The 3 elements of stupidity, according to philosophy | Jonny Thomson: Full Interview

My name is Jonny Thomson. I'm a writer. I'm a columnist at Big Think and I run the Mini Philosophy social network where I explain philosophical ideas to millions of people. I am the author of the upcoming book, The Art of Enough, where I explain epicureanism and teach everybody how it can apply to our lives.

Chapter one, stupidity versus evil. So Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a 20th century philosopher and theologian and he's known for his writings but also he's known for his resistance to the Nazi system. He was born in the early 20th century to a prominent quite elite family. His father was um head of psychiatry at Berlin University, one of the most prestigious chairs in the country. When the Nazis came to power and began the German Christian movement where they tried to co-opt the Protestant churches, he ran a counter movement known as the Confessional Church.

When the war broke out, Bonhoeffer was part of the anti-Nazi intelligence where he would feed information to the Allies and to the resistance movements all over Europe and in Germany. Eventually the Nazis found out about this and he was imprisoned in 1943 where he wrote a whole range of letters and diaries from which we get these notes on stupidity which I'm going to talk about today. He was associated with the plot to kill Hitler in 1944 and he was executed at Flossenberg concentration camp in 1945 few weeks before it was liberated by the allies.

So in in Bon Hopper's letters he talks about stupidity and he makes this slightly bold claim that stupidity is a greater threat to civilization than even evil. But to understand that we need to really understand what he meant by stupidity because it's different to how a lot of us use the word stupid in our everyday lexicon. So what is stupidity? Well it is not the same as foolishness. Foolishness is when you do something silly, reckless, imprudent. For example, if you put diesel into a petrol car, or I, for example, put washing up liquid in the washing machine and it caused a disaster. Or I remember at my son's last birthday party, he was gifted a plastic golf set. And so I was desperate to impress all of the other moms and dads, and so I got the golf club out, and I whacked the ball as hard as I could, and it went flying over our gate into the road outside, hitting a passing car. That is an example of foolishness. But it is not stupidity in the Bonhoeffer sense.

Nor is it the same as a lack of cognitive ability. So sometimes in life you will run up against tasks which are simply beyond what you are capable of. In my own case, for example, I find flatp pack incredibly difficult. So if it comes to assembling any furniture or even fiddly things like doing Lego, I'll often um pass it on to somebody else. Even my 5-year-old son is better at making Lego than I am. But nor is stupidity the same as ignorance. Because if you don't know something, that is either a lack of education or a lack of exposure to that fact. For example, if you don't know the capital of Indonesia, that is an example of ignorance. And then you go away and you find out that the capital is is it Jakarta? I think it might be the capital might be Jakarta. And that resolves your ignorance. That is not stupidity. So Bonhoeffer is careful to say that those three things are not stupidity.

But what is stupidity? Now again um Bonhoeffer says that stupidity can be defined by three different elements. The first is when we outsource our critical thinking to some kind of third party. It might be a teacher, it might be a parent, it might be a social media influencer or it might be technology. And of course today a lot of people do outsource their thinking to technology. In 2014 a philosopher called Robert Howell wrote a paper where he introduced a thought experiment known as Google morals. And in the paper he explains that we often use apps to do certain things for us. The most common is is Google maps. So even coming here today for example I use Google maps to tell me where to go. I followed the the blue line. It told me to go left. It told me to go right. And hey presto, here I am. And most people are okay with using Google maps. Even if we use it for slightly imbecillic things. So for example, if I want to go to Big Ben and it's obviously there in front of me, people will still use Google Maps to tell them where to go to Big Ben in London. But we're okay with that because navigation seems to be a thing that we're quite willing to outsource to technology. But how introduce an extra idea? He said, imagine that the future contains an app called Google Morals. Now Google Morals is an app where you would type in a question and it tells you what you should do in any situation. So let's go suppose I go to a burger bar or a burger restaurant and I say, "Is it right for me to eat the meat burger or the halumi burger?" and the app does its worring and it tells me okay you should do this. Now the point isn't whether Google morals does the the reasoning properly or not. The point that Robert Howell is saying is that we shouldn't be outsourcing our moral reasoning to an app. Now this was written in 2014 and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to point out the fact that a lot of people use chat GPT and claude and AI today to answer these kind of questions for them. Is it right to do X? Is it right to do Y? Should I cheat on my partner? Should I stay with my partner? Should I do this job or should I do that job? We are using AI to do the critical thinking for us. And that's an example of what Bonhoeffer would call stupidity.

