Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew more than you or I are likely to ever know about about the line between stupidity and outright evil. The Lutheran pastor and theologian had a front row seat as he watched the Nazis—history’s evilest stupid people (or stupidest evil people)—ascend to power and come to rule through terror during the 1930s and ‘40s.
In a letter to his friends, family, and followers written while he awaited execution at Flossenbürg concentration camp for his role in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Adolph Hitler, Bonhoeffer detailed his thoughts on the root cause of the moral and intellectual infection that resulted in the Third Reich. His conclusion: It’s the stupidity, stupid.
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “[Evil] can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.”
You are probably stupid
Before you apply the “stupid” label to whatever group you disagree with and move on, consider the possibility that you are the stupid one. Stupid people don’t think they’re stupid after all; according to Bonhoeffer, “stupidity” isn’t defined by the trappings of “smartness” anyway. “It is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one,” he writes. “There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.”
Stupidity, according to Bonhoeffer, is a sociological problem. “It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions.” Bonhoeffer identified the cause of societal stupidity like this: “Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law.”
Interconnectedness, technology, and stupidity
If stupidity is a sociological condition, the people who are most likely to avoid it are the those who are isolated from others—or so said Bonhoeffer: “[People] who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability.”
Bonhoeffer didn’t have to reckon with our current faux-connectedness fostered through technology, but I doubt he would consider the physical isolation of being “very-online” as the same shield against stupidity as the monastic, spiritual life he was imagining. We’re all lonely these days, but that doesn’t make us less stupid.
Not to put words in the guy’s mouth, but it seems like social media and the internet are simply additional methods of infecting the masses with stupidity, maybe made more effective because it excises flesh-to-flesh human interaction altogether.
Consider this description of the typical stupid person from Bonhoeffer:
He is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being.
Sounds familiar, eh?
How do we fight evil?
Fighting evil is easy. You devote your existence to opposing it while ignoring how much danger you’re in. Bonhoeffer confronted Nazism both publicly and privately. He rallied opposition to The Party behind-the-scenes among his fellow religious professionals and condemned Nazi racism from the pulpit in clear, unwavering tones. He secretly worked with the German resistance to help the allies, then refused to flee Germany even when it was clear they wanted to see him at the end of a rope.
Fighting evil makes sense. There are concrete steps you can take (if you have the courage). The tricky part is recognizing evil. Bonhoeffer devoted his life to studying and understanding a merciful God, and saw firsthand the way Jews, Roma, gay people, and others were oppressed by the bloodthirsty regime, so it was not difficult for him to point at Hitler and other Nazis and say, “They’re the bad ones!”
But run-of-the-mill Nazis in the ‘40s didn’t think they were evil—they thought Hitler was fighting for Germany’s freedom. People almost never see themselves as evil or as supporting evil things, but we’re generally too stupid to know the difference—further evidence of the supremacy of stupidity in causing human suffering, and the necessity to fight stupidity instead of evil.
How do we fight stupid?
Assuming for the moment that you and I are not stupid, and that we would be personally brave enough to even try: What can we do about the scourge of stupidity? According Bonhoeffer, you can’t fight stupidity with reason, facts, protests, or your fists, because, to the stupid, “Reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed… and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”
In terms of a “solution” Bonhoeffer offers the following:
Only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.
I’m not sure how “external liberation” can be achieved without the kind of “upsurge of power in the public sphere” that leads to stupidity in the first place—after all, how many seemingly righteous and just social and political movements have ended in bloodshed, oppression, and stupidity throughout history? I want to say “all of them,” but I’m too stupid to really know.
A less-stupid world would depend on “whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom,” according to Bonhoeffer. But this solution imagines morality exists outside of humanity’s tenuous agreement on it. To Bonhoeffer, the answer is to stupidity is provided by God: “The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.”
