> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.ariet.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # More on stupidity - URL: https://www.ariet.net/more-on-stupidity/ - Published: 2026-09-18T22:26:22.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-18T22:26:22.000Z - Author: Richard Thackeray ## The story This started as a script that went around social media: a monologue built around Dietrich Bonhoeffer's wartime essay on stupidity, illustrated throughout with examples from current politics. A story like that is only worth using if it's true, so I checked it; the essay's own history turned out to be more interesting than the script had made it out to be once the politics came back out (although relating it to some of our political movements is still valid). What's left isn't really a claim about nations but a claim about what concentrated power does to independent judgement, and that applies to an organisation as precisely as it applies to a country. The question on the social media post was how millions of people who are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves choose to stop thinking for themselves. I've adapted that to how organisations think. In December 1942, a German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote an essay explaining how an entire country of smart people went along with fascism, and with a plan to exterminate people the regime considered its enemies, because the regime told them it was the right thing to do. He shared it privately with the small circle of friends resisting the regime alongside him. He was arrested four months later and executed two years after that, in April 1945, days before the camp he was held in was liberated. He called the essay "On Stupidity". Only the first two of the six points below are his; the rest borrow from separate writers working decades apart, folded into the same six-part frame from the original social media post. ## Six ways to destroy Here it is as told: six ways stupidity destroys a country from within. **One: the three things that make you stupid.** Bonhoeffer said stupidity has nothing to do with how smart you are, your IQ or your education. Three things make a person stupid. The first is letting someone else do your thinking for you: a leader, a political party, a media figure, any third-party group. Once you hand your thinking over, you're outsourcing your own judgement to whoever's holding it. The second is not knowing something and being proud of not knowing it: not even trying to learn, celebrating ignorance rather than correcting it. The ancient Greeks had a word for this, amathia, or wilful ignorance; Aristotle is said to have called it one of the greatest threats to a civilisation. We have the world's knowledge at our fingertips and still won't take five seconds to look something up. In the battle against alternate facts, we have to do this. The third is going along with the group even when you know it's wrong: believing what the group believes, because belonging matters more than truth. Bonhoeffer's point wasn't cowardice so much as what happens once the cost of independent thought becomes visible enough. Did we see this this week at a fashion show when a fashion CEO (Kolb) pulled a woman to the ground, put his hand over her mouth, and the rest looked on as he exercised his power. This, Bonhoeffer argued, is what stupidity is: not an inability to think, but a choice to stop. People aren't born this way; they're made this way. It spreads in groups; every time a certain kind of power rises, it infects people with stupidity, because the power of the one needs the stupidity of the others. He watched it happen in Germany: doctors, lawyers, professors, people who could think for themselves, and the moment fascist power rose, they stopped. **Two: the spell.** Bonhoeffer described this as a kind of delusion: try to talk to someone in this state and you're not talking to a person anymore, you're talking to a slogan, to talking points; the phrases have taken hold of them, and once that spell takes hold, they can do terrible things without being able to see them as terrible. **Three: the cage.** In 2022, a philosopher named Chris Ranalli, at VU Amsterdam, published research on how people become locked into their beliefs. He coined the term "epistemically insulating content": some beliefs come with a built-in rule that questioning them makes you a traitor. The belief stops being something you think and becomes something you are, so a challenge to the idea reads as an attack on your identity, and evidence against it gets discarded, not because it's wrong but because of where it came from. This is why facts bounce off; the cage is built from the inside. Stepping outside it means losing the group, the identity, the belonging, possibly the job, and the walls get thicker. **Four: bullshit.** In 1986, a Princeton philosopher named Harry Frankfurt published a paper called "On Bullshit". Frankfurt said there's a difference between a liar and a bullshitter, and the bullshitter is worse: a liar still cares about the truth and knows what's real while trying to hide it from you, so truth still has power over them. The bullshitter doesn't care whether something is true or false; whatever works, whatever gets a reaction, whatever wins the next five minutes. Caught out, they don't panic; they shrug, smile, and move on as if it never happened. Once that kind of indifference to truth becomes normal, people stop expecting truth from anyone; once they stop trying to sort truth from lies, they can be told anything. **Five: the language.