Welcome, curious minds! Do you know what the five basic laws of human stupidity are? Is it possible that the rise to power of some political leaders is due to the stupidity of the population?
In April 1943, during World War II, the Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo. During his captivity, which lasted for two years, he reflected on the evolution of his country, and how it was possible that a people like the Germans, so fond of culture, science and art, so supposedly civilized, and cultivated, would have not only allowed, but also encouraged and celebrated, Hitler to achieve absolute power over their lives. Bonhoeffer concluded that, beyond the economic and social context, the main cause was stupidity, a much more dangerous enemy of good than malice.
In a letter addressed to three of his friends, he explained his reflections. “One can protest against evil,” he wrote; evil can be exposed and, if necessary, prevented by the use of force. However, against stupidity we are defenseless.
Protests are useless against it , since the reasons fall on deaf ears. The stupid, unlike the malicious, is completely satisfied with himself. ” For this reason, according to Bonhoeffer, you have to be very careful when a stupid person is presented with arguments that contradict his beliefs.
On the one hand, you will never believe them: you will always remain firm in your opinion no matter how clear the evidence that you are wrong is. And if the veracity of opposing arguments is so horribly obvious that it is impossible to deny them, you will simply downplay or ignore them. On the other hand, and here comes the most important thing, it is dangerous and foolish, as this thinker defended, to try to persuade a stupid person with reasons, because he will easily get irritated and try to attack.
Bonhoeffer believed that, to overcome stupidity, it is necessary to understand its nature. He did not believe it was an intellectual defect, since he knew people with remarkably agile intelligence but stupid, as well as people who he would describe as “intellectually quite dull” but who were not stupid at all. For him, stupidity is a human defect, of personality, not of his abilities.
It is not a congenital defect either , but anyone can become stupid under certain circumstances. As? Allowing stupidity to take over, something that can happen more easily when we are integrated into a large group.
People who live in solitude, always according to Bonhoeffer, tend to manifest the defect of stupidity to a lesser extent compared to those individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. From that perspective, stupidity would not be so much a psychological problem as a sociological one. It is external circumstances that make humans stupid who allow it.
And every sharp increase in power in the public sphere, whether political or religious, infects a large part of humanity with stupidity. “The power of one,” Bonhoeffer stated, “ needs the stupidity of the other. ” When human beings contemplate overwhelming growing power, that is, when we see a political party or religion rapidly gaining followers, our critical capacity can atrophy or fail; Our independence of thought can be weakened to the point that we give up establishing an autonomous position in the face of emerging circumstances.
Whether consciously or not, some people will adopt the thinking of the masses, and will assume as their own the arguments that come from the figure in power. That is, they will become stupid, and that stupidity will feed back into the power of the rising figure. Bonhoeffer, whose context we will discuss in detail later, sadly witnessed how the society in which he lived accepted as valid and even justified, morally evil ideas and policies emanating from the government led by Hitler, such as racism, forced sterilization with eugenic purposes or the persecution and even extermination of certain minorities.
The vast majority of the population does not They were interested in those topics; They were concerned about the economic crisis and the political situation. And if a charismatic figure emerged who promised them work, bread, stability and living space based on conquests, in addition to recovering the national pride trampled by the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. .
. well, they could well offer their support and accept all their demands. arguments in any aspect without thinking too much about them.
“Conversing with a stupid person,” Bonhoeffer wrote in his letter, “one practically feels that it is not a person at all, but slogans, mottos, and the like that have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, blinded, mistreated and abused in his very being. Having thus become a meaningless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and, at the same time, unable to see that it is evil.
This is what can destroy human beings once and for all,” explained the anti-Nazi dissident. To conclude, Bonhoeffer added an optimistic point by specifying that all these reflections on stupidity completely prohibit us from considering the majority of people as stupid under any circumstances. In fact, those who have become stupid by elevating to power a leader or a party that will abuse that power are recoverable.
