'Stupidity is more dangerous to us than Evil'- Dietrich Bonhoeffer hero of anti-Nazi resistance

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:14]I've been thinking a lot recently about human bias and group think and I want to tell you about Bonhaofer's ideas relating to evil and stupidity. First of all, let me talk to you about Bonhofer.

[00:00:27]He was born in 1906. He was a German theologian. Uh he died a fortnight before being liberated. The Nazis hung him by a noose of piano wire in the prison two weeks before liberation. He formed a confessing church, a Protestant group of churches that refused the authority of the Nazi state in Germany and wrote a number of very important pieces um including letters from prison, which is where I take this from.

[00:00:58]Essentially, Bonhofer said that we need to worry much more about stupid people than evil people. We need to worry about stupidity more than evil. And one of the things it's occurred to me is that we're dealing with stupidity. Interestingly, his ideas correspond to Jordan Peterson's.

[00:01:17]Peterson also talks in the same way about people being inhabited or possessed by an idea. He doesn't say it, but they then become stupid. So we have two ideas now. Stupidity and possession.

[00:01:30]Both of which Christians ought to be familiar with. Why does Bonhaofer think that stupidity is a more important problem than evil?

[00:01:38]This is critical and very essential.

[00:01:40]When I came across this articulated clearly, I thought this is what I've been looking for. This this is saying very clearly what I felt for a long time, but lacked in a sense the the clarity to express properly. So this is Bonhoffer's position. He says that we can manage evil. We can manage evil and we can manage evil people. The thing about evil, he says, it always pretends to be good. But ultimately it self-discloses. It gives itself away with its malice, its hatred, its prejudice, its bitterness, its unreasonleness.

[00:02:15]And so we can do two things with evil.

[00:02:17]We can first of all argue against it successfully because our arguments are stronger. There's a better outcome of good than evil. We are designed to like good more than evil. So in our argumentation with evil people and evil ideas, we can expose them. They expose themselves as well.

[00:02:39]But he says whilst that's difficult and problematic, we we can manage. What we can't manage is stupid people. Now at this point we need to understand that stupidity in this sense is not about intelligence.

[00:02:56]It's more about moral perception. It's about people becoming dumb for another reason. So what he says is this.

[00:03:03]Essentially we're dealing with power.

[00:03:05]Ultimately this will trace its way back to the power or potency of God and different kind of power real power as we understand it in this world. It's what happens is that there's a kind of group think which develops. A powerful idea comes along and people give way to it for a whole series of reasons. They don't want to be left out. They don't want to be considered antisocial. They don't have the courage to stand against it. But ultimately they want to be in on this power thing. And so what you have is a kind of form of collective stupidity that people sign up to. Unless unless you have a greater power, a greater authenticity within you and this comes from God. Now the problem with stupidity of this collective level is that you can't argue against it. People are too stupid to argue. They're too morally blind to be able to consider there's another point of view. This is an exercise of power, not discernment.

[00:04:03]This has got nothing to do with intelligence. It's essentially power politics that's inhabited people. So when you come across a really stupid idea or a dangerous idea, I'm thinking of two things at the moment. I'm thinking of wokery and the idea I mean the whole the whole gays to Palestine uh nonsense is is an example of that. You have people who want to uh take samesex attraction and then support the Palestinian rights irrespective of the fact that if the same theocracy that governs Palestine took place in their society, they would be invited to the top of a sky of a skyscraper or a large building uh given a cup of tea and then pushed over the side. And yet they're quite unable to to do the easiest and simplest exercise of common sense, which is to say, "I, as a samesex attracted person, should not be supporting a regime that likes to throw samesex attracted people off buildings."

[00:05:05]This is a piece of serious stupidity.

[00:05:07]But that's the point. They become stupid.

[00:05:11]There's another form of stupidity that we're struggling with at the moment, which is anti-semitism. I've been listening to people who say that Israel has no right to exist. Is there any other country in the world where people say, "However much we are for or against what you stand for or for or against the complexity of your society, we are determined you have no right to exist with the implication that the destruction of a whole nation becomes morally acceptable." Now this isn't the moment to enter into engagement about what any particular country is doing.

[00:05:47]All countries uh are as nations are morally suspect. Of course they are.

[00:05:52]There's nothing there's nothing intrinsically good about the way in which people do nationalism. Though we could argue whether nationalism is a healthy concept or not. But the idea that you could be against anyone's right to exist is a phenomenal piece of moral stupidity. But it's one that is increasingly becoming powerful in our society. I don't want to argue about that. I want to argue about the notion of collective stupidity because I think Bonhaofer in his in in his resistance to the Nazis.

[00:06:27]And by the way, the one thing that Nazis were particularly famous for was deciding that Jews had no right to exist either outside or inside their country.

[00:06:37]It ought to be it ought to people ought to stop for a moment when they move towards a position where Jews and only Jews have no right to exist in some form or another. But let's go back to Bonhaer and the Nazis.

[00:06:54]Bonhaer when he's asking himself, how can people be delivered from collective stupidity, from group think? Is there any solution to it? Says that there is. But only God can produce it. An act of internal redemption or illumination needs to take place. In other words, one needs to be more committed to God inside one than fear or than power. And it is fear and power that makes people collectively morally not intellectually remember but collectively and morally stupid. What Bonhoffer says is that as Jesus says, Jesus being the truth and the truth will set you free. The only way we can become free from collective stupidity is by wanting Jesus, wanting God, wanting the reality of God more than we want to well, whatever it is that drove us to sign up for this thing to be possessed by the ideology. more than we want to not be excluded. More than we want to not be thought badly of, more than we want to not belong to the cool people or to the powerful people in our society, we have to want God more than that. And the fact is, it seems, if you follow Bonhaofer, the p people possessed by collective group think, by this moral stupidity, whether it's anti-semitism or wokery, are people for whom God has taken a backseat to something that's more important, something that produces a degree of moral and spiritual occlusion, we might call it. What can we do about this? nothing at all except go on telling the truth in the hope that the moral the people who have become morally stupid may find a deeper longing within them or or perhaps they'll notice that there's a degree of intellectual inconsistency with what they're holding.

[00:08:49]Perhaps some little camera at the back that that examines their thoughts will say, "But this doesn't add up." And the discomfort with it not adding up and the implications that have that has for sitting loose to truth or reality will become more and more difficult for them until until this act of internal redemption happens. I've been reading Bonhoffer to try and find out more about this internal act of redemption, the the prioritizing of God within our heart.

[00:09:20]But um I don't think one could do anything more than describe it and then hope and pray that people who are given over to different forms of collective and moral stupidity wake up. Evil we can deal with. Evil we can argue with. Evil we can expose. But as Bonhaofer said, stupidity is very very much more dangerous, particularly when it takes the form of a collective stupidity when people hide in the protection of crowd and group think.

[00:09:56]That's what we're facing today, particularly with a number of authoritarian ideologies that take people over. As Petersonen says, I think with Petersonen and Bonhofer together reminding us of what's going on, at least we're able to make some form of diagnosis.

[00:10:14]God himself can set us free and the rest of us can tell the truth as energetically, as clearly, as enthusiastically as possible. And I'm afraid whatever the cost for Bournehofer the cost was being hung by piano wire two weeks before the allies liberated Germany. None of us know what the cost is. But if we love the truth, the truth will set us free, irrespective of what it costs us. God bless and help you as you pursue the truth and freedom from this collective stupidity.