I’ve sometimes written about Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil,” the idea that the lack of thought can be far more dangerous than evil intentions. And see here. BTW, it turns out that Adolf Eichmann, Arendt’s Exhibit 1, was not a good example of this alleged lack of evil intentions, based on recent revelations.*

Here’s a related idea: the problem with stupidity. I am bit uneasy with that word, because it is often used as a pejorative and connotes willful ignorance, ignorance for which someone has made conscious choices to put themselves into that state of ignorance. I would have preferred to simply use “ignorance” to express the idea that someone lacks the necessary information to make decisions that further human flourishing. Another related idea is the Dunning-Kruger effect:

a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. Some researchers also include in their definition the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills.

But back to “stupidity.” As described by Dr. Peter McCullough in a recent article, Dietrich Bonhoeffer discussed individual and social damage caused by stupidity. First, McCullough’s description of Bonhoeffer:

In 1943, the Lutheran pastor and member of the German resistance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was arrested and incarcerated in Tegel Prison. There he meditated on the question of why the German people—in spite of their vast education, culture, and intellectual achievements—had fallen so far from reason and morality. He concluded that they, as a people, had been afflicted with collective stupidity (German: Dummheit).

He was not being flippant or sarcastic, and he made it clear that stupidity is not the opposite of native intellect. On the contrary, the events in Germany between 1933 and 1943 had shown him that perfectly intelligent people were, under the pressure of political power and propaganda, rendered stupid—that is, incapable of critical reasoning.

What follows are a few excerpts from Bonhoeffer’s writings on stupidity:

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than wickedness. Evil can be protested against, exposed, and, if necessary, it can be prevented by force. Evil always harbors the germ of self-destruction by inducing at least some uneasiness in people. We are defenseless against stupidity. Nothing can be done to oppose it, neither with protests nor with violence. Reasons cannot prevail. Facts that contradict one’s prejudice simply don’t need to be believed, and when they are inescapable, they can simply be brushed aside as meaningless, isolated cases.

In contrast to evil, the stupid person is completely satisfied with itself. When irritated, he becomes dangerous and may even go on the attack. More caution is therefore required when dealing with the stupid than with the wicked. Never try to convince the stupid with reasons; it’s pointless and dangerous.

To understand how to deal with stupidity, we must try to understand its nature. This much is certain: it is not essentially an intellectual, but a human defect. There are people who are intellectually agile who are stupid, while intellectually inept people may be anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in certain situations.

One gets the impression that stupidity is often not an innate defect, but one that emerges under certain circumstances in which people are made stupid or allow themselves to be made stupid. We also observe that isolated and solitary people exhibit this defect less frequently than socializing groups of people. Thus, perhaps stupidity is less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a special manifestation of the influence of historical circumstances on man—a psychological side effect of certain external conditions.

A closer look reveals that the strong exertion of external power, be it political or religious, strikes a large part of the people with stupidity. Yes, it seems as if this is a sociological-psychological law. The power of some requires the stupidity of others. Under this influence, human abilities suddenly wither or fail, robbing people of their inner independence, which they—more or less unconsciously —renounce to adapt their behavior to the prevailing situation.

The fact that stupid people are often stubborn should not hide the fact that they are not independent. When talking to him, one feels that one is not dealing with him personally, but with catchphrases, slogans, etc. that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell; he is blinded; he is abused in his own being.

Having become an instrument without an independent will, the fool will also be capable of all evil, and at the same time, unable to recognize it as evil. Here lies the danger of diabolical abuse. Through this, a people can be ruined forever.

But it is also quite clear here that it is not an act of instruction, but only an act of liberation that can overcome stupidity. In doing so, one will have to accept the fact that, in most cases, real inner liberation is only possible after outer liberation has taken place. Until then we will have to refrain from all attempts to convince the stupid. In this state of affairs, we try in vain to know what “the people” actually think.”

In my experience, “stupidity” should not ordinarily be applied to describe an entire person through that person’s entire history on Earth, but can more usefully be applied to particular aspects of how that person thinks and acts. A person might be an incredibly smart musician, doctor, parent or mathematician yet be notably stupid in other aspects of their life.

Many of us use the term “intellect” as though our thought process is independent of our social environment. Many studies prove this incorrect.  One such example is the work of Stanley Milgram on Obedience to Authority.

Another related concept is Jonathan Haidt’s description of “social intuitionism,” (and see here), the idea that our emotions determine our decision-making far more than our intellect, which is more commonly used for justifying the direction and power of our emotions. The function of reason appears to be to cleverly win arguments, but most of us, much of the time embrace our opinions based on emotions and aesthetic taste, well before we conjure up our arguments that we use to defend our opinions.

Finally, consider social environment as a strong determinant as to what any person “thinks.”  Solomon Asch demonstrated this in 1956: In an experiment which required people to compare the lengths of lines, many people tend to “see” the incorrect lengths of line when a roomful of stooges first unanimously express the incorrect answer.  This effect is powerful and it affects basic-level perception. My operating assumption is that social judgment is a wobbly house of cards and is much more susceptible to be swayed into “stupidity” by one’s social environment. Decades of research on in-group effects confirm this.  The current madness regarding transgender ideology is a current example of such contagion.

• Recording of Eichman demonstrates his ill-will toward jews:

Eichmann was extensively interviewed for four months beginning in late 1956 by Nazi expatriate journalist Willem Sassen with the intention of producing a biography. Eichmann produced tapes, transcripts, and handwritten notes.^[112] The surviving audio recordings became public in 2022.^[113] Eichmann confessed that he in fact knew that millions of Jews and others were being killed: “I didn’t care about the Jews deported to Auschwitz, whether they lived or died. It was the Fuehrer’s order: Jews who were fit to work would work and those who weren’t would be sent to the Final Solution.”^[114] Sassen asked him: “When you say Final Solution, do you mean they should be eradicated?”, to which Eichmann replied: “Yes.”

I just now tracked down two quotes about the banality of evil by Hannah Arendt:

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.

― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil