The 3 elements of stupidity, according to philosophy | Jonny Thomson: Full Interview

My name is Jonny Thomson. 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 am 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 one, stupidity versus 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 few weeks before it was liberated by the allies.

So in Bon Hopper's letters he talks about stupidity and he makes this slightly bold claim that stupidity is a greater threat to civilization 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. 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 moms 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 flatp 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 5-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 it Jakarta? I think it might be the capital 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 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. 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 imbecillic 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 how introduce 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 go 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 halumi burger?" and the app does its worring 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 chat GPT and claude and AI today to answer these 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. In his works the Nicomachean Ethics and the politics Aristotle says that one of the worst things that can befall any society is what the ancient Greeks called amathia. Now amathia is willful ignorance. It's

when somebody celebrates the fact they don't know something and they take no steps to resolve it. And in the ancient world we can trace a line from Socrates to Plato to the Stoics which associates knowledge with immorality and being wrong. The idea was that the more the better you become. And so Amathia is the great curse. It's a great contagion because there is this

rise in people who no longer want to know things. They celebrate the fact they don't know things. And there is a inverse elitism where those who do know things are mocked and ridiculed. So that's the second example of stupidity according to Bonhoeffer. Now the third element

of stupidity is conformity. And this is what Bonhoeffer saw from his prison cell in 1943. He saw people who he grew up with people who were educated in the same university systems, people who went to the same schools as him and suddenly they became part of this Nazi operation. And so with conformity it reminds me of something that nature says in his work beyond good and evil.

nature has an entire chapter devoted to truth. And in the work nature argues that philosophers and academics and writers often become obsessed with this idea of truth that truth has a value in and of itself. And he says if you look at the history of humanity, if you look at where we are today, people don't care about truth as a thing.

What matters more is loyalty and what matters more is identity. So for example in 2022 a philosopher called Chris Rali wrote a paper about indoctrination and he was trying to answer the question what is it that makes somebody indoctrinated? How can

we define indoctrination? And Rali argues that indoctrination is not defined by believing one thing or believing another thing. It's when you close your citadel to any alternative positions. It's when you associate your belief with an identity. You are that belief. And so you see

any rivals to that position as a test of faith. You see any rivals as a temptation. So the indoctrinated person doesn't belong to any one camp. It's not the atheist. It's not the believer. It's not the right wing or it's not the left wing. It's how you keep those beliefs. And what Rali is saying is what Bonhoeffer was saying as well that when we conform

to some group think we are surrendering our own ability to do critical thinking and we are offloading it to somebody else to do for us. A writer and a philosopher called Robert Musul developed a distinction between what he called ordinary stupidity and intelligent stupidity. Now ordinary stupidity is what a lot of people might associate with

cognitive ability. Some people just can't do certain things. I can't do flat pack very well. But intelligent stupidity is when somebody who is otherwise incredibly able, somebody who is otherwise incredibly talented, articulate, erudite, uses their abilities for

some foolish end. And what Musul and Bonhoeffer were writing about and what they were talking about was of course Nazism. Here you had a system that was populated by intelligent people and yet they were using their abilities for an incredibly foolish end. So the reason why Bonhoeffer says that stupidity is a greater problem than evil is because with evil you have a known problem.

There is some intention to the malice. So when you have the evil person we're thinking the dark lord Sauron from Lord of the Rings dressed in black with orcs and fiery volcanoes that's obviously evil. But likewise in our world we have people like who are serial killers or genocidal tyrants or people who we know to be evil. And when you can point to something which is evil,

what happens is that the good of the world can rally around and they can resist the evil. Bonhoeffer has got this quotation where he says that evil contains within it the germ of its own subversion. Because once something is evil, the good people of Minas Tirith can gather around and they can fight the dark lord Sauron. But there are two problems with stupidity.

The first is that as a society, we are much more tolerant of it. If somebody says they don't know something and they don't want to take steps to know that thing, we brush it off. We say, ", that's what they're like." And we kind of accept that. But the second problem with stupidity is that it's far harder to identify. So, for example, not everything is the Dark Lord Sorrow. Not everybody is a serial killer. Not everybody is a genocidal tyrant.

But in our time, of course, we have real life evil people. For example, I'm thinking in the UK, we had the Jimmy Savile scandal. In 2012, Jimmy Savile was exposed as abusing children. And of course, that is an evil. And the good of the world rallied round. The judicial system and

the police and all of the witnesses came out and they opposed this very obvious explicit evil. In 2017, you had Harvey Weinstein. Similar there. The good of the world rallied around. The judicial system worked. Police came out. Harvey Weinstein was arrested. He is now in prison. And of course,

very recently, you have the Epstein files. These are obvious evils. And in each case you have somebody who is evil eventually being put into prison or in the case of Savile he was dead. But the question that comes after that is who knew about what was going on? Who are the people

who didn't ask questions? Who are the people who were willfully blind? Who were the people who were stupid in the Bonhoeffer sense? Because in the Nazi regime there's a character called Albert Shar who embodies this quite well. Albert Shar was a very intelligent and educated person and he

was Hitler's architect. He ended up becoming the minister for munitions and production in the Nazi system. And when it came to the end of the war and he was put on trial at the Nuremberg trials, he said he didn't know anything. He said he didn't know about the Holocaust. He didn't

know about all of the trade. He didn't know about all of the evils of the Nazi machinery. And the people at Nuremberg said to him, "This is ridiculous. You are an intelligent person. There is no possible way. You didn't know what was going on." And so he was arrested and he was put in prison. He wasn't executed like some of the Nazi regime were executed,

but people said that you should have known better. Your stupidity in that instance was not an excuse. So that's why stupidity is such a harder thing to find and it's why Bonhoeffer thinks is worse than evil because it's part of the system and it drags down institutions and it makes everybody far more corrupt and worse off. So there's a great quotation which has been floating

around the internet for a very long time now from the earlier days of the internet. And it says that debating an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon. You can play as well as you want but the pigeon will jump on the board. It'll crap on the pieces and it'll go back to its flock declaring victory. And it's a brilliant quotation and it's a brilliant visual because it is so true

as to what it feels like when you are debating somebody who is stupid in the sense of Bonhoeffer. When you're debating somebody who is stupid in the sense of Bonhoeffer, they don't question their own beliefs and they are unwilling to accept any contrary position to what they believe. They're playing by different rules. You might approach them with facts and the most logical arguments you can possibly devise, but they will see you as an enemy. They will see you

as an other. They will see you as a temptation. And so it's very interesting that in our language we often have a few examples where people will try to repel any contribution using certain words and these can belong to whatever different denomination or different ever belief system. So for example, if somebody says trust a science. Now if we dig into what

trust a science means, it makes sense. You go away and you look at some peer-reviewed papers. You look at what the consensus of the experts are saying. You look at some studies online, whatever. When someone says trust a science is often used as a batting away of any opposition to you.

Another example might be do your own research. Again, on paper looks like a good thing. Go away and Google and find out what's going on yourself. But if somebody says do your research is often used as a way to try to reduce you as an alternative position. So the reason why debating an idiot is so difficult is because they are playing by a different rule system.

In Aristotle's rhetoric he makes a distinction between three different types of persuading somebody or three different ways that people often come to believe something. He talks about logos which is rationality. It's reason and it's using good debate and facts and evidence.