Born in 1906, Dietrich Bonhoeffer grew up the sixth of eight children in Breslau (now Poland) and Berlin. His father, a renowned psychiatrist, was not particularly religious. Even Bonhoeffer’s mother, a pastor’s daughter, had little contact with the church. So it was somewhat surprising that in 1923 the then 17-year-old decided to study theology out of intellectual interest.
Bonhoeffer received his doctorate by the age of 21 and was a lecturer by 25 – an exceptionally rapid rise in the academic and theologian spheres.
However, it was on attending the Theological Seminary in New York in 1930 that Bonhoeffer’s faith shifted. He became profoundly fixated on, and influenced by, the famous Sermon on the Mount and the notion of living in Christ’s image. Bonhoeffer later wrote that “until New York I was a theologian but not yet a Christian.”
The scholar many contemporaries had once considered arrogant suddenly was reborn as a campaigner for social justice and peace. His new credo: The church should be open to all, even non-Christian victims of every social order. He viewed Nazi Germany’s rejection of the Jews as a rejection of Jesus Christ, who himself was a Jew.
Not wanting to be involved in the Nazi-influenced national church, Bonhoeffer moved to London to preach in 1933. Returning to Germany in 1935, he helped found the opposition Confessing Church in Finkenwalde before it was forcefully shut by the Nazi secret police in 1937. And in 1940 Bonhoeffer was silenced by an official Nazi gag order.
In the same year he joined the resistance group of Major General Hans Oster and began his risky double life as a resistance courier and preacher of peace.
On April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested for “undermining the military.”
In the Berlin-Tegel prison where he was confined he found time to read, write letters and poems and, most importantly, to work. After the failure of the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, the Gestapo uncovered documents indicting Bonhoeffer in the plot.
Six months later he was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp before being executed in another camp in Flossenbürg.
According to a fellow inmate, Bonhoeffer reportedly departed with the words: “This is the end – but for me the beginning.”
The following was written by Bonhoeffer while being held in prison.
‘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 accomplishes 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, it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.
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 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 (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works/English, vol. 8) Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010.
The Laws of Human Stupidity
Mella, P. (2017). Intelligence and Stupidity. Creative Education, 8, 2515-2534. https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2017.815174
Scientific Research, Open Access Web Site
As a young man, Cipolla wanted to teach history and philosophy in an Italian high school, and therefore enrolled at the political science faculty at the University of Pavia. While a student there he discovered his passion for economic history.
He graduated from Pavia in 1944. He then studied at the University of Paris and the London School of Economics.
Cipolla obtained his first teaching post in economic history in Catania at the age of 27. This was to be the first stop in a long academic career in Italy (Venice, Turin, Pavia, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and Fiesole) and abroad. In 1953 Cipolla left for the United States as a Fulbright fellow and in 1957 became a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Two years later he obtained a full professorship.
Carlo Cipolla attempted to determine the percentage of stupid people in a given population. To determine if that number depends on education or on the social circle of the person, Cipolla conducted a “lighthearted” experiment that entailed dividing the population of his University into four groups: school custodians, students, clerks and teachers, in order to determine the percentage of stupid people in each group.
Surprisingly, he found that the number of stupid people remained constant for all the groups. Enthusiastic about his discovery, he extended his research to a group of Nobel Prize winners; here, too, he found, “happily”, that this population had the same number of stupid individuals. Based on this “lighthearted” experiment, he arrived at his first conclusion:
The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person (Cipolla, 2011: 11) .
He found it extraordinary that nature succeeds in maintaining constant the percentage of stupid individuals no matter what population is being considered.
Concentrating his attention on the results of these experiments, Cipolla presented several “Basic laws on human stupidity” :
1) Stupidity is inevitable. In all places, times and groups there has always been and will always be a percentage of stupid people; in his book A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity, the philosopher Walter Pitkin (1934) estimated that four people out of five are stupid enough to be called “stupid”; that amounts to over four billion today;
2) Stupidity cannot be quantified. No matter hard we try to quantify the number of stupid individuals, their number will always be greater than the one we have come up with;
3) It is not possible to recognize the stupid individual. Stupidity can be found in the simple as well as the educated person; in the worker and the businessman; adults and children; citizens or rulers. We cannot recognize the stupid person from his appearance but rather from the consequences of his behavior.
People whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid. Day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one’s activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments (Cipolla, 2011: 12) .
4) Stupidity is reflexive. All of us can show stupid behavior intermixed with other types of behavior. Often when we judge others as being stupid we are unaware that we may have the same characteristic.
5) The stupid person is more dangerous than the bandit (Cipolla, 2011: 28) ; The latter harms others but at least procures advantages for himself, while the stupid individual produces only disadvantages, for himself and for others; in effect stupid people do not know they are stupid, and that is one more reason why they are extremely dangerous;
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake (Cipolla, 2011: 31) ;
6) The decline of a nation begins when the number of stupid individuals exceeds that of the intelligent citizens.
Carlo Cipolla must have been amused by his lucid analysis. In fact, the essay that, in Italy, presents his theory―together with other essays full of irony―is titled “Allegro ma non troppo” (“Cheerful But Not Too Much”).