** In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay called "Politics and the English Language". Orwell said political language doesn't get vague by accident; it gets vague on purpose. Flatten the words and you flatten the thinking; the words do the lying, so the speaker doesn't have to. He wrote that this kind of language is designed to make lies sound truthful, murder sound respectable, and give the appearance of substance to pure nonsense. The language does the lying, so the audience never has to face what it's cheering for and never has to ask what the words mean, because the words were built to stop that question before it starts. I wrote about lazy labels recently, and it is connected. **Six: the machine.** You don't need a dictator to keep people stupid anymore; a social media feed will do. In 2017, psychologists William Brady and Jay Van Bavel, at New York University, studied over half a million social media posts to see which political messages spread fastest. They found that every moral-emotional word in a post, words like hate, shame, destroy, betray, evil, increased sharing by roughly 20%: the angrier and more moral the language, the faster it spread. They called it moral contagion. The algorithm doesn't reward accuracy; it rewards outrage and cruelty, and the most extreme version of whatever your group already believes. It rewards you for saying what your group wants to hear; it punishes you for questioning; it feeds you back your own opinions; it shows you who to hate. The people deepest inside this don't feel trapped; they feel free, like fighters, like patriots, and feel like they're winning. It doesn't feel like giving up; it feels like purpose. But stupidity, Bonhoeffer argued, is more dangerous than evil. Evil can be fought, called out, stopped by force, because the evil person knows, somewhere, that they're wrong. The stupid person feels nothing: bring them facts and they don't hear you; show them proof and they push it aside; when the proof is too strong to ignore, they simply say it doesn't matter. You can't argue someone out of stupidity, not with facts, logic or evidence. Bonhoeffer said only an act of freedom can break the spell: the leader loses credibility, the propaganda stops reaching people, the group fractures, or the people around them stop rewarding obedience and start leaving. When the system can no longer reward conformity and punish independent thought, its power starts to disappear. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed on 9 April 1945; he was thirty-nine. He spent his last months trying to answer the question I started with: how do millions of people who can think for themselves choose to stop? His answer: power rises, the slogans take hold, the cage gets built from the inside, and the people deepest in it are the ones most convinced they're free. This relates to some of the darkest times in our history, but the words sound familiar. ## Sources He was arrested on 5 April 1943 over "Operation 7", an Abwehr scheme that smuggled a small group of Jews into Switzerland under cover of an intelligence mission, along with related currency and travel offences and helping pastors evade military service. His part in the actual plot against Hitler, the bomb of 20 July 1944, only came to light afterwards, when the Gestapo found incriminating papers that September; that is what sealed his fate, not the 1943 arrest. The essay itself, "On Stupidity", is part of a longer piece called "After Ten Years", written as a Christmas reflection in December 1942 and circulated privately among his fellow conspirators, Hans von Dohnányi, Hans Oster and Eberhard Bethge, months before his arrest. He was executed by hanging at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945, aged 39; the camp was liberated by US forces roughly two weeks later, on 23 April. His argument holds up too: that stupidity is a moral and sociological defect rather than an intellectual one, that it takes hold when a surge of power leads people to surrender their own independent judgement, and that only "an act of liberation, not instruction" can break it. Chris Ranalli, who coined the term "epistemically insulating content" (2022), teaches at VU Amsterdam. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" was an essay in 1986, expanded into a book in 2005; Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" was published in 1946\. The 2017 study on moral contagion was published in PNAS by William Brady, Julian Wills, John Jost, Joshua Tucker and Jay Van Bavel. The Aristotle line on amathia is best treated as paraphrase rather than a sourced quote. Johann Hari's Stolen Focus (2022) draws on the same Facebook Files material and coins the line "if it's enraging, it's engaging"; his own disconnection story is set in Provincetown, Massachusetts. ## The organisational question Bonhoeffer's claim turns out to be structural rather than psychological: stupidity is what a concentration of power produces in the people under it, not a trait some people carry into the room. That is what makes it an organisational argument as much as a historical one. The earlier phrase “the slogans take hold” has resonance with me; I remember senior leaders at a recent role using them to hide the truth. **Outsourcing thinking.** The clearest equivalent is the culture where one dominant leader or function sets the line and everyone else waits to hear what it is before forming a view of their own. Judgement doesn't disappear; it gets handed upward and stays there, because contesting the line in public reads as disloyalty rather than the ordinary discipline of checking a plan. **Amathia.