Now the second element of stupidity is when we are willfully ignorant. I mentioned earlier how ignorance is itself not a form of stupidity. But if you are continuously ignorant and you don't take any steps to resolve your ignorance, well this that is an example of stupidity. There is an example um in the ancient Greek world where the oracle of Delphi was once reputed to say that the wisest man in the ancient world was Socrates. Socrates famously said that the only thing I know is that I know nothing at all which is an example of ignorance. But the reason why he wasn't stupid was that because he spent his life devoted to trying to resolve that. In his works the Nicomachean Ethics and the politics Aristotle says that one of the worst things that can befall any society is what the ancient Greeks called amathia. Now amathia is willful ignorance. It's when somebody celebrates the fact they don't know something and they take no steps to resolve it. And in the ancient world we can trace a line from Socrates to Plato to the Stoics which associates knowledge with immorality and being wrong. The idea was that the more you know the better you become. And so Amathia is the great curse. It's a great contagion because there is this rise in people who no longer want to know things. They celebrate the fact they don't know things. And there is a kind of inverse elitism where those who do know things are mocked and ridiculed. So that's the second example of stupidity according to Bonhoeffer.

Now the third element of stupidity is conformity. And this is what Bonhoeffer saw from his prison cell in 1943. He saw people who he grew up with people who were educated in the same university systems, people who went to the same schools as him and suddenly they became part of this Nazi operation. And so with conformity it reminds me of something that nature says in his work beyond good and evil. In his work beyond good and evil, nature has an entire chapter devoted to truth. And in the work nature argues that philosophers and academics and writers often become obsessed with this idea of truth that truth has a value in and of itself. And he says if you look at the history of humanity, if you look at where we are today, people don't care about truth as a thing. What matters more is loyalty and what matters more is identity. So for example in 2022 a philosopher called Chris Rali wrote a paper about indoctrination and he was trying to answer the question what is it that makes somebody indoctrinated? How can we define indoctrination? And Rali argues that indoctrination is not defined by believing one thing or believing another thing. It's when you close your citadel to any alternative positions. It's when you associate your belief with an identity. You are that belief. And so you see any rivals to that position as a kind of test of faith. You see any rivals as a kind of temptation. So the indoctrinated person doesn't belong to any one camp. It's not the atheist. It's not the believer. It's not the right wing or it's not the left wing. It's how you keep those beliefs. And what Rali is saying is what Bonhoeffer was saying as well that when we conform to some kind of group think we are surrendering our own ability to do critical thinking and we are offloading it to somebody else to do for us.

A writer and a philosopher called Robert Musul developed a distinction between what he called ordinary stupidity and intelligent stupidity. Now ordinary stupidity is what a lot of people might associate with cognitive ability. Some people just can't do certain things. I can't do flat pack very well. But intelligent stupidity is when somebody who is otherwise incredibly able, somebody who is otherwise incredibly talented, articulate, erudite, uses their abilities for some foolish end. And what Musul and Bonhoeffer were writing about and what they were talking about was of course Nazism. Here you had a system that was populated by intelligent people and yet they were using their abilities for an incredibly foolish end.

So the reason why Bonhoeffer says that stupidity is a greater problem than evil is because with evil you have a known problem. There is some intention to the malice. So when you have the evil person we're thinking the dark lord Sauron from Lord of the Rings you know dressed in black with orcs and fiery volcanoes that's obviously evil. But likewise in our world we have people like who are serial killers or genocidal tyrants or people who we know to be evil. And when you can point to something which is evil, what happens is that the good of the world can rally around and they can resist the evil. Bonhoeffer has got this quotation where he says that evil contains within it the germ of its own subversion. Because once you know something is evil, the good people of Minas Tirith can gather around and they can fight the dark lord Sauron.

But there are two problems with stupidity. The first is that as a society, we are much more tolerant of it. If somebody says they don't know something and they don't want to take steps to know that thing, we kind of brush it off. We say, "Oh, that's what they're like." And we kind of accept that. But the second problem with stupidity is that it's far harder to identify. So, for example, not everything is the Dark Lord Sorrow. Not everybody is a serial killer. Not everybody is a genocidal tyrant. But in our time, of course, we have real life evil people. For example, I'm thinking in the UK, we had the Jimmy Savile scandal. In 2012, Jimmy Savile was exposed as abusing children. And of course, that is an evil. And the good of the world rallied round. The judicial system and the police and all of the witnesses came out and they opposed this very obvious explicit evil. In 2017, you had Harvey Weinstein. Similar there. The good of the world rallied around. The judicial system worked. Police came out. Harvey Weinstein was arrested. He is now in prison. And of course, very recently, you have the Epstein files. These are obvious evils. And in each case you have somebody who is evil eventually being put into prison or in the case of Savile he was dead. But the question that comes after that is who knew about what was going on? Who are the people who didn't ask questions? Who are the people who were willfully blind? Who were the people who were stupid in the Bonhoeffer sense? Because in the Nazi regime there's a character called Albert Shar who embodies this quite well. Albert Shar was a very intelligent and educated person and he was Hitler's architect. He ended up becoming the minister for munitions and production in the Nazi system. And when it came to the end of the war and he was put on trial at the Nuremberg trials, he said he didn't know anything. He said he didn't know about the Holocaust. He didn't know about all of the trade. He didn't know about all of the evils of the Nazi machinery. And the people at Nuremberg said to him, "This is ridiculous. You are an intelligent person. There is no possible way. You didn't know what was going on." And so he was arrested and he was put in prison. He wasn't executed like some of the Nazi regime were executed, but people said that you should have known better. Your stupidity in that instance was not an excuse. So that's why stupidity is such a harder thing to find and it's why Bonhoeffer thinks is actually worse than evil because it's part of the system and it drags down institutions and it makes everybody far more corrupt and worse off.

So there's a great quotation which has been floating around the internet for a very long time now from the earlier days of the internet. And it says that um debating an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon. You can play as well as you want but the pigeon will jump on the board. It'll crap on the pieces and it'll go back to its flock declaring victory. And it's a brilliant quotation and it's a brilliant visual because it is so true as to what it feels like when you are debating somebody who is stupid in the sense of Bonhoeffer. When you're debating somebody who is stupid in the sense of Bonhoeffer, they don't question their own beliefs and they are unwilling to accept any contrary position to what they actually believe. They're playing by different rules. You might approach them with facts and the most logical arguments you can possibly devise, but they will see you as an enemy. They will see you as an other. They will see you as a kind of temptation. And so it's very interesting that in our language we often have a few examples where people will try to repel any contribution using certain words and these can belong to whatever different denomination or different ever belief system. So for example, if somebody says trust a science. Now if we dig into what trust a science means, it makes sense. You go away and you look at some peer-reviewed papers. You look at what the consensus of the experts are saying. You look at some studies online, whatever. When someone says trust a science is often used as a kind of batting away of any opposition to you. Another example might be do your own research. Again, on paper looks like a good thing. Go away and Google and find out what's going on yourself. But if somebody says do your research is often used as a way to try to reduce you as an alternative position.

So the reason why debating an idiot is so difficult is because they are playing by a different rule system. In Aristotle's rhetoric he actually makes a distinction between three different types of persuading somebody or three different ways that people often come to believe something. He talks about logos which is rationality. It's reason and it's using good debate and facts and evidence. He talks about ethos which is somebody's character, their reputation, their status and the ability to persuade you. And he talks about pathos which is emotions. It talks about feelings. And Aristotle even in the ancient Greek world this is you know the epitome of the rational philosopher. He is well aware that logos plays second place to your ethos and your posthos as well. So if we pull it up to the modern time the same thing is at play here. That when you are debating somebody you may think that you are both playing by logos. that if I lay out my argument in premises to conclusion, if I lay out all of the evidence, this person is going to bow to me and say, "Well done. You are so brilliant. Your position is better and I will believe what you are saying." And what Bonhoeffer is saying about the stupid person, the pigeon on the chessboard, is that they don't even care about the logos. They care about the ethos. They care about the pathos. And so, you need to play it according to their game if you're going to have any kind of proper debate and discussion.