They can free themselves from their stupidity and recover their own thinking. But, according to him, this internal liberation is only possible preceded by an external liberation. When a dictatorial regime collapses, for example, the population is finally free to think again according to their personal wisdom and criteria, since, while they remain subject to coercive power, social circumstances will push them to assume the ideas and ideas as their own.
the arguments of authority to cope with the pain produced by internal conflict when there is an abysmal lack of coherence between our thoughts and our actions. Now, let's take a break to get to know the author and the context of all these ideas better. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born in Wrocław in 1906, came from a very large family in which intellectual and musical training was highly valued.
His father, a psychiatrist and neurologist, ran the psychiatric clinic at the University of Wrocław. His mother, a pianist, was the granddaughter of the painter Stanislaus von Kalckreuth and the daughter of the pianist Klara von Hase, who had been a pupil of Franz Liszt. Thanks to his mother's teachings, Dietrich learned to play the piano at the age of eight and at eleven he was already composing songs that were performed by professional orchestras.
Moved by the horrors and suffering that the First World War caused in the population, as well as by the death in combat of his brother Walter, he began to attend evangelical meetings and in 1920, at the age of fourteen, he decided to direct his life towards He studied Theology despite criticism from two of his older brothers: Klaus, who was a jurist, and Karl, a scientist. At the age of twenty-one, he received his doctorate 'summa cum laude' in Theology from the Humboldt University of Berlin. Three years later, in 1930, he spent some time in New York.
There, in the Harlem neighborhood, he came into contact with the African-American church and became fascinated by the sermons of its preachers about the social injustices suffered by ethnic minorities in the United States. When he returned to Germany, Bonhoeffer secured a position as professor of systematic theology at the University of Berlin. He was very interested in ecumenism, that is, the idea that all Christians, regardless of the church to which they belonged, should work together to smooth over differences and promote Christian unity.
Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Anglicans, Methodists. . .
Whatever the Christian denomination, they all, in their opinion, shared faith and values. Although Bonhoeffer's first approaches to theology had been produced by an intellectual interest, little by little he became a profound believer, to the point that in 1931, at the age of twenty-five, he was ordained a priest. On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg and the life of Bonhoeffer, who was staunchly opposed to the new regime from the beginning, changed.
forever. Just two days after Hitler took office, Bonhoeffer gave a speech on the radio in which he harshly attacked him, and warned Germany not to fall into the idolatrous cult of the Führer – that is, the leader – since In fact, it could well be the Verführer – which can be translated as the seducer or the corrupter. That transmission was cut off suddenly.
Less than three months later, in April 1933, he gave a conference to the Berlin pastors in which he called for the resistance of the church in the face of the persecution to which the Jews were being subjected. In that speech he said: “The church should not simply bandage the victims who are crushed under the wheel, but rather insert a stick between the spokes to block the wheel itself. ” But Hitler did not sit idly by and, in July of that same year, he unconstitutionally called new ecclesiastical elections for the positions of officials of the Landeskirche, the historic Protestant churches.
Bonhoeffer campaigned for independent candidates, those who were not of Nazi ideology, but the Nazi-backed Deutsche Christen group won a landslide victory. Although, doctrinally, Hitler's party advocated a kind of neo-paganism, it proposed to maintain Christianity as the national religion of the Germans and subordinate it to racism. So, in September, the national evangelical synod of German Christians approved applying the Aryan paragraph within the church, which in practice meant the dismissal of all pastors and church officials of Jewish descent.
In November, 20,000 members of the Deutsche Christen demonstrated to demand that the Old Testament be removed from the Bible because it was of Jewish origin. Faced with that situation in his country, Bonhoeffer went to London to work as pastor of two German-speaking Protestant churches while trying to gather international Christian support to oppose the Deutsche Christen movement and its attempt to merge Nazi nationalism with Christianity. The German bishop Theodor Heckel, in charge of foreign affairs for the German Lutheran church, traveled to London to warn him to cease such activities, but Bonhoeffer refused.
