In April of 1945, a German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp. He was 39 years old. The camp was liberated days later.
Bonhoeffer had been arrested in 1943 for his involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. While he waited in his cell for the execution he knew was coming, he did not write about God. He did not write about salvation. He wrote about stupidity.
The essay he left behind, simply titled “On Stupidity,” is one of the most unsettling documents ever written about how democracies die. Not from the outside. Not from military force. Not from some foreign enemy. From the inside. From the voluntary surrender of thinking by millions of people who were perfectly capable of thinking for themselves.
Bonhoeffer watched it happen in Germany. Doctors. Lawyers. Professors. Engineers. People who could think. People who had been educated to think. And the moment fascist power rose, they stopped.
That essay, written by a man who knew he was about to die for opposing it, remains the clearest warning ever produced about what is happening in America right now.
What Bonhoeffer Meant by Stupidity
Bonhoeffer was precise about what he did not mean. He was not talking about intelligence. He was not talking about education. He was not talking about IQ.
He identified three specific mechanisms that turn a thinking person into a stupid one.
The first is outsourcing your thinking to someone else. A leader. A party. A media figure. A movement. The person stops evaluating information on their own and begins filtering everything through the question of what the leader would say, what the group believes, what the party demands. The thinking doesn’t disappear. It gets redirected. Instead of thinking about whether something is true, the person thinks about whether it is loyal.
The second is willful ignorance. Not the absence of knowledge, but the celebration of that absence. The ancient Greeks had a word for this. Aristotle called it amathia: the refusal to learn what is available to be learned. Not because the information is hidden or inaccessible. Because engaging with it would threaten something the person does not want threatened.
We carry the entire accumulated knowledge of human civilization in our pockets. Every study. Every dataset. Every court filing. Every historical record. Available in seconds. And millions of people will not take five seconds to look something up, because looking it up might mean finding out they were wrong. And being wrong is more painful to them than being ignorant.
The third is conformity under pressure. Going along with the group even when you know the group is wrong. Not because you were convinced. Because the cost of dissent is too high. You know something is off. You feel it. But you say what they say anyway. Because belonging matters more than truth. And because the people who have spoken up before you have been destroyed in front of everyone as a warning.
Bonhoeffer said people are not born this way. They are made this way. Stupidity is not a defect of the individual. It is a product of the system. It spreads through groups. It accelerates when power rises. And it follows what he called a law of human nature: the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.
The Spell
Bonhoeffer described something in his essay that should disturb everyone who reads it.
He said that when you try to reason with a person in this state, you feel like you are not talking to a person anymore. You are talking to slogans. You are talking to phrases that have taken possession of them. They are, in his words, under a spell. Blinded. Misused. Abused in their very being.
The person is still physically present. They can still form sentences. They can still hold a job and raise children and function in the world. But the part of them that evaluates, that questions, that resists, has been deactivated. They have surrendered the one thing that made them a self-governing individual: the willingness to think independently.
And once that surrender is complete, Bonhoeffer warned, the person becomes capable of any evil. Not because they have become evil. Because they can no longer see evil for what it is. The act and the recognition of the act have been separated. They do terrible things and cannot see that they are terrible.
At the 2024 Republican National Convention, delegates held up signs that said “Mass Deportation Now” and cheered. At CPAC in 2025, Elon Musk walked onto the stage holding a chainsaw and revved it over his head while the audience roared. Federal workers were being fired by email. Some lost their pensions that day. Some lost their healthcare. An aid worker testified that children overseas would die because food programs were cancelled overnight.
And the crowd cheered for the chainsaw.
The White House posted a video of handcuffed immigrants being walked onto a deportation plane, set to a pop song. They let Dr. Phil film ICE raids for television. They turned human suffering into entertainment content. And millions of people watched it and called it winning.
People capable of cruelty. Completely unable to see that it is cruelty. That is Bonhoeffer’s spell. Not a metaphor. A clinical description of what happens when a person has surrendered their capacity for independent moral judgment to a group.
