unwilling to challenge the evil of his superiors, he devised ways to systematically exterminate millions of Jews, without questioning the morality of his actions. He was stupidly evil. She noticed that ordinary people become thoughtless and blind obedient agents of destruction when they surrender their morality and capacity for intellectual reflection. This is exactly what our bureaucracy does today. It reminds me of the alien Vogon race from the movie “Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy.” Mindless bureaucrats whose only purpose in life is to enforce the rules of the bureaucracy, oblivious to the consequences.
Bertrand Russell wrote about how mass media makes people stupid by condensing everything into soundbites. Tribalizing and conditioning people to stop using their brains to think critically, but instead to blindly accept whatever agreeable propaganda they are being fed. Reinforcing peoples echo-chambers where questioning alternative viewpoints becomes verboten. I find it somewhat ironic that I myself sometimes fall into this trap. I try to limit my blogs to no more the 8 to 10 minutes of reading time, or else risk the number of people who might read my stuff. (That is why I purposely wrote this blog to be over 10 min utes reading time.) I do the very same thing when I watch a video or read an article, if it is too long, or I think it’s a form of opposition propaganda, I lose interest. We have been programmed to avoid thinking critically, programmed to trust others to do our thinking for us. Worse, we are teaching generations of children to think emotionally instead of intellectually.
This is an over simplification of these thoughts and writings. However, the main premise among all 3 is the failure of societies to think critically. The problem with humanity is that in general people have a need to be part of something, a need to belong to a group. Authoritarian governments realize that, and use it for their own purposes. Using propaganda, and nowadays mass media, they induce what Dr. Robert Malone referred to as “Mass Formation Psychosis,” or what Bonheoffer referred to in his Theory of Stupidity. Authoritarians understand this implicitly and utilize tribalism in order to eliminate critical thinking. Authoritarians understand that critical thinking is hard for a group to accomplish as a whole, an individual or two maybe, but for a whole tribe it’s virtually impossible. It’s far easier to convince them to put their trust in someone who is echoing the same thoughts and beliefs as the tribe. By doing this they get people to abandon their need to question whether what is being said is in fact the truth. This is why stupidity not only runs rampant in societies around the globe, but is also virtually impossible to fight, once it has taken hold. There is no vaccine to this virus, because stupidity, like Bonhoeffer, says is impervious to logic, persuasion or rational arguments. Authoritarians use simple phrases like “Hope and change,” or “Build back better,” or even scarier “Make America Great Again.”
Societal stupidity is found on both sides of the political spectrum. In a previous blog I mentioned that podcaster Hotep Jesus speculated the deep state might just be abandoning the radical left, for the radical right to achieve their goal of a One World Government. The globalist agenda is the visible evil. Stupidity is the tool they use to create a society that is easily manipulated, making their plans easier to accomplish. The deep state doesn’t really care about political philosophy, they only care about wealth and power. This is why Bonhoeffer, Arendt and Russell all say that stupidity is far worse then evil. Evil uses stupidity to control the masses. If it was evil alone, it would be recognizable and therefore you could fight against it, but the only way to fight stupidity is for everyone to start thinking critically, and as I said before a society filled with critical thinkers is a virtual impossibility, it goes against humanities basic tribal nature.
I’m sure Trump knows all this, my hope is that he is using simple phrases and sound-bites because he realizes it’s the only way to communicate to masses of people who have been programmed into stupidity. His team is breaking the mold of how D.C operates, bringing in people who are not part of the D.C. swamp. Say what you will about Elon Musk, he is not stupid, he questions everything, he certainly is an independent thinker. Maybe that’s why the establishment fears him so much, he threatens their hold on society by showing people that it’s ok to use your brain.
In the end just as evil uses stupidity, we need to use the brains and intellect God gave us. We need to defy tribalism and embrace individuality, celebrate our differences instead of fearing them as we’re all individuals of one huge tribe, one race, the human race. Bonheoffer was a theologian. Some have called him one of the 10 most important martyrs of the 20th century. He believed fervently in God, and in fact when he faced execution, he calmly accepted his fate, knowing what awaited him. Some say may Christianity is a tribe and therefore subject to Bonhoeffer’s theory. I firmly disagree. Christianity is not a tribe but the foundation of human morality that can be used to escape the chains of stupidity. By using the brains God gave us to think for ourselves, by following the morality expressed in God’s word, we can by God’s grace and mercy, defeat the enemy, defeat the rampant stupidity that is an existential threat to humanity. God bless all Y’all 😊
Rock On Brother an Sisters!