Together with other ecclesiastics who shared his ideas, in 1934 he founded the Confessing Church, a Protestant Christian movement to oppose Nazi control of German churches. In 1935, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to clandestinely train the pastors of the Confessing Church, but when Nazi repression increased, he was forced to leave for Switzerland. In August 1936, Bishop Heckel, the one who had traveled to London to rein him in, denounced him as a “pacifist and enemy of the State,” which is why his authorization to teach at the University of Berlin was withdrawn.
The following year, Himmler decreed the education and examination of candidates for the ministry of the Confessing Church illegal, and the Gestapo arrested 27 friends of Bonhoeffer, who spent the next two years secretly traveling from town to town throughout the country. East of Germany trying to train its students clandestinely. In 1938, through his brother-in-law, the jurist Hans von Dohnanyi, he came into contact for the first time with a group of conspirators who were planning the overthrow of Hitler.
Some of those opponents were part of the Abwehr, a military intelligence organization, and Bonhoeffer learned from them that a great war was coming. In June '39, three months before the outbreak of World War II, he traveled to the United States again, and could well have stayed there, but decided to return to Germany. Why do I make such a seemingly stupid decision?
Why ignore the advice of his friends and return to a country that was about to plunge headlong into a terrible war and where he would be persecuted by the authorities? He himself explained it to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in a letter, with the following words: “I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to the United States this time. I must live this difficult period of our national history together with the people of Germany.
I will not have the right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people. . .
Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of wishing for the defeat of their nation in order to that a future Christian civilization can survive or desire the victory of its nation despite thus destroying our civilization and any true Christianity. “I know which of these alternatives I should choose, but I cannot make that decision from a safe place. ” In short, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, where the authorities prohibited him from speaking in public and required him to periodically report all his activities to the police.
Bonhoeffer joined the Abwehr thanks to his brother-in-law, Dohnányi, who was already part of the intelligence organization. Dohnányi was actively involved in planning several plots against Hitler, and it is very likely that Bonhoeffer was aware of them as well. Likewise, both participated in operations to help German Jews escape to Switzerland.
In 1941, with the war already started, the authorities prohibited Bonhoeffer from publishing or printing any texts. Meanwhile, through his international contacts, he tried to establish communication between the German resistance and the British Government, but the latter, which considered all Germans as enemies, ignored his messages. Finally, on April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law were arrested and imprisoned.
For a year and a half, Bonhoeffer remained imprisoned in Tegel prison awaiting a trial that never came. During that period, he wrote a series of letters that some sympathetic guards helped him send, sneaking them out of the prison. These letters would be published posthumously under the title 'Letters from Prison', and among them was the one in which he reflected on human stupidity.
One of the prison guards, a corporal named Knobloch, offered to help him escape, but Bonhoeffer rejected the opportunity, fearing retaliation against his own family. After being transferred for a few months to the Buchenwald concentration camp, Bonhoeffer ended up in the Flossenbürg camp. They were there on April 4, 1945, when the personal diaries of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who had been head of the Abwehr, reached Hitler.
They showed that the admiral had been aware of the plot of July 20, 1944, when Colonel Stauffenberg tried to assassinate Hitler in the Wolf's Lair with an explosive hidden in a briefcase. Furious, Hitler ordered Canaris and other members of the Abwehr who were prisoners to be killed. Four days later, on April 8, despite the fact that there was no evidence against him, a military court sentenced Bonhoeffer to be hanged without him having anyone to act in his defense.
At dawn the next day, he was led naked to the courtyard and hanged along with Admiral Canaris and five other defendants. His brother-in-law, Dohnanyi, was hanged the next day, and two weeks later Bonhoeffer's jurist brother, Klaus, was also executed for his alleged involvement in the July 20 plot. It was never known what became of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's body.
He was 39 years old. Now, let's return to the topic of human stupidity. In 1976, the Italian historian and economist Carlo Cipolla published an interesting essay in which he proposed five basic laws of human stupidity.
The first law is that everyone always, and inevitably, underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation. The second was that the probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. That is to say, stupidity does not depend on cultural level, wealth or social status, and is distributed practically equally among all segments of the population.
