The Theory of Stupidity

Bonhoeffer nailed it in 1945 and we should consider what he figured out.

As I have written before, I grew up with a photo album my dad had that contained pictures of a Concentration/”Reeducation” camp he and his regiment discovered at the very end of World War II.

The pictures were horrific, shocking for a young boy. They showed bodies stacked like cords of wood. Walking skeletons of flesh hanging on bodies with lifeless eyes. Sores on the body, that looked like what I imagined decomposition would look like after a short while. He described the smell and how tough paratroopers would get close and smell or see something and start vomiting. So many were over taken by nausea that the medic had to keep them hydrated.

Of all the events that occurred in my dad’s life, I only know of three that shook him to his core. One was the death of my sister at 2 years old a week before Christmas in 1949. The other was when my brother, his oldest was listed as MIA in Vietnam, his plane having been shot down and no word of his outcome for nearly 30 years.

This event in 1945 was the first one.

He understood war, he had seen numerous battles. He understood a tenacious enemy and the cruelty of Hitler and Nazi Germany’s war waged on innocent nations with no regard to soldiers or civilians. But, he had no place in his had to comprehend what he now saw. He had no words of consolation for the men in his company who treated him as their commander from Bastogne to this moment.

He was frustrated, shocked and even ashamed and mad at himself when they attempted to feed the prisoners still clinging to life that they had killed some because their bodies couldn’t handle the richness of GI rations.

I asked him why the pictures, why so many pictures? “Because I didn’t think anyone would believe me.” He went on to say, he sent the rolls of film home with explicit instructions for my mom to NOT process them. He would do it when he got home. He later learned that his brother had just arrived home from Europe after being missing so he instructed my mom to have Rex process them and keep them. He wrote Rex to let allow any of the women to see them.

Imagine a sight so horrific that you feared that others would call you a liar. It is easy for us on this side of history to understand what he saw. But at this moment in the war, very few knew of the camps. The allies were not prepared for what they encountered.

Later, when I was in high school, I would again have these questions and one thing I learned was that this event had become a barrier between my Dad and God. It was centered around when the commander of his Division, the 101st, AB, ordered that the populace of two villages near the camp would tour the camp, clean up and bury the dead. This was because the excuse, “We never knew about it”, didn’t make sense to the Americans.

“How could you not know about this place that is less than a couple of kilometers from your village?” For my dad, the shock was seeing all the churches in these villages and all the people who would go to church. Lutheran Pastors, Reformed, Catholics, United and the most populous one, the German Evangelical Church.

He would later learn that this wasn’t a real church but a composition of Evangelicals who merged themselves into basically a nationalist, Nazi church. They cherry picked the Bible, actually removed parts that didn’t fit their agenda and had sermons prescribed like homilies to unify all the churches in their messaging to the benefit of the state.

As a teen, sold out to Jesus, this made me sad. So, having honestly developed an interest in the Holocaust and the rise of the Nazi regime. I would choose it as a topic. Once I came across information about the Confessing Church. This was the Evangelicals who didn’t align themselves with The German Evangelical Church. This introduce me to a man who would become one of my heroes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

It was a very big deal for me as a kid to, I guess I would say, defend my faith. I understood why my dad was angry, I was angry as he told me the stories. But to be able to tell him there were real Christians also and many paid with their lives in camps just like this one; it seemed to be my chance to redeem the credibility of Jesus.

I would continue in my fascination with both Bonhoeffer and the Holocaust through college, graduate school and even up to today. I never thought I would see the American Church, MY church repeat what occurred in Germany, but here we are. We have seen an entire religious subset whore themselves and not even blink. They represent an entire generation immersed in idol worship of Christian leaders and now they have their messiah. They believe 100% like the Germans did that this person is God’s Anointed.

(fatigued sad sigh)

If you don’t know about Bonhoeffer, look him up. Read his books. Read his letters. What follows is one of the most poignant snippets from his works. It was written in prison while awaiting execution. Its applicability to this moment in the present political environment in the United States is staggering. It also is not encouraging.

He and others in the Confessing Churches, must have asked much and we do today, how the hell did this happen and where are the Christians? How has it come to pass that so many we once called brothers and sisters are now compliant to such evil? How is it that people we knew to be faithful disciples, have become partners in murder and destruction?

I have heard the same questions today. I have heard the same disgust with what others see in American Christianity. Those we claim to love and desire to reach, are as disgusted and confused as my dad was 80 years ago.

What follows in Bonhoeffer’s letter to others trying to understand what has transpired over 10 years. They commemorate Hitler’s rise to power much like a parent commemorates and grieves the death of a child.

Theory of Stupidity—Bonhoeffer

Taken from a circular letter addressing many topics, written to three friends and co-workers in the conspiracy against Hitler, on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship of Germany.

‘Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it 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. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — 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.

For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

‘If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature.

This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.

We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability.

And so, stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that 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. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail.

Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence,and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that 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.

Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings. Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that 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. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly.

The word of the Bible that states “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 these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.’

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison

I hope you read and re-read Bonhoeffer’s words.

While for me, it is discouraging, it also is rational and offers an explanation and validation for my own and other’s mystification of the absolute foolishness and delusional seduction we have witnessed. It also lets us know we are not alone in what we wrestle with and, as post war Germany showed the world, not only did the spell break, but the lessons were learned and there national unity that what happened will never happen again.

Americans could and should learn from Germany, what genuine repentance and humility looks like in the face of past sins of slavery, genocide and racial oppression. But that is another installment for another day. Perhaps we should ask ourselves if, we, as a nation, have the capacity to be humble and broken for our sins? That may very well prove to be significant as we fight for the very life of our neighbors, nations and the Republic against a pseudo-Christian cult and a delusional narcissist and his minions.