Who is the Most Dangerous Person?

Last week in a poll, I asked this question with over 2000 people voting on the options, with many others leaving comments pointing to certain people. Why ask this question? I did so to see how many understood the threats to our society today as we live in troubling times.

History fascinates me as I seek to understand where things started, how we got to today, and what lessons we can learn from these past developments. As the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana stated, “Those that cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” He also said, “A country without a memory is a country of madmen.” Both are very applicable to what we see played out in our world today.

To study history, one must be willing to ask tough questions and be willing to face what it tells us about our humanity. Our claim to be a different generation from past generations is nothing more than a psychological defense to push aside the past evils, allowing us to believe we would never do what our forefathers did.

When I look at the Third Reich, there are some challenging questions:

• How did a criminal rise to become Chancellor and later a Dictator?
• How did parents come to prize blond hair/blue-eyed children over all their other children, often abusing the outliers?
• How did parents turn their disabled children over to the state, which later executed them in gas showers?
• How did neighbors turn against neighbors to destroy businesses and places of worship or report them to the state?
• How did German healthcare workers, who took the Hippocratic Oath (to not harm), find killing deformed children justifiable and then go on to staff the concentration camps to oversee the killing of millions?

These are all troubling questions on how evil developed in a country with so many intelligent people. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lived during the Third Reich, spoke out against it and was later executed in a concentration camp. As he struggled with what he saw going on in his beloved country, he later penned his answer in a letter.

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings?at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

Who are these stupid people, according to Bonhoeffer?

If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. 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.

In many cases, stupid people are stupid because they choose to be. They choose to follow Groupthink and fail to determine an independent view as Bonhoeffer wrote nearly 80 years ago:

Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.

Why are stupid people so dangerous? Bonhoeffer goes on to explain:

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

Thus, people are dangerous because once sufficiently stupid, they are capable of any evil and incapable of seeing their actions as evil, justifying what they do without a conscience to hold them back. As a result, they often become as Hermann Goring stated:

I know two types of law because I know two types of men, those who are with us and those who are against us.

These fitting words warn against the divisions that keep us from coming together for good and uniting around freedom. I challenge you to ask yourself the questions I ask myself, “Where am I choosing stupidity over reasoning? Where am I choosing a slogan over independent thinking? Where am I holding a view I cannot support with facts?” We must seek wisdom to stand against the dangers caused by stupidity. or each of us will become the most danger