When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Pastor, Theorized How Stupidity Enabled the Rise of the Nazis (1942)
Two days after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer took to the airwaves. Before his radio broadcast was cut off, he warned his countrymen that their führer could well be a verführer, or misleader. Bonhoeffer’s anti-Nazism lasted until the end of his life in 1945, when he was executed by the regime for association with the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. Even while imprisoned, he kept thinking about the origins of the political mania that had overtaken Germany. The force of central importance to Hitler’s rise was not evil, he concluded, but stupidity.
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice,” Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter to his co-conspirators on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship. “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.” When provoked, “the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”
Fighting stupidity, to Bonhoeffer’s mind, first necessitates understanding it. “In essence not an intellectual defect but a human one,” stupidity can descend upon practically anyone: “under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them.” And it happens most noticeably when a particular figure or movement seizes the attention of the public. “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,” he writes. Since such phenomena could hardly arise without blindly obedient masses, it seems that “the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
You can see Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity explained in the illustrated Sprouts video above, and you can learn more about the man himself from the documentary Bonhoeffer. Or, better yet, read his collection, Letters and Papers from Prison. Though rooted in his time, culture, and religion, his thought remains relevant wherever humans follow the crowd. “The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent,” he writes, which held as true in the public squares of wartime Europe as it does on the social-media platforms of today. “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.” Whatever would surprise Bonhoeffer about our time, he would know exactly what we mean when we call stupid people “tools.”
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.