However, his test is truly powerful and convincing, especially owing to his decision to focus the analysis on the most deleterious form of social behavior, stupidity, thereby confirming Albert Einstein’s conviction: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe”.
Unfortunately, rational persons have great difficulty in understanding the modus operandi of those we can define as stupid since, in carrying out their actions, stupid individuals are not guided by any form of rationality, and for this reason their behavior is not only harmful to the interests of others but also self-damaging.
The American Interest Web Site
It’s the Foolishness, Stupid
Was A History of Human Stupidity an example of its subject?
A Short Introduction to the History
of Human Stupidity (1932)
Walter B. Pitkin
What is there to be learned from a book on human stupidity published in 1932? Well, for one, that the history of stupidity never ends. Walter B. Pitkin gives plentiful examples of human stupidity, and one would have hoped that such examples would have ended in 1932. But there followed World War II; the Vietnam War (for those who have not noticed, the Communists won); genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia and Sudan (Darfur); Enron, Tyco and Arthur Andersen; and a current involvement in Iraq with rapidly shifting ex post facto rationales, billions of dollars spent, and no endgame apparent to anyone, least of all those highly educated men of state who got us into it. These messes are not examples of stupidity alone, of course. Venality, greed, opportunism, irresponsibility and other less charming human traits played roles as well. But stupidity has surely been a prince among these causes.
Pitkin defines intelligence in a reasonable way, as “the ability of the individual to adjust successfully to new situations.” He defines stupidity as the opposite.
I would prefer to call it foolishness to distinguish it from low IQ, which is clearly not what Pitkin means given that many of his examples of stupid people, such as Walt Whitman, almost certainly had high IQs. But whatever we call it, Pitkin believes that stupidity is omnipresent in the world.
The reason is that the very attributes that led to success over evolutionary history lead to failure in more modern times. In particular, he insists that our distant ancestors had to be insensitive and indifferent to multitudinous stimuli in the environment, but that today—1932, anyway—we need to pay attention to those many stimuli. This evolutionary thesis is probably wrong.
Pitkin was unusual if he was anything. Early in his career he seemed to fancy himself a philosopher. In 1910, when he was 32 years old, he joined with five other authors to produce a book entitled The Progress and Platform of Six Realists.
The book is practically unreadable, though it seems to be a brief for a form of radical positivism. Pitkin’s chapter is about evolution, and what is intelligible about it seems to be mainly wrong.
A few years earlier he tracked down Edmund Husserl in Germany, trying to persuade him to let him translate one of Husserl’s books into English. He seems to have abandoned his philosophical ideas, becoming a journalism professor at Columbia University and writing a series of mostly self-help books.
Life Begins at 40 was his most famous, but he also wrote books giving advice on speed-reading and commented on just about every subject under the sun, gaining him a reputation as a kind of walking encyclopedia.
Pitkin was always a pessimist: Just before A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity appeared in 1932, he published The Twilight of the American Mind (1928), an early entry in the field of American declinism in which he warned against too much immigration and too much education for less-than-keen minds.
Despite (or perhaps because of) his reputation for such views, Pitkin was a household name. A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity sold like hotcakes for Simon & Schuster, and it was translated into 15 languages. Perhaps there is something Pitkin got right after all?
There is something. We can learn from A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity that there is a difference between the more academic, analytical side of intelligence and its more practical side.
Very academically brilliant people, such as Manuel Jones, a physicist cited by Pitkin, can be practically incompetent. Pitkin may have had some of these same tendencies, as do many of us.
Think about it.The skills that lead to success in school are by no means the only ones people need to function effectively in teams, communicate in a clear and convincing fashion, and understand other people’s belief systems and emotions. Nevertheless, societies continue to hang onto rather narrow beliefs about intelligence, even in their quiz shows.
Many countries have television quiz shows that test people’s knowledge of obscure facts. The United States has a program, College Bowl, that pits undergraduate students from various universities against each other to determine which university had the smartest students, in much the same way that the universities competed in football.
There were other programs, such as The Sixty-four Thousand Dollar Question, for which the stakes were so high that the producers decided to rig the games, causing a nationwide scandal when the fraud was discovered.
Today, in the United States as in other countries, there are spelling bees, and there even was a recent documentary, Spellbound, that chronicles the lives of youngsters memorizing the spellings of thousands of words in order to compete nationally to be the spelling champion.
Is memorizing thousands of obscure spellings, or for that matter pi to thousands of digits, the road to intelligence, or to foolishness? More importantly, can a person be smart, in the sense of knowing all the facts he or she needs to know and then some, and at the same time be stupid in some other sense?
Examples of foolish behavior in smart people abound. Bill Clinton, a graduate of Yale Law School and a Rhodes Scholar, compromised his presidency by his poor handling of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and other scandals with women from his past.
The antics of Silvio Berlusconi, one of the richest men in the world and the Prime Minister of Italy, at times seem to defy belief such as his claim that Mussolini wasn’t responsible for any of the deaths of his countrymen; he only sent them “on vacation.”
