Sunday – time’s most deceptive trick; all promise in the morning and all regret by dusk. But you pretend to comply, like a corpse politely attending its own post-mortem, as you stagger into the kitchen where hope had died sometime around 2019.
“Cup of tea!” – that’ll help…
It doesn’t, maybe needs more sugar, maybe it has too much, or maybe Sundays are just the blindfold before Monday’s firing squad.
“I keep forgetting things” he said.
“How do you know?” she asked.
Somewhere between losing the will to live and losing your Wi-Fi connection lies the modern dilemma. But before the digital age got its grubby hands on stupidity and pimped it out in hashtags and curated outrage, Dietrich Bonhoeffer – German theologian, reluctant martyr, and all-round party pooper of fascism, had already pinned stupidity to the board like some sullen entomologist dissecting the slow death of reason.
Now, Bonhoeffer wasn’t talking about the “forgot-your-keys-in-the-fridge” kind of stupidity, no, this was the weaponised variety. The sort of stupidity that doesn’t trip over its shoelaces, but marches confidently into the abyss, quoting slogans, humming the national anthem, and asking for directions to the nearest book-burning. Bonhoeffer concluded, while rotting in a Nazi prison cell (which, incidentally, has better acoustics than Twitter), that stupidity, not evil, is the real threat to humanity. Evil, at least, has the decency to be sinister. Stupidity? It smiles.
“Against stupidity we are defenceless,” Bonhoeffer said, relatable I’m sure to anybody familiar with Reddit. Facts don’t matter, arguments bounce off like ping-pong balls off a tank. The stupid person doesn’t listen, they vibe. Worse still, they’re often clever enough to weaponise their ignorance. You’d have more luck reasoning with a toaster.
His definition of stupidity was gloriously democratic. Professors, priests, politicians – they all get a fair punt at being morons. Stupidity, he said, flourishes not in solitude but in crowds. It’s a group activity, like an university boat race, only more genocidal on paper. The more powerful the group, the more lobotomised the individual. You stop being someone with thoughts and become a ventriloquist’s dummy for slogans you didn’t write and opinions you didn’t test. That’s why you can’t argue with stupidity. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with a meme in trousers.
And what’s worse, liberation from this state can’t be achieved with polite debate or frantic fact-checking. Bonhoeffer believed only a kind of internal awakening, often sparked by external liberation, could restore sanity. Until then, all you can do is sit back, sip your lukewarm coffee, and watch as the world gets increasingly run by catchphrases, algorithms, and the spiritual descendants of people who thought the plague was a government hoax to sell bells.
“I feel like I’m missing something” he said.
“You are” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well if I knew that, then it wouldn’t be missing” she said
In the end, Bonhoeffer’s greatest insight wasn’t just that stupidity is dangerous, it’s that it’s curated. Cultivated, a by-product of power, and unless we stop mistaking unthinking compliance for civility, and volume for wisdom, we’ll find ourselves cheerfully ushered into whatever catastrophe the next idiot-in-chief has scrawled on a napkin.
:: REFERENCES ::
- Irving Janis – Groupthink
- Adam Grant – Think Again
- The Pressure to Conform – PSYFORU
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