Evil is easy to identify and fight against; not so with stupidity. Philosopher Jonny Thomson walks through Dietrich Bonhoeffer's 3 conditions for the kind of stupidity that destroys societies: outsourcing your thinking to an authority, willful ignorance, and conformity.
He shows how each one shows up today, from AI answering our moral questions to political parties enforcing loyalty over conviction.
About the speaker: Jonny Thomson taught philosophy in Oxford for more than a decade before turning to writing full-time. He’s a columnist at Big Think and is the award-winning, bestselling author of three books that have been translated into 22 languages.
Jonny is also the founder of Mini Philosophy, a social network of around two million curious, intelligent minds. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.
Get more from Jonny Thomson
Timestamps
00:00:21 Chapter 1: Stupidity vs evil
00:01:52 What stupidity actually is
00:09:14 Why stupidity beats evil
00:21:53 How to cure stupid
00:27:35 Chapter 2: How power cultivates stupidity
00:30:09 Liars vs. bullshitters
00:35:12 Groupthink by algorithm
00:38:30 How to un-stupid yourself
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
My name is Jonny Thompson. I’m a writer, I’m a columnist at Big Think, and I run the Mini Philosophy social network, where I explain philosophical ideas to millions of people. I’m the author of the upcoming book, The Art of Enough, where I explain Epicureanism and teach everybody how it can apply to our lives.
Chapter 1: Stupidity vs. evil
So Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a 20th century philosopher and theologian, and he’s known for his writings, but also he’s known for his resistance to the Nazi system. He was born in the early 20th century to a prominent, quite elite family. His father was head of psychiatry at Berlin University, one of the most prestigious chairs in the country. When the Nazis came to power and began the German Christian movement where they tried to co-opt the Protestant churches, he ran a counter-movement known as the Confessional Church. When the war broke out, Bonhoeffer was part of the anti-Nazi intelligence where he would feed information to the Allies and to the resistance movements all over Europe and in Germany. Eventually the Nazis found out about this and he was imprisoned in 1943 where he wrote a whole range of letters and diaries from which we get these notes on stupidity which I’m going to talk about today. He was associated with the plot to kill Hitler in 1944 and he was executed at Flossenberg Concentration Camp in 1945, a few weeks before it was liberated by the Allies.
So in Bonhoeffer’s letters he talks about stupidity and he makes this slightly bold claim that stupidity is a greater threat to civilisation than even evil. But to understand that we need to really understand what he meant by stupidity because it’s different to how a lot of us use the word stupid in our everyday lexicon.
What stupidity actually is
So what is stupidity? Well, it is not the same as foolishness. Foolishness is when you do something silly, reckless, imprudent. For example, if you put diesel into a petrol car or I, for example, put washing up liquid in the washing machine and it caused a disaster or I remember... At my son’s last birthday party he was gifted a plastic golf set and so I was desperate to impress all of the other mums and dads and so I got the golf club out and I whacked the ball as hard as I could and it went flying over our gate into the road outside hitting a passing car. That is an example of foolishness but it is not stupidity in the Bonhoeffer sense.
Nor is it the same as a lack of cognitive ability. So sometimes in life you will run up against tasks which are simply beyond what you are capable of. In my own case, for example, I find flat pack incredibly difficult. So if it comes to assembling any furniture or even fiddly things like doing Lego, I’ll often pass it on to somebody else. Even my five-year-old son is better at making Lego than I am.
But nor is stupidity the same as ignorance because if you don’t know something, that is either a lack of education or a lack of exposure to that fact. For example, if you don’t know the capital of Indonesia, that is an example of ignorance. And then you go away and you find out that the capital is, is it Jakarta? I think it might be the capital, it might be Jakarta. And that resolves your ignorance. That is not stupidity. So Bonhoeffer is careful to say that those three things are not stupidity.
But what is stupidity? Now again, Bonhoeffer says that stupidity can be defined by three different elements. The first is when we outsource our critical thinking to some kind of third party. It might be a teacher, it might be a parent, it might be a social media influencer, or it might be technology. And of course today a lot of people do outsource their thinking to technology.
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Read “Live deliberately”: The origin of America’s first philosophy, an article by Jonny Thomson written for the Big Think Print Issue “The Opt-Out Nation.”
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In 2014, a philosopher called Robert Howell wrote a paper where he introduced a thought experiment known as Google Morals. And in the paper, he explains that we often use apps to do certain things for us. The most common is Google Maps. So even coming here today, for example, I use Google Maps to tell me where to go. I followed the blue line. It told me to go left. It told me to go right. And hey, presto, here I am. And most people are okay with using Google Maps, even if we use it for slightly imbecilic things. So for example, if I want to go to Big Ben, and it’s obviously there in front of me, people will still use Google Maps to tell them where to go to Big Ben in London. But we’re okay with that, because navigation seems to be a thing that we’re quite willing to outsource to technology.
But Howe introduced an extra idea. He said, imagine that the future contains an app called Google Morals. Now, Google Morals is an app where you would type in a question and it tells you what you should do in any situation. So let’s suppose I go to a burger bar or a burger restaurant and I say, is it right for me to eat the meat burger or the halloumi burger? And the app does its whirring and it tells me, okay, you should do this. Now the point isn’t whether Google Morals does the reasoning properly or not. The point that Robert Howell is saying is that we shouldn’t be outsourcing our moral reasoning to an app. Now this was written in 2014 and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to point out the fact that a lot of people use ChatGPT and Claude and AI today to answer these kind of questions for them. Is it right to do X? Is it right to do Y? Should I cheat on my partner? Should I stay with my partner? Should I do this job or should I do that job? We are using AI to do the critical thinking for us and that’s an example of what Bonhoeffer would call stupidity.
Now, the second element of stupidity is when we are willfully ignorant. I mentioned earlier how ignorance is itself not a form of stupidity. But if you are continuously ignorant and you don’t take any steps to resolve your ignorance, well, this, that is an example of stupidity. There is an example in the ancient Greek world where the Oracle of Delphi was once reputed to say that the wisest man in the ancient world was Socrates. Socrates famously said that the only thing I know is that I know nothing at all, which is an example of ignorance. But the reason why he wasn’t stupid was that because he spent his life devoted to trying to resolve that.
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