In Cipolla's own words: “Whether you frequent elegant circles, take refuge among cannibals, or lock yourself in a monastery, you will always have to deal with the same percentage of stupid people. ” The third basic law of stupidity was the one that Cipolla himself considered the most important of all, and it read like this: “A stupid person is one who causes losses to another person or a group of people while he himself gains nothing or even suffers. ” losses".
Based on this law, Cipolla established four categories in which all human beings could be classified based on their behavior, assessing the benefits or losses that their actions cause to others and those they cause to themselves. In this way, while stupid people would be – as stated in the third law – those whose actions harm others without bringing profit to them, evil people – whom Cipolla calls 'bandits' – would be those who harm others. others for personal gain.
On the other hand, intelligent people would be those whose actions benefit themselves but also others. And finally, those who help others even at the cost of harming themselves are called 'defenseless people': they contribute to the well-being of society, but at the same time they are exploited by it. They are altruistic people who can accept their role for moral reasons, and become the ideal prey for bandits, whose actions follow a pattern of rationality.
Unlike stupid people, who usually act irrationally, bandits – the evil ones – know perfectly well what they are doing, they are aware of their behavior. And that is why intelligent individuals are able to understand them, foresee what they will try to do and, therefore, take measures to defend themselves against them. On the other hand, the plans of intelligent people can be frustrated by stupid ones, since these are totally unpredictable and very destructive.
And since all societies are full of stupid people, the intelligent cannot contribute to the common well-being as much as is expected of them. Furthermore, Cipolla highlights that it is not easy to determine if a person is really intelligent, since we are normally guided by the opinion of others about that person, but frequently, by analyzing their actions in detail, we can discover that they actually act like a stupid The fourth basic law of stupidity states that non-stupid people always underestimate the harmful power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at any time, place and circumstance, dealing and/or associating with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
According to Cipolla, intelligent people tend to think that stupid people can only harm themselves, and that they, given their intelligence, are immune to the acts of stupid people, but, as we mentioned before, intelligent people find it difficult to imagine and understand the behavior of stupid people, so their attacks catch them by surprise, which gives rise to the fifth and final basic law: “Stupid people are the most dangerous type of people. ” Much more than bandits, than evil people! And within the stupid category?
Who do you think gets the credit for being considered the most dangerous? . .
. Exactly: the stupid ones who occupy positions of power. For Cipolla, there is nothing more threatening than a stupid person with power.
And unfortunately, the masses of stupid people, through their votes in elections, ensure that the percentage of stupid people who occupy positions of great responsibility in the governments of a country remains terrifyingly high. But then what can we do about the stupidity of others? Are we condemned to suffer it without remedy?
According to a 2015 study carried out by researchers at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, in Hungary, to avoid being victims of other people's stupidity, the most important thing is to learn to detect it. But. .
. how to recognize it? Well, knowing what produces it.
And apparently, according to that study, there are only three causes, each of which generates a different level of stupidity. The first cause, the one that causes the lowest degree of stupidity, is distraction. Those who are easily distracted do not dedicate the appropriate amount of energy and concentration to carrying out the relevant tasks that can lead them to achieve their goals.
They behave stupidly because they strive to achieve goals that, in reality, they are not willing to achieve. The average degree of human stupidity is produced by the lack of control over oneself, a characteristic of impulsive people. He who lacks self-control will be a victim of the events that happen around him and will act irrationally, harming himself and those around him.
Finally, the cause of the highest and most dangerous degree of human stupidity is ignorance and overconfidence, which often go hand in hand. That fearsome combination leads people to take big risks, despite lacking the knowledge or skills required to succeed and not knowing how to deal with the likely disastrous consequences of their failure. So, in summary, you know: if we want to protect ourselves from the stupidity of others, we must avoid the distracted, the impulsive and the ignorant with overconfidence in themselves.
And to protect ourselves from our own stupidity. . .
Well, I'm afraid that no one has yet found an effective defense strategy for that. And you? What do you think of Bonhoeffer and Cipolla's ideas about stupidity?
I would like you to tell us below, in the comments. And if you want to know more interesting stories, subscribe to our channel. Thank you very much for being there, curious minds!
See you in the next video!