But Bonhoeffer’s God is clearly different from the one worshipped by most German Christians during the War—few Catholic or Protestant congregations were as opposed to the Nazis as the “Confessing Church” to which Bonhoeffer belonged, and plenty of Christians saw no contradiction between worshipping God and being a Nazi. But even if everyone in Germany had agreed that Bonhoeffer’s God was the one they believed in, it wouldn’t account for all the non-Judeo-Christian expressions of spirituality in the world, nor does that leave hope for the those of us who think all religion in bullshit.
The evil, stupid death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In final weeks of World War II, with Russia already entering Berlin, a kangaroo court sentenced Bonhoeffer to death. A doctor at Flossenbürg concentration camp who witnessed the execution said Bonhoeffer prayed quietly, then heroically walked up to the gallows to meet his end. But many historians suspect the doctor/witness was trying to lessen his own culpability for overseeing Nazi executions, and it’s more likely the Bonhoeffer was tortured to death. Either way, he met his maker, if there is such a thing.
Evil re-examined: Donald Ewen Cameron
A few years after Bonhoeffer’s hanging and the fall of the Third Reich, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, eminent psychiatrist and president of the American Psychiatric Association, was enlisted to interview war criminals at Nuremberg to try to make sense of Nazi atrocities and ensure that nothing like the Holocaust ever happened again. After studying German society, Cameron came to a similar conclusion as Bonhoeffer. He called it “mental illness” not “stupidity,” but Cameron agreed that Nazism was the result of a kind of social contagion.
According to Cameron, among the four “dangerous” personality types that made up Nazis were the “passive man” who will “stand anything, and stands for nothing” and the “insecure man,” who Cameron saw as “the driven crowds that make the army of the authoritarian overlord; they are the stuffing of conservatism …. They fear the stranger, they fear the new idea; they are afraid to live, and scared to die.” Again, sound familiar?
Shaken by the horror of Nazi Germany and by the potential for civilization-ending nuclear war, Cameron devoted his professional and intellectual life to fighting societal evil using the tools of psychiatry instead of religion. He believed that if scientific principles were employed toward improving human behavior, we might eradicate evil and stupidity entirely. Or at least not kill everyone earth.
Employing pioneering techniques at the cutting edge of the medical field, Cameron set out to break the lifelong thought patterns of his patients, who were mostly suffering from relatively minor mental health issues. At his research center at McGill University, Cameron drugged patients with powerful tranquilizers and paralytics that kept them either asleep or wide-awake-but-paralyzed for weeks straight. He performed “electric lobotomies” by zapping patients’ brains with nearly deadly jolts of electricity, over and over again. He fed them heroic doses of LSD and locked helmets on their heads equipped with speakers that played the same 10-second tape loop of their own voice at a deafening volume for weeks straight.
Essentially, Cameron erased his patients’ minds. People who came to see him for help with mild depression left his laboratory of horrors a few months later incontinent and unable to remember their parents or even talk. It turns out, even if you’re a famous doctor, you can’t destroy someone’s internal world and replace it with one you like better. Whoops.
Whether he knew it or not is an open question, but Cameron’s work was funded by the CIA, who used the results of this program (and others like it) to “design a scientifically based system for extracting information from ‘resistant sources.’ In other words, torture.” Remember Abu Graib? That was rooted in Cameron’s ideas.
Was Cameron evil? He sure didn’t think so. His writing has that “ain’t I amazing?” vibe common to those who see themselves as heroically good. As is so often the case, society responded by rewarding Cameron’s work (at least his public work) with money, power, and the kind of respect afforded only to members of the upper echelon of society.
Cameron wasn’t “stupid” either, at least not in the way we usually think of the word. He didn’t develop his ideas about human behavior by passively accepting propaganda like some damn Nazi. He applied the academic rigors he’d developed at the most prestigious universities and medical schools in the free world to conclude that the solution to depression was strapping vulnerable people into torture helmets for weeks straight.
Evil or not, Cameron died of a heart attack while hiking with his son in the Adirondack Mountains at 65 years old, having never publicly (or privately, that we know of) acknowledged any misgivings or regret about his work.