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
Reading the passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's letter which certainly should be considered these days, after thinking along with so many others that he could be talking about the rise of neo-fascism in the United States and elsewhere, the phrase "invincible ignorance" came to me though what Bonhoeffer is describing is different from the classical Catholic definition of ignorance of the truth of Christianity. That ignorance was only invincible (in the Catholic articulation of the idea) so long as the person remained ignorant of ideas they could learn. Once hearing it, they pass into those considered "vincably ignorant." Looking it up I found that there is something closer to what Bonhoeffer discussed that was probably unfortunately formulated as a "logical fallacy of invincible ignorance" about sixty years ago. Given here:
invincible ignorance -- the fallacy of insisting on the legitimacy of one's position in the face of contradictory facts. Statements like "I really don't care what the experts say; no one is going to convince me that I'm wrong"; "nothing you say is going to change my mind"; "yeah, okay, whatever!" are examples of this fallacy.
The use of the word "stupidity" for that is probably unfortunate because in his letter Bonhoeffer has the insight to remove what he's talking about from a mere lack of intelligence, the favorite framing of "the problem" among the college-credentialed, made so obvious in how many of those involved with the neo-fascist movement being highly credentialed and craftier than many of their opponents.
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. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.
Perhaps less in his time but certainly in ours an individual's "society" is liable to be less through face to face communication or interaction and is likely through some form of electronic media, either the mental disease spreading "social media" or through the passive consumption of mass media, both entertainment and "news". A large number of people have commented on how their parents or uncles and aunts or grandparents were nice, normal, level-headed people until they started watching FOX or EWTN or some other form of right-wing propaganda on TV, which uses every tool of deception sharpened by the advertising industry. Or listening to hate-talk radio. It is an established fact that the movies have a huge impact on its viewers, something already known when Birth of a Nation was made, the man who reignited what might be the foremost terrorist group in the United States, the KKK gleefully announced his intention to use the showing of the movie for that purpose, he used it and it worked in exactly the way he intended it to. Earlier than that William Randolph Hurst deliberately fomented the Spanish American War using his newspaper empire So with that extension of the word "sociological" I would entirely agree with what he is said.
This effect is certainly not unknown though American liberals have been gulled by the advocates of free speech absolutism to pretend it doesn't exist. Especially on behalf of the porn industry and the "rights" of Nazis and the KKK to get all the chances they will ever need to make it work, after they've learned from past failures, that they have a "right" to lie themselves into power eternally. I would like to know how many people who parrot the morally responsible phrase of "never again" in light of the past success of the Nazis and the millions murdered in the process have, at the same time advocated the making the conditions of their future success in doing it again a "First Amendment right." It seems to me you can't pose as an advocate of "never again" when, in the next breath, you say, well, maybe again. Nor can you pick and choose the genocides you will say that about as you enable those with other lists of who to oppress and destroy to have their next bite of the apple. That is exactly what the civil liberties ideology and industry has done in the 20th and 21st centuries, refusing to learn even the hardest lessons of recent history, the passing direct witness to the crimes of the Nazis and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot, etc. and ignoring the continual and living witness that is given witness by Black Lives Matter and a myriad of other groups attacked by the neo-fascist, neo-Nazi media that is both highly financed and empowered by the civil liberties industry and that ideology that has been embedded into the law.
The refusal to see the result of that is the invincible ignorance of the kind that that "logical fallacy" encodes. A logical fallacy of the libertarian liberal, often on behalf of those who transgress morality and promote harm to people for profit, the porn industry, the liquor industry, the peddlers of addictive prescription drugs, the tobacco industry, all of which have had the support of such groups as the ACLU to use the media to advertise their wares and the damage that comes from them.
It isn't any accident at all that this kind of "stupidity" this kind of "invincible ignorance" uses direct appeals to our worst weaknesses, pleasure, laziness, a choice to not think of the consequences for people other than ourselves and those we care about. "Yeah, ok, whatever." I wonder how often that promotion of inconsideration has been repeated in TV shows or movies. It's only one of a hundred product placements for willful stupidity in pop culture that more people watch than who watch FOX or other ersatz "news" shows.
All of that is directly related to and linked into the promoters of exactly the dangerous, deadly kind of "stupidity" that Dietrich Bonhoeffer identified in his fight against Nazism, and here it's considered a sacrosanct act of civic, 18th century "enlightenment" virtue.
The links between American neo-fascism, edging into neo-Nazism and what secular liberals support are as obvious as the links between American neo-fascism and 1930s style German Nazism. American liberals who have aided and supported the creation of the conditions in which American's indigenous fascists have gotten more than a mere next bite at the apple will piously nod in approval of the idea of Dietrich Bonhoeffer bravely, courageously setting himself against German Nazism, they will smugly nod at his identification of the problem as "stupidity" while ignoring that they and their casual ideology are exactly the same thing he was talking about. They will ignore that as they will the previous examples of what their "civil libertarian" regime has gotten us, or, until recently, for People of Color, for Women (especially those without money) for other targets of hate-media-hate-talk-hate-press.
And a lot of those people are not only getting paid to advocate for them getting that next bite, some of them are sitting on the bench in black robes with lifetime appointments. Lots of them are sitting in comfortable chairs of learning and advocating the "liberal" side in the media. Lots of them get to make movies, too.
Update: Far from that being a "logical fallacy" what it is is a complete refusal to engage in logical thought which begins with the acceptance of truths which are obvious or well established. There is no getting around that and the fact that without the moral decision to acknowledge the truth, any pose of logicality will only delude the willfully deluded even farther. I suspect that John Eastman's infamous legal memo laying out how to make a coup American style flows from his willful choice to buy into lies. He's not alone in that, it's regularly done by lawyers, judges and "justices," who often do it by willfully disclaiming the evil results of what they do. If I had the chops to do it, I might try to figure out how the act of instrumental reasoning figures into it and how in the end all of it depends on what they want the end of their decisions to be.
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