So, when we're talking about stupidity, we often imagine somebody in our heads. We often imagine a certain type of person. It might be somebody in our own life. It might be somebody that we've met quite recently. But Nathan Balentine who's a philosopher, he actually argues that stupidity can take many different forms and it can come from many different angles. And he talks about a particular phenomenon known as epistemic trespassing which exists within academia. So the most intelligent, the most able, the most educated people you know can also be guilty of this intellectual stupidity. Banitine talks about domain specificity which is where you know your area particularly well. So for example it might be that an astrophysicist is incredibly knowledgeable about stars about black holes about the movement of planets. But epistemic trespassing is when the astrophysics thinks that because they know so much about this one area they will also be able to tell you about another area. So epistemic trespassing, for example, is when the astrophysics thinks they know about political science, but it could be also when a car mechanic thinks they know about tree surgery. It could be when a doctor thinks they know about economics. Epistemic trespassing according to Banitine often has two causes. The first is what he calls intellectual pride. If you are at the top of your game and you've got all of these accolades, you've got all of this praise, you get these awards, you get this kind of body of students who are waiting on your every word, that's a kind of ego boost. It's a kind of encouragement. You get this intellectual pride from all of that. And so you therefore think that you can walk into different disciplines, different areas, and you can tell them what is true and what is false. And the second problem is an overestimation of what is called transferable skills. So transferable skills are things that will apply across a whole range of disciplines. So at a basic level, the ability to read is a transferable skill. The astrophysicist can read, the economist can read, the neuroscientist can read, the tree surgeon can all read. These are all transferable skills. But also writing an essay is a transferable skill. The ability to analyze data is a transferable skill. So Valentine argues that epistemic trespassers are often guilty of overestimating their own transferable skills. They assume that just because they can analyze data in one area that they can analyze data in another area without considering the wider knowledge that is required to make sense of that data set. So what Bitan is saying is that stupidity isn't limited to any one particular type of person. It can be anywhere. It can be in the academy. It can be an incredibly intelligent person who steps outside of their lane.

So Chris Finalei in 2022 wrote a paper into indoctrination and he was trying to look at the factors that make somebody indoctrinated and he is quite clear early on in his paper to make the distinction that anybody can become indoctrinated. It doesn't matter whether you are a Christian or an atheist or leftwing or right-wing or a meat eater or a vegan whatever. Anyone can become indoctrinated in so far as how they hold their beliefs. Now the difference is that the indoctrinated person will see every rival to their belief system as a kind of enemy. They are so used to associating their belief with a certain identity that if anybody comes along and challenges that belief, they will see them as a kind of opposition. For example, in the online discourse, it's very common to attack what's called mainstream media. Now, there is a certain brand of conspiracy theory which will say that if any evidence, any article, any position is presented to them from the mainstream media, well, the mainstream media are the enemy. They'll immediately discount this information. They'll immediately discount this article because it was written by a certain person, by a certain outlet, by a certain publication. That's an example of what Rali would call indoctrination. They are so used to viewing the enemy in certain areas that they will not take anything that they say as worth considering. Now that's the first part of Rali's paper. But the second part of Rali's paper asks the slightly more difficult question. How can we resolve this? Because if we are aware of indoctrinated people in our lives and we have to be aware that we also ourselves might be indoctrinated in certain key areas. I suspect that most people watching this and myself included are indoctrinated in certain areas that I will reject information. I will reject evidence if it's presented to me by a certain person in a certain way or about a certain topic. And so Ral is asking how can we resolve that? And the clearest example is to give a kind of off-ramp because challenging your beliefs is difficult. And challenging your beliefs is very difficult when you associate those beliefs with a certain identity. And so you need to create an environment where criticizing a belief or doubting a belief is considered to be safe. Now, this is where we have to lean on our friend Aristotle again because in this case, logos will only get us so far. Rationality, logic, laying out evidence will only take you up to the door. But to go through the door, you need to have a certain ethos. You need to have a certain character. You need to have a certain warmth of personality. And so when we're discussing ideas with somebody, we should always bear in mind how important it is to have that kind of warmth to develop a relationship with someone where you can criticize or discuss these ideas in an open way without it feeling confrontational.

So there are many examples of when stupidity can be funny and particularly when it's associated with ignorance. For example, at Christmas, my stepbrother turned to me and said, "Do reindeer exist?" I said, "Yes, they do exist." And we all had a laugh. And if somebody says, for example, what was Hitler's surname? That's funny. We might have a bit of a giggle about it. Those are examples of harmless ignorance. Now, Bonhoeffer says that isn't the same as stupidity. Now, stupidity becomes dangerous when it walks through the corridors of power. Stupidity becomes dangerous when we surrender our own critical thinking and we outsource it to somebody else. It's when we let a political party, a group, a tribal identity do the thinking for us. Because what happens then is you kind of go through a kind of zombie state where you will be pushed along by people who may have malicious intent. So for example, if somebody is sharing a conspiracy theory in the pub with you over a few beers, they talk about being a flatearther for example, that might be funny. You might joke about it. But if an education board is teaching flat earth to students, that's when it becomes a problem because the institution itself is allowing a sense of willful stupidity where you accept not knowing as the default and that's when it becomes a problem in the sense that it occupies power.