The Cage
In 2022, philosopher Chris Ranalli at VU Amsterdam published research that gave Bonhoeffer’s observation a modern framework.
Ranalli studied indoctrination. Not the crude version most people imagine, where someone is strapped to a chair and shown propaganda until they break. The structural version. The version that operates in plain sight, in free societies, on people who believe they are thinking freely.
Ranalli identified what he called epistemically insulating content. This is any belief that comes prepackaged with a built-in rule: if you question this, you are either stupid or a traitor. The belief is not just something you think. It becomes who you are. Your identity is fused to it. So when someone challenges the belief, they are not challenging an idea. They are attacking you.
The insulation works because it preemptively disqualifies all possible counter-evidence. Before the evidence even arrives, the person has already been told that any evidence against their belief is fabricated, biased, or part of a conspiracy. The source is the enemy. The expert is compromised. The journalist is corrupt. The court is rigged.
This is the cage Bonhoeffer described, rendered in the vocabulary of modern epistemology. The cage is built from the inside. The walls are not made of steel. They are made of phrases. Fake news. Enemy of the people. Do your own research. Trust the plan. These are not arguments. They are the walls of the cage. Each phrase is designed to disqualify a category of evidence before the person ever encounters it.
Ranalli’s insight was that the cage does not require the person inside it to be unintelligent. The cage works on smart people. The cage works on educated people. Because the cage does not attack the person’s ability to reason. It attacks the inputs that reasoning operates on. If you can control what information is allowed into the process, you don’t need to control the process itself. The person will reason their way to exactly the conclusion you want, using exactly the information you permitted.
That is why facts bounce off. Not because the person is incapable of processing them. Because the cage classified those facts as enemy content before the person ever saw them.
The B******t
In 1986, Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a paper with a title that became famous in philosophy departments and everywhere else. The paper was called “On B******t.”
Frankfurt made a distinction that sounds simple but changes how you understand everything that follows. He said there is a fundamental difference between a liar and a bullshitter. And the bullshitter is worse.
A liar cares about the truth. That sounds paradoxical, but Frankfurt’s point was precise. When a liar speaks, they know what is real and they are trying to hide it from you. Truth still has power over the liar. The liar’s entire strategy depends on knowing what is true so they can construct a convincing alternative.
The bullshitter has abandoned truth entirely. True or false, it does not matter. Whatever works. Whatever gets a reaction. Whatever wins the next five minutes. The bullshitter is not hiding the truth. The bullshitter has opted out of the truth-telling enterprise altogether.
Frankfurt warned that when b******t becomes normal, people stop asking what is real. They stop expecting truth from public figures. They stop believing that truth is even possible. And once that happens, the cage gets stronger. You don’t need sophisticated propaganda anymore. You just need volume.
Steve Bannon said it out loud. “Flood the zone with s**t.” That is Frankfurt’s theory weaponized. If you produce enough b******t, fast enough, from enough directions, people stop trying to sort truth from lies. Not because they are stupid. Because the task becomes impossible. And once they stop trying, you can tell them anything.
The Language
In 1946, George Orwell published an essay called “Politics and the English Language.” His thesis was that political language does not become vague by accident. It becomes vague on purpose.
Orwell argued that the function of political language is to make cruelty invisible. To give terrible acts respectable names. To create a layer of abstraction between the act and the audience so that the audience never has to confront what is actually happening.
When DOGE fired hundreds of thousands of federal workers, they called it efficiency gains. When they sent emails threatening people to quit or be fired, they called it voluntary resignation. When they gutted Medicaid and slashed programs that kept rural hospitals open, they called it the big beautiful bill.
Orwell wrote that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful, murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Efficiency gains means people lost their jobs. Voluntary resignation means people were threatened into quitting. The big beautiful bill means hospitals in rural America are closing. The language does the lying so the crowd never has to face what they are cheering for. And the crowd never asks what the words actually mean, because the words were designed to stop that question before it starts.
