Personally, I find Bonhoeffer's premises are easily accepted - 1) stupidity is not an intellectual defect and 2) stupidity as a more dangerous adversary than malice. It follows that liberation, not instruction, is necessary to overcome stupidity. "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."
What I don't align with is the consequence that "stupidity surpasses malice in its danger." Malice, and only intentional malice, is the evil that was present in his day and remains so. I think there's an inherent snobbishness of modern philosophy readers who have a surface relation to this axiom, thinking that it means that, "oh, everyone is just stupid and unmotivated towards learning, and that's why I'm better than them."
Basically the reason ignorance is so danger is that it aliases between harmless stupidity and extreme evil, but it fails to trigger our collective species evil detection pattern coding which results in an unbelievable cascade evil failure mode.
In a sense, religion is a meta-epistemic solution to the binding problem of our collective subconscious.
I think if you apply the epistemic quantum mechanics to different logic modalities, you get some interesting insights!
Great summary. The problem with ignorance is that you are more likely to forgive the perpetrator whereas a malicious actor would have been cutoff once detected. You then stick with the ignorant for way longer and suffer loses beyond what a malicious actor would've likely caused. This is my impression from relationships at work.
If the truth becomes dangerous or unpopular, a decent defense is adopting stupidity. I think that is subtly different from ignorance, which implies never knowing, as opposed to a rejection of truth.
Like much cognitive dissonance, it can be easiest to live with if you just change your beliefs rather than trying to rail against it.
The danger is, once truth is denied, reality becomes disconnected and atrocity much more abstract.
Maybe there is a better name yet for the phenomenon.
Something sobering to keep in mind is that the vast majority of people have the logical and mathematical capabilities of a good ten-year-old. There are ten-year-old chess grandmasters, USAJMO qualifiers, or to be less extreme, ten-year-olds that have a solid understanding of algebra and an intuition for proofs. Most people do not, and rely on heuristics or intuitions for everything. They do not even realize you can prove something, except with "it feels or seems right". It isn't because they're mentally incapable of learning the skill, it's because they never bothered to, or didn't think it was important.
Think about this: you've probably driven a car to get from Point A to Point B before. If you existed in a society where people were constantly making mistakes, in the sense of crashing their cars several orders of magnitude more often, driving a car to get from Point A to Point B is no longer a good strategy. But it usually is a good, if not the best, move you can make right now, because people aren't making mistakes that frequently.
Here's another example: marriage (long-term relationships). Perhaps not all extra-marital affairs are mistakes, but a significant proportion of them are. If too many people are making these mistakes, leading to messy divorces, it's no longer worth it to even consider dating in the first place.
I had a period of my life where I read a lot of "you're not special" on reddit, but then I finally understood that the ability to think logically on the most basic level already makes me very special. After spending some time with people from lower social classes and genuinely trying to bond with them I became elitist. These people just don't fucking think.
"Because the stupid person's actions do not conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that we are generally caught by surprise by the attack. We cannot mount a rational defense, because the attack itself lacks any rational structure. [...] dealing with or associating with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."
[...] We think it’s an issue of education or life-experience — that they’re victims of circumstance, and not innately stupid. Thus we help them rise to power, as with Hitler and Stalin, even allowing them to make our regulations and laws, and to enforce them. But in truth, this never accrues to the welfare of a society; instead it leads to its downfall."
> Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
> 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.
> And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem
> it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere ... infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. ... The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.
> ... one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like
> This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain
> In the 1970s, Carlo Cipolla, a social psychologist, developed FIVE LAWS OF STUPIDITY. The term itself, he said, wasn’t a description of intellectual acuity, but of social responsibility
This is a good definition, one we need to talk about more and not associate it with IQ or other social indicators.
smitty1e•1d ago
The area of the abstractions occurring up the individual's pyramid is dwarfed by the area of the base needs.
The more people you consider, the more the basic needs for e.g. food and shelter dominate.
Finely nuanced abstractions about rights and aesthetics? Don't waste your breath on more than the substet of the population whose heads linger around the top of the pyramid.
Someone else who understood this non-scalability point was Gustav Le Bon[2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Po...
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7•1d ago
There are 8.2 billion of them, so I think they scale just fine.
smitty1e•1d ago
But look how hard it is to wage peace in the Ukraine...
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7•35m ago
Also, I am not sure how accurate this, but maybe something worth taking into consideration:
https://theconversation.com/its-ukraine-not-the-ukraine-here...