If we agree with Bonhoeffer, if we even partially agree with Bonhoeffer that stupidity is a greater danger to society than evil and we agree with Aristotle that a mafia is the greatest threat to civilization, then how can we resolve that? What steps can we all take to remove stupidity from society? Well, I would argue that there are three things that we can do. There's a personal thing we can do, there's an interpersonal thing, and there's a societal institutional thing we can do.

On the personal level, I think we can all dig up, scrutinize and analyze our beliefs. We can accept, we can reject or modify our beliefs. And I think we can do this in three different ways each with varying degrees of intensity. The first step is I think we can take a leaf from KL Pupa's book. Cole Popper introduced this idea of falsification where he says a theory is good in so far as it can resist any falsification and if there is no falsifying data available to it or you do not present that theory with falsifying data then the hypothesis the theory the belief is bad. So for example I think that all of us have certain beliefs that we are not entirely sure on. For example in my head I'm not entirely sure about my meat eating. I'm not entirely sure whether I should be eating meat or whether it's right or whether it's wrong. And so PA would say what you need to do is go away and you need to introduce yourself to as many falsifying arguments as you possibly can. Read arguments from vegans. Read arguments from vegetarians. Maybe look at some kind of information about battery farms or the latest biology about animal sentience. Go away and challenge your own belief. That's the first thing we could all do individually. Escape your echo chamber.

The second thing is interpersonal. And this links back to what Chris Rali was saying about indoctrination is that when we are talking with somebody else, appreciate that beliefs are not just specimens on the table that we can dissect and poke. They are deeply personal. We are all involved in our beliefs. And certain beliefs are so personal to us that we will reject them viscerally. When somebody challenges certain beliefs, we object to them because we feel as though they are attacking who we are. For example, when I was growing up, Pluto was a planet. I'm not even sure if it is a planet anymore. Whether it's an exoplanet, whether it's a star or moon, I don't even know. But the point is that's what the philosopher William James would call a dead belief to me. My life goes on. I don't really care if Pluto is a planet or not. And I can I can go about my life quite happily not knowing it is. But there are certain beliefs which do matter to me. And there are certain beliefs, for example, about parenting, about my family, about my friends, about my work life, and about exercise and about eating, about whatever. These things do matter to me. So these beliefs are important. So we should always appreciate that when we are discussing those live beliefs and those important beliefs and what James calls momentous beliefs, we should always appreciate there is a degree of personality to them. We should be personable. We should be warm. We should allow people to defend themselves and not make the debate an issue of personality. Now the best way to do this and the best person that embodies this is Socrates. If you look back in Plato's dialogue, Socrates is somebody who discusses the conversation in a very non-confrontational way. And he does so by asking open questions. He's not saying you're wrong. He's not offering counterpositions. He's not calling anyone named. He's not calling you stupid or idiotic or or evil. He's asking questions. And over the course of the dialogues, you know, they are condensed dialogues. In some ways, it might be a very romanticized account of what a Socratic dialogue looks like. But over the course of the conversation, both parties are better. Both parties have analyzed their beliefs. Both parties have stronger beliefs as a result of it. So that's the key element there in interpersonal belief systems. Always approach it from a Socratic position. I would argue.

Now the third thing is institutional and this is where we need to allow, we need to create and we need to foster a culture of dissent and debate. In 2018, two writers, Steven Dvitzky and Daniel Ziblit, wrote a book called How Democracies Die. And they were laying out the various factors that lead to the collapse of a democracy. They looked at history. And of course, they applied history to the modern day. And two key elements jump out for me. The first is an abuse of power. This is when a president, a prime minister, a Congress, a parliament oversteps their constitutional or their historical power. But the second and and to my mind more important element is where we illegitimize an opposition. It's when you start to say that the opponents are monstrous. They are evil. They are satanic. They are demonic and they should be struck off. We shouldn't allow any descent within this organization. We shouldn't allow any rival positions in this Congress in this parliament. So what they're arguing in how democracies die is when those two factors emerge, democracies will suffer. But of course we see it in institutions as well. We see it in corporations and businesses. We see it when leaders will make decisions without any consultation whatsoever. So what I would argue is in an institutional level we should think about committees. We should think about debate. We should invite and welcome dissent. I interviewed a philosopher called Sebastian Purcell a few weeks ago about Aztec philosophy. I don't know anything about Aztec philosophy and Purcell introduced me to an idea that I can't really get out of my head actually and I love it. It's known as the Aztec decision circle. And Purcell taught me that when an Aztec was confronted with a difficult decision or they didn't know what to believe or what to do, they would consult their decision circle. It might be four, five, six very close friends, relatives who will offer them advice, but crucially they will offer them dissent. They will offer them an alternative position. And Purcell has an entire chapter in his book saying the wise do not think for themselves. And I love that idea. I love that idea of a decision circle. I love the idea of consulting people who will also dissent.