In history, we only need to go back to Neville Chamberlain and his slogan of “peace in our time” as a means to appease Hitler to realize that smart people can act very foolishly.
Such behavior is not limited to politicians. Some of the world’s smarter and better-educated businessmen brought us the scandals and fiascoes that led to the bankruptcies of or fiascos in major U.S. corporations such as Arthur Andersen, Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and others. Such scandals are not, of course, limited to the United States.
If there is one conclusion that seems clear, it is that smart people can act stupidly. If stupidity is in some sense the opposite of wisdom, it means that intelligence is no protection against it.
No one would question whether Clinton, once the most powerful man in the United States, or Berlusconi, currently the most powerful man in Italy, is smart.
We learn also from Pitkin, correctly I believe, that stupidity is more a state than a trait. That is, intelligent people can behave stupidly much of the time. Indeed, he concludes that every normal person actually needs many moments of stupidity.
Kenneth Lay, formerly CEO of Enron, was an economics professor. Another CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, was a Harvard MBA. And Andrew Fastow, the CFO, was a graduate of the Tufts university.
What is it that leads smart people to do stupidthings? Pitkin doesn’t delve very deeply here, but I would suggest that smart people are especially susceptible to stupidity precisely because they think they are immune to it.
The unrealistic optimism fallacy. This fallacy occurs when one believes one is so smart or powerful that it is pointless to worry about the outcomes, especially the long-term ones, of what one does because everything will come out all right in the end—as in “I’m too brainy and powerful to have to worry about anything.” If one simply acts boldly, one’s intelligence will turn things around in time. What were Richard Nixon’s cronies thinking when they planned the break-in at the Watergate? What were George W. Bush and his handlers thinking when the “mission accomplished” banner was waved to signal the end of the war in Iraq?
The egocentrism fallacy. This fallacy arises when one comes to think that one’s own interests are the only ones that are important. One starts to ignore one’s responsibilities to other people or to institutions. Sometimes people in positions of responsibility may start off with good intentions but then become corrupted by the power they yield and their seeming unaccountability to others. A prime minister, for example, might use his office to escape prosecution, as has appeared to happen in some European and South American countries in recent years. Berlusconi saw to the passing of laws that specifically protected his economic and legal interests.
The omniscience fallacy. This fallacy results from having at one’s disposal essentially any knowledge one might want that is, in fact, knowable. With a phone call, a powerful leader can have almost any kind of knowledge made available to him or her. At the same time, people look up to the powerful leader as all-knowing. The powerful leader may then come to believe that he or she really is all-knowing. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a bright man, was more or less immune to listening and learning, a fault of which his distant successor, Donald Rumsfeld, has also been accused (although whether fairly or not remains to be seen).
The omnipotence fallacy. This fallacy results from the extreme power one wields, or believes oneself to wield. The result is overextension and, often, abuse of power. Sometimes leaders create internal or external enemies in order to demand more power for themselves to deal with the supposed enemies. In the United States today, the Federal government has seized more power to itself than any government since World War II on the grounds of terrorist threats. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe has turned one group against another, with the similar goal of maintaining his own power.
The invulnerability fallacy. This fallacy derives from the illusion of complete protection, such as might be provided by a large staff. Leaders especially seem to have many friends ready to protect them at a moment’s notice, but they may be shielding themselves from individuals who are anything less than sycophantic. Eliot Spitzer engaged in behavior that he himself had investigated and prosecuted in the past.
The ethical disengagement fallacy. This fallacy occurs when one starts to believe that ethics are important for other people but not for oneself. Many leaders of countries, corporations and even churches have seemed to think themselves exempt from the ethical standards to which they hold others. Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker come to mind.
Pitkin has some very good insights on “six stupid tendencies” in our judging of other people. To mention just a few, we can slip up when we judge people only by the ephemera of their personal mannerisms or on-screen presence (unfortunately, the way many politicians come to be judged); by looking only at externals, such as how good-looking or tall they are, rather than by what they are like inside; and by judging them by our own habits and standards rather than by who they are. But in the end, for all the book’s many flaws, Pitkin’s main achievement is to remind us that there is a difference between book knowledge and academic intelligence, on the one hand, and broader skills, on the other. I mentioned one such broader skill above: practical intelligence. But there is an even more important one, perhaps: wisdom.
Wisdom can be defined as using one’s academic and practical intelligence, as well as one’s knowledge base, for a common good over the long and short terms by balancing competing interests through the infusion of positive ethical values. Schools need to place more emphasis on teaching wisdom and less on the learning of facts, many of which will be out-of-date or irrelevant shortly after they are learned. We test for many unimportant things that crowd the important lessons out of the curriculum.
The nation will not be saved by the No Child Left Behind Act. Indeed, the crumbling, unpopular Administration that has pushed it so hard seems to be full of people whom everyone else in the country has left way behind, or so one might conclude from a Gallup Poll which found George W. Bush to have the lowest popularity rating of any president since the poll was started. Nor will America be saved by aptitude tests, achievement tests, and schools that employ drill-and-kill regimes to maximize scores on standardized tests.
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