This is the mechanism that connects Bonhoeffer’s stupidity to Frankfurt’s b******t to Ranalli’s cage. The language creates the insulation. The insulation prevents the evidence from reaching the person. The person continues to believe they are thinking clearly. And the cruelty continues, described in words that make it sound like governance.
The Machine
Bonhoeffer watched stupidity spread through radio broadcasts and party rallies. He could not have imagined the machine that now exists to do the same work at a scale and speed that would have terrified him.
In 2017, psychologists William Brady and Jay Van Bavel at New York University studied over half a million social media posts to find out which political messages spread the fastest. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They found that every moral-emotional word in a post increased its sharing by approximately 20 percent. Words like hate, shame, destroy, betray, evil. The angrier and more morally charged the language, the faster and further it spread. They also found that this effect was bounded by group membership. Moral-emotional content spread most virally within ideological networks, not between them. The outrage circulated inside the echo chamber, reinforcing the group’s existing beliefs and intensifying the emotional charge with every share.
Brady and Van Bavel called it moral contagion.
The algorithm does not reward accuracy. It rewards outrage. It rewards cruelty. It rewards the most extreme version of whatever your group already believes. And every time you share it, the algorithm feeds you more. The system is not designed to inform. It is designed to engage. And the most engaging content is the content that makes you angry and makes you feel righteous about being angry.
This is the machine that keeps Bonhoeffer’s stupidity alive at industrial scale. The algorithm does not need a dictator. It does not need a propaganda ministry. It just needs engagement metrics. And moral outrage is the most engaging content humans produce.
The people deepest inside the machine don’t feel trapped. They feel free. They feel like fighters, like patriots, like rebels. They hold up signs that say “Mass Deportation Now” and feel like heroes. They cheer for a man with a chainsaw and feel like revolutionaries. They share a meme while someone loses their pension and feel like they are winning.
That is how it works. It doesn’t feel like giving up your ability to think. It feels like purpose.
What Bonhoeffer Said You Can Do About It
Bonhoeffer’s most difficult conclusion was his most important one.
He said you cannot argue a person out of stupidity. Not with facts. Not with logic. Not with evidence. Not with patience. Not with compassion. The person in the grip of stupidity is not processing your argument as information. They are processing it as a threat to the system they have surrendered themselves to.
The only thing that breaks the spell, Bonhoeffer said, is an act of liberation. Something has to break the system that controls the person before the person can begin to think again.
The leader loses credibility. The propaganda stops reaching them. The group fractures and the people around them stop rewarding the obedience. Or the person leaves the group entirely. When the system can no longer reward conformity and punish independent thought, its power starts to disappear.
That is what Bonhoeffer saw in Germany. And it is what 70 percent of this country is watching happen in America right now.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent his last days trying to answer the question he started with. How do millions of people who are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves choose to stop?
He answered it. Power rises. The slogans take hold. The cage gets built from the inside. And the people deepest in are the ones most convinced they are free.
You cannot teach them out of it. You have to break the machine that keeps feeding them the stupidity. Because as long as the machine runs, the spell holds.
And as long as the spell holds, these people will cheer for the chainsaw and never once look down to see what it is cutting.
Sources
Bonhoeffer, D. (1943). “On Stupidity.” In Letters and Papers from Prison. Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (English edition, 1997).
Ranalli, C. (2022). Closed-minded Belief and Indoctrination. American Philosophical Quarterly, 59(1), 61-80.
Frankfurt, H. G. (1986). On B******t. Raritan Quarterly Review, 6(2). Expanded edition: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English Language. Horizon, 13(76), 252-265.
Brady, W. J., Wills, J. A., Jost, J. T., Tucker, J. A., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2017). Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), 7313-7318.
Brady, W. J., Crockett, M. J., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2020). The MAD Model of Moral Contagion: The Role of Motivation, Attention, and Design in the Spread of Moralized Content Online. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(4), 978-1010.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Book VII, on Amathia (willful ignorance).
Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House.