Chapter 2. How power cultivates stupidity. Intelligence according to Bonhoeffer is measured by the ability to think critically. It's measured by the ability to take evidence, to condense it, and to take on what is good and to reject what is bad. It's to think for yourself. Don't outsource your thinking to technology. Don't outsource your thinking to an influencer, an academic, a teacher, your parents, whatever. And so what do you see in power? What do you see particularly in democracies? What you see is that when people are elected, they no longer are individuals. They're no longer seen as individuals. They are seen as part of a party system. So what you see in political party democracies such as the United States, such as United Kingdom and all over Europe is you have these party democracies where people are expected to surrender their own critical thinking for the wider party. You have to tow the line. In the UK, we have something called the the threeline whip where you have a whip, which is the title you give to somebody within your political party who will go around all of the politicians and will say to them, "You know which way you're voting, don't you today? You're not going to vote the other way, are you? You know exactly which way you're going to vote, don't you? Now, it might be that each of these individual politicians has their own beliefs. It might be that they have their own thought process. They have applied their critical thinking to the issue, but what they have to do is they have to vote according to the party political lines. They have to obey the whip. There are versions of the whip across all sorts of political parties. And Bonhoeffer is saying that when you get power, you are expected to tow the line in this sense.

In 1969, an author called Lawrence Peter gave us something called the Peter principle. And what Peter was arguing was that when you're part of an organization or a company, you are expected to have certain skills and a certain knowledge base that gets you to the next step and you get promoted. Well done. And you go up the ladder. But the Peter principle argues that you will reach a point where you can no longer get promoted because your skills and your abilities can no longer get you any further. Now what we're seeing with Bonhoeffer's argument is almost the inverse of the Peter principle. What Bonhoeffer is saying is that to become elected, to become powerful, you have to be intelligent. You have to have a certain degree of critical thinking. But when you occupy the position of power, when you walk through the corridors of power, you are expected to now tow the line and to sacrifice your critical thinking for what somebody else is saying. And so you outsource your thinking to what your leader is saying or what the political party whip is saying instead.

So in his work beyond good and evil, nature devotes an entire chapter to truth where he says that philosophers and academics and writers have become obsessed with this notion of truth that truth is a thing that we should value in and of itself. Bon says if you look at how people actually consider truth, it is not something that is valuable in itself. It is a tool in a box to be used. This makes sense on an evolutionary level because there are sometimes when obviously knowing the truth helps you. It's good to know that that red snake is dangerous. It's good to know that that mushroom will kill you if you eat it. It's good to know that that mushroom will give you calories. Truth in that case is very useful evolutionarily. But what about conformity? N talks about how truth often plays second place to conformity because it often pays to be part of the pack. The tall poppy gets cut down first. And so what we see is when we're talking about institutions and corporations and organizations, truth is less important than towing the party line. It's actually better to be seen as good. It's better to be seen as somebody who knows their stuff rather than any concern for the truth. This relates to actually something that the philosopher Harry Frankfurt talks about in his famous paper on bullshit. Frankfurt talks about the distinction between the liar and the bullshitter. Now the liar on the face of it seems to be a bad thing. But what Harry Frankfurt is saying that the liar is actually better than the bullshitter because the liar still is concerned about the truth. When somebody lies to you, they are trying to warp reality. They are trying to make this thing seem like it is true. They want you to believe that this thing is true because they recognize that being called true has a value. There is a cache, a prestige to being called true. The bullshitter though doesn't even care about truth. They will say whatever they can, whatever they want to try to get to their own ends. They will say whatever they can to win. So if you call them out on their lies, if you call them out on their bullshit they will smile. they will shrug and they will just say I don't care let's move on. Frankfurt says this is actually a worse problem because what this does is it normalizes lying and it normalizes a disregard for the truth and when that happens you have conformist and according to Bonhoeffer you have a world which leads towards something like Nazi Germany. Now Frankfurt wrote this article in 1986 and he argued back then that there was a rise in bullshit and I'm sure many people today will think that we also have a rise in bullshit today. And so the question then becomes why are we seeing such a rise in bullshit? And I suspect one of the reasons is that we are all expected to have an opinion on things. We all are expected to have an opinion on politics, on the latest celebrity drama, the latest movie, the latest album release, whatever. But of course, we cannot possibly know everything about everything. We cannot know enough to talk about things confidently, competently, and articulately. And so into this world where we are expected to have opinions, the bullshitter is naturally going to rise. We have to bullshit because we are expected to have an opinion and those who don't have an opinion are considered to be stupid or ignorant. But what Bonhoeffer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are all saying is that those who admit they don't know something are actually the wisest of all.

