Bonhoeffer's Theory of Stupidity more true today than you can ever imagine in the US.

[BerettaGuy]

Could it be that a certain "group" of people understand this theory and are exploiting it to the max?

I mean the more I see the more stupidity I see. I go to a store in Maryland and masks are required. Then playing on the TV is a football game with 10s of thousands of people crammed together and maskless. So I remove my mask. Then a teenage kid scolds me. Sir, please put on your mask. I stupidly put it back on. Watch this short take on the Theory of Stupidity. Then as you apply the "theory" to gun control, climate change, Corona, BLM, ANTIFA and then add in a Centrally controlled media and social media and more common day bs, a picture emerges. What if someone is exploiting this "theory"?

 

[SomeSoldier]

While listening to the video describe who a stupid person is, I had 10-15 people I know personally come into my head. I know more people that fit into the stupid category than not. We are outnumbered.

 

[Uninformed and Compliant]

To answer your question, "Yes."

Very much worth the read. Twice.

Shadow Men: Napoleon, Anthony: 9781621377283: Amazon.com: Books

 

[Blimey]

He is describing hyper-partisanship. It short circuits reason and creates what would later be referred to as “useful idiots”. They are their movement’s unthinking shock troops. Perpetually enraged, ignorant, ever self-righteous.

This morphs into dehumanizing of the opposition which is always a requirement before state-sanctioned mass murder. Only by classifying the other side as evil vermin can a human be brought to partake in genocide, and then later that evening sit to dinner with their family and tuck the kids into bed.

 

[libertysnake]

I will read into this. The video is interesting.

If there is one thing the video should tell us, is we should engage with ideas, no matter how good they seem prima facie. We should not just consume them. That's how we got into this mess, after all.

 

[Acer-m14]

i think that has been used in the govt schools over 2 decades if not longer .. make them stupid .. make them have no interest to learn something new ..

 

[BerettaGuy]

He is describing hyper-partisanship. It short circuits reason and creates what would later be referred to as “useful idiots”. They are their movement’s unthinking shock troops. Perpetually enraged, ignorant, ever self-righteous.

This morphs into dehumanizing of the opposition which is always a requirement before state-sanctioned mass murder. Only by classifying the other side as evil vermin can a human be brought to partake in genocide, and then later that evening sit to dinner with their family and tuck the kids into bed.

He is describing groupthink and the power of groupthink after realizing how some realize this and then control groupthink. We are in the process of being manipulated and groupthink is being steered into the demonization of the unvacced and anti mandate people. Expect more in the coming days about re-education of the unvaccinated because the stupid will not just go along with it, they will start demanding it.

 

[BerettaGuy]

Five laws of Stupidity
Law Number 1
Everyone underestimates the number of stupid people!
No matter how many stupid people you think you are surrounded by, you are lowballing the estimation.
Law Number 2
The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic.
Any characteristic you can imagine is uncorrelated to whether the person is stupid or not.
Law Number 3
A Stupid person causes losses to others without making gains to themselves.
Law Nubmer 4
Nonstupid people underestimate the "danger" of the stupid.
Law Number 5
Stupid People are the most dangerous people on the planet.

 

[libertysnake]

So I read the essay itself that the video is sourcing here. Honestly, I feel like the video author merely took the paper and repeated that section on stupidity word for word for the section on stupidity.

Some high level points that stuck out on the first pass:

• He believes a lot of obligation to fight evil stems ultimately from God. He seems to try to make that argument very superficially and assumingly several times, and then call Christians to action.
• In the face of evil you cannot change, he believes it should be about accepting the fact the evil exists, but seeing how you can improve the lives of future generations to lessen it to some degree.
• He believes Germans got into the mess they were in because they are used to wanting to be a sort of cog in the machine of society, but somehow couldn't figure out their cog-part could be used for evil.

Honestly he tries to cover a whole lot in a short period. This "essay" seems more like a collection of mini journals he is writing to himself, mostly around justifying the moderate attitude of the German resistance and reinforcing his Christian beliefs.

Like most German philosophical writing I found it dense and over-reaching as far as what it is trying to cover without a ton of concrete examples.

I'll give another pass to see if I get anything from a second reading, but I honestly didn't find it very good, personally. I tried.

 

[Uninformed and Compliant]

Carlin's take, IMO, was simpler.

"The average IQ is 100. Realize that half the people? Are dumber."