** It has an organisational shape too: the team that treats not understanding the customer, or the tech debt, or its own regulatory exposure, as a fact of life rather than a gap to close. Pride in not knowing is rarer, put that plainly; a milder, more common version is a learned incuriosity about anything outside your own ticket. **The cage.** This is probably the most familiar of the six. Plenty of organisations run a version of "trust the strategy" that does exactly what "trust the plan" does in Bonhoeffer's account: it turns the person asking the awkward question into the problem, rather than treating the question as information about the plan. **Bullshit and the language.** Euphemism does the same anaesthetic work inside a firm that Orwell described in politics. "Resource action", "right-sizing" and "managed decline" do what "efficiency gains" does in the story: they let a decision be made and enacted by making it harder to see clearly what the decision is. **The machine.** This is the one point that doesn't fit cleanly, and I won't force it. The line that sticks in my mind is Johann Hari's, from Stolen Focus (2022): "if it's enraging, it's engaging” as mentioned earlier. What made the algorithm dangerous in the story was scale: automated curation deciding, across millions of strangers, that the angriest version of a claim gets seen more, the same substance behind Brady and Van Bavel's finding that a moral-emotional word raised a post's reach by about 20%, and behind the 2021 Facebook Files reporting Hari draws on, which found the platform's own algorithm weighed an "angry" reaction five times a plain "like". Most organisations have no equivalent: nothing in Slack or email is ranking messages by how much outrage they generate. What can exist instead is a softer, human version of the same incentive: a culture where the loudest or most alarming framing of a problem gets resourced fastest, so people learn to escalate dramatically rather than accurately, where manufactured urgency gets the attention (although eventually people see through it and any sort of urgency is mistrusted). That's a real risk, but it runs on incentive design and informal reputation, not on an algorithm. **Where the analogy needs to work hardest.** The wider mechanism strains for the same reason. Bonhoeffer's account depends on an external threat and a concentration of power that most organisations don't have in that form; fear of the market, or of the next round of cuts, may do some of that work, but more diffusely. Some of what reads as organisational stupidity may simply be incentive design, or an honest information gap, rather than a surrendered independence, and the argument is more useful if it stays alert to that difference rather than finding stupidity everywhere it looks. **What can we do?** My writing is about an informal layer of design called fabric, but this article isn't to relabel ordinary organisational dysfunction as fascism in miniature. It's narrower and more useful: identifying the specific conditions, a dominant single narrative, a penalty on dissent, a language built to make decisions hard to see, under which an organisation starts rewarding conformity and punishing the independent judgement its own capability depends on. It's the same claim, from a different angle, that runs through the rest of this work: that an architect's real product is the right question, not the diagram, and that walking the seams only tells you anything if the person doing it is still allowed to say what they found. The Wasa paper (see [here](https://www.ariet.net/the-learning-problem/)) made the same point from the other direction, a learning problem treated as an execution problem, feedback with nowhere authoritative to land. Bonhoeffer's version of that is what happens to a country, or an organisation, once saying what you found stops being safe. Which leaves three questions that matter more than the analysis. As a leader, that isn’t part of the power playbook, what do you do? The answer is structural, not moral: build the feedback loop with real authority attached before you need it, because a plan without one fails the way the Wasa did, and reward the person who said the unwelcome thing early over the one who executed the existing plan without asking. As someone inside the system, with none of that authority, what can you do? Less than a leader, and it's wrong to pretend otherwise, but more than nothing. Bonhoeffer wasn't alone in this either; he wrote for the small circle of people who still saw what he saw, and that circle was the actual mechanism, not a comfort on the side of it. Finding two or three people who still think clearly, and staying close to them, is how you keep your own capacity to notice and judge rather than lose it quietly. From there: keep your own clarity even where public agreement is required, say what you've noticed to whoever will still hear it, and treat the point where you can no longer do even that as information, not failure. And what should the good people of Germany have done? That question risks sounding like judgement from a safe distance, decades on, and it is and I am not going to go there. None of this is only history. The same conditions are visible in Britain now, earlier and milder than the story above, but visible; and the same test is in front of us. We need to see it, and do something different, while doing something different still costs less than it will later. If this is useful, there's more of this thinking at The Fabric: [www.ariet.net](https://www.ariet.net/).