I think a better reflection of the mechanisms behind stupidity today can be found in an essay from George Orwell written in 1946 known as politics and the English language. In the essay, Orwell makes the point that the language we use around economics and politics has become hollow. It's become flatter and vague. And as a result, our thoughts about politics and economics has become flatter and vague as well. Orwell argues that when we are asked our opinion on a certain issue, we are often presented with a menu of cliches and ready-made platitudes. And so we are limited to only rattling off these platitudes. For example, it might be that somebody goes on to camera and they say that we have to make some necessary sacrifices. Necessary sacrifices is a cliche and it's a euphemism for you are worse off. But no leader is going to say to the camera, you the people are worse off and so they say necessary sacrifices instead. It might be that you say something like negative growth. Negative growth is a cliche and it's a euphemism for a recession. The economy is much worse off. But rather than say that, they retreat to this euphemism. And Orwell says that we see this all of the time in our language. We see this flattening. We see this regression to the cliche. But it's not just seen in the political world. It's also seen in our institutions. For example, if the boss calls you in and they say, "We're going to have to make some efficiency gains." That's a euphemism. That's a cliche for the fact they've laid off 10% of the company. And Orwell would say they are hiding behind that language. They are hiding behind the cliche. Here they are hiding behind the platitude. Of course, this makes sense because it gives our leaders a degree of plausible deniability. We have entire teams devoted to storytelling and messaging rather than truth and clarity because it's easier to say negative growth and necessary sacrifices or collateral damage than to accept the stark truth that civilians have been killed or that you are worse off.

So, social media has a whole range of problems. Um, of course our attention span, of course, the lack of real life connection. But one of the often ignored casualties of the social media age is a lack of proper debates, the lack of proper discussions. In ancient Greece, 2 and a half thousand years ago, Plato attacked what's called the sophists, who were these paid philosophers who would teach people how to argue. They would teach people how to win an argument. And Protagoras who is known as the the greatest of all the Sophist has his famous line where he says that man is the measure of all things. And I think that Protagoras and the Sophist would love the social media age because what we are seeing in the social media age is the age of assertion. We think that if somebody says something in 140 characters or in a 90-cond reel or on on social media that that is enough to be considered a debate. But of course what Plato was saying in the ancient world was that a debate needs more time and it needs the maturity of thought to challenge ideas in a space which is not about identity in a space which is not confrontational. And so what we're seeing today is a rise in debate and not enough dialectic. And there is a key difference. The online world encourages reposting. It encourages status. You get a kick of dopamine every time somebody likes what you say. And so as a result, if you occupy an echo chamber, you are encouraged to say certain things even though you might not believe them, even though they might not be true, even though you haven't possibly thought them through. And so when you say these things to your echo chamber, you are rewarded by your community, by the tribe, by your niche of the internet. Now, this is a great example of what Bonhoeffer talks about as stupidity because what you have here are people who are valuing conformity and the tribe more than their own critical thinking abilities. So, what you see with social media is millions of people who are perfectly capable of independent thought suddenly outsourcing their own beliefs to other people. This might be a friend that they see posting something on social media. But of course, we are seeing the rise of the influencer. We are seeing the rise of people who are telling their followers what to believe. I believe this and if you are like me, if you want to belong to this pack, you also have to repost. You have to like, you have to comment on my reel. And so what this encourages is that degree of group think. It encourages that sacrifice of your critical thinking to become part of that group. So what we see with social media is we have a puppet master without a furer. We are presented with certain things that we should see that we should believe and things that we should say and so we go along with it because the algorithm tells us so.

