The few who are truly evil at the top, the thought runs, one could deal with — they are a small group, they could be confronted. The real problem is the many who follow them uncritically, who make themselves into their helpers and thereby let them become powerful in the first place. Against that mass one is then practically defenceless. This thought has a name and a place: Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it "stupidity", and he wrote it down in 1942, in the midst of the resistance against the Nazi regime.
A Text from the Resistance
At Christmas 1942 the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) wrote, for his closest fellow conspirators, a stocktaking titled After Ten Years — ten years after Hitler's seizure of power. It contains the short, now-famous section "On Stupidity". The manuscript survived hidden in a roof beam of his parents' house; Bonhoeffer himself was arrested in 1943 and executed in April 1945 at Flossenbürg concentration camp, two weeks before its liberation. The text is thus no academic exercise but the sober observation of a man who studied the mechanism of going-along at close range and at the risk of his life.
The Thesis: Stupidity Is More Dangerous Than Malice
Bonhoeffer begins with a sentence that at first sounds paradoxical:
"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice."
The reasoning is cool and practical. Against evil one can do something: one can expose it, contradict it, prevent it by force if need be; evil always carries within it a seed of self-destruction, because it leaves at least a sense of unease behind. With stupidity it is different — and here Bonhoeffer becomes very concrete:
"Against stupidity we are defenceless. Neither protests nor force can achieve anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one's own prejudice simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even turns critical — and when the facts are unavoidable, they can simply be brushed aside as meaningless exceptions."
Anyone reading this instantly recognises the experience of arguing with a committed follower: arguments bounce off, facts are waved away, and precisely where one expects insight, the other turns stubborn. Hence Bonhoeffer's sober warning: "One needs to be more on guard with the stupid person than with the malicious one."
Not a Problem of Intelligence but of Power
Here comes Bonhoeffer's real discovery, and it is what makes his text so sharp. By "stupidity" he means no lack of intelligence. Highly educated people can be stupid in this sense, simple people wide awake. It is a human, a moral defect — and above all a social one: stupidity is not an innate condition but something that, under certain circumstances, is produced. Bonhoeffer observes:
"… every strong outward display of power, whether political or religious, strikes a large part of humanity with stupidity."
And he condenses the relationship into a formula that captures exactly this point:
"The power of the one needs the stupidity of the others."
That is the core. The few powerful ones at the top are powerful not in spite of but because of the many followers. Power does not arise out of itself — it is produced in the first place by the uncritical following. In the pull of the movement the individual surrenders their judgement, "renounces" their own inner independence, and precisely this renunciation is what makes the apparatus strong. It is not that the top makes the mass stupid because it is weak; the mass, having become stupid, makes the top strong.
The Follower as a Will-less Instrument
What makes this state so dangerous Bonhoeffer describes with frightening precision. The person who has surrendered their judgement is not simply harmlessly naive. They have become available:
"Having thus become a will-less instrument, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time unable to recognise it as evil."
This is the answer to the question of how crimes on a vast scale become possible without those who carry them out having to be monsters. They need only be available — an instrument that functions while no longer recognising its own action for what it is. It is the same observation that comes from historical research in the piece on the "ordinary men": not fanatics, but the available.
Bonhoeffer and Arendt: Two Witnesses, One Diagnosis
It is striking that two very different people independently arrive at almost the same insight. Bonhoeffer, the Protestant theologian, writes about "stupidity" in 1942 within the resistance. Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher, coins the concept of thoughtlessness in 1963 after the Eichmann trial (covered in detail in the piece Obedience and Evil). Both are saying essentially the same thing: the catastrophe lies not with a handful of villains but with the many who have stopped judging for themselves.
The concepts even complement each other. Arendt describes the how from within — the suspension of the silent dialogue with oneself. Bonhoeffer describes the by-what from without — the power that numbs judgement. And social psychology measures the same mechanism in the lab (see Herd Behaviour in Humans) and in the steering of whole populations (see Propaganda and the Manipulation of the Masses).
The Resolution: Liberation, Not Instruction
At this point the text could end in resignation — after all, we are supposedly "defenceless". But Bonhoeffer turns it decisively. If stupidity is not a lack of knowledge, then knowledge is no remedy against it:
"It becomes especially clear here that stupidity can be overcome not by an act of instruction but only by an act of liberation."
One cannot argue the follower out of their condition — one can only help them to free themselves inwardly. And what this liberation consists of Bonhoeffer states unmistakably in his closing sentence:
"The biblical words that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declare that the inner liberation of a person to a responsible life before God is the only real overcoming of stupidity."
Here Bonhoeffer touches precisely the line this site keeps returning to. The saving authority is not external — not the majority, not the apparatus, not the right information — but an inner one: being responsible before something higher, before which one cannot hide. This is the same inner judgement that Arendt describes as "living together with oneself", only put theologically. Whoever acknowledges an inner authority above themselves cannot be turned entirely into an instrument.
A Warning at the End: What Bonhoeffer Did Not Say
Precisely because Bonhoeffer is so quotable, many sentences circulate under his name that he never wrote — for instance "Not to act is to act" or "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil." However catchy they sound, they are not documented but later attributions. All the quotes in this piece are taken verbatim from On Stupidity — the text has been in the public domain since 2016 and can be read freely in the original. This care is not a side issue: whoever warns against uncritical adoption should not practise it themselves.
And so the uncomfortable symmetry of the sister articles applies here too: "power needs stupidity" works in every movement, every age, every group — including one's own, including the one that takes itself to be the enlightened. The antidote remains the same one that Bonhoeffer and Arendt name from two sides: not to surrender one's own inner authority. Examine for yourself, answer for it before yourself — then follow, or not.
Sources
- Bonhoeffer, D. (1942/43): On Stupidity, from: After Ten Years. In: Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 8). All quotes verbatim from the public-domain original (Wikisource).
- On his life and execution in 1945: standard biographies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (e.g. Eberhard Bethge).
- Note on misquotes: "Not to act is to act" and the like cannot be verified in Bonhoeffer's work.
- Comparison: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and The Life of the Mind — see the piece Obedience and Evil.