So whenever I post on social media about stupidity the lack of critical thinking or the rise in group think they often do very well. People will repost them and they will say oh look it's you guys over there. Oh look it's those people there. And of course what Bonhoeffer is saying, what Aristotle, what Plato and what all the philosophers are saying is that we should also apply the same logic to ourselves. We also need to introspect and say well hang on am I guilty of being indoctrinated in the Chris Finalei sense. Do I hold any belief which I haven't questioned? Now the archetype of self-questing is a man known as Rene Descartes. In Descartes' meditations, he says that everybody should at least once in their life question everything that they believe because it's so easy to walk through life inheriting our beliefs. We say things that our parents said. We will repost stuff that our friends have posted. And so a lot of our beliefs are given to us. They are implanted in our heads. And so what Descartes says is that we should occasionally throw all of those beliefs out because Descartes says that it might be that one, two, three, or many of our beliefs are corrupt. He gives an analogy of an apple basket or an apple barrel. He imagines that there's a big barrel of apples and we know that within this barrel somewhere is a rotten apple. Now what should we do? Yes, we could take the long diligent time to pull every apple out and to look for the rot. But what Descartes is saying that what you should do is throw all of the apples out and start from scratch. Because when you're growing up, so many of your beliefs are given to you. When you're 5 years old, you do what your parents say. But when you are older, you have a sense of rationality. You have your adult critical thinking abilities. So it's now that you can assess your beliefs. This isn't easy. In fact, Daycart himself says it is often difficult to challenge your own beliefs on this universal scale, what's called radical doubt. But we need to do it because if we don't do it, then we can't be sure that we don't ourselves hold these beliefs which are indoctrinated. And we can't be sure that we don't hold these beliefs which are unquestioned and possibly wrong. And the other thing is to reconsider our relationships with other people that our social media algorithms are very good at throwing us into these echo chambers. And the worry is that we are replicating that in real life. That we surround ourselves only with yes men and people who are ideologically pure. The people who agree with us on everything. And what philosophy is saying is that we should have people in our friendship group, people around us who genuinely believe other things. If you are pro-war, find somebody who is anti-war. If you are an atheist, find a believer. If you are a vegan, find a meat eater. And so on. Don't occupy real life echo chambers because if you do that you'll never be able to challenge your own beliefs and you can never be sure that those beliefs are true, right, and good.

So there's often a thought experiment I like to suggest for those who want to analyze their own beliefs. And this is where I ask, what would you do if the entire world suddenly hated your belief? What would you do if you would lose your reputation, your status, your job for believing something? For some things such as 2 plus 2 equals 4, it's hard to imagine surrendering that belief. But what about your other beliefs? The thought experiment is designed to highlight something that nature was saying. Do you believe these things because they are true, because they are right, or because they are socially advantageous? Now, it might be that once you've analyzed those beliefs that they are socially advantageous, but that doesn't necessarily mean you need to jettison them. But what it does mean is that you need to look at those beliefs carefully and see whether they are actually worth holding.

When you're debating an idea or a belief with someone, it can often degrade into a kind of argument. It can often become confrontational. And so I'm often asked how it is that philosophy can help this. Because philosophy is unique in that it presents ideas in an objective way. And so I'm often amazed that when I am discussing an idea with somebody, how honest and open people are with me about their beliefs. Because when you're discussing something that you read about in Simone de Beauvoir or when you're reading about something that Bonhoeffer says or when you're reading at something that Descartes says, you aren't discussing yourself, you're discussing yourself in a roundabout way. And so by dissecting these arguments, by dissecting the philosophy, you are actually dissecting your beliefs in a way which is non-confrontational and is far close to what Aristotle and Plato would have approved of.

The third thing is something that we can learn from the ancient skeptics. Now the ancient skeptics were a Greek school of philosophy who were concerned about happiness and in particular the word ataraxia. How we can be less mentally disturbed, how we can find that peace of mind, that tranquility of thought. And the skeptics made quite a bold claim. They said that you can be free of anxiety and distress if you get used to saying the words I don't know. If somebody asks your opinion about something, say I don't know. If somebody wants to know what you think about a movie or a political policy or a geopolitical position, whatever, you say, "I'm sorry, I don't know enough about the situation. I don't know enough to give a good answer." So, what the skeptics are saying is, if you want to be happier, if you want to be calmer, and you want to get on with more people, you should get used to saying the words I don't know from time to time.

So, what can we all do to reverse what Bonhoeffer was seeing in society and what Frankfurt was seeing in society? what Renali is pointing out in his work on indoctrination. I mean, the first thing is to model what we want to change. We can all be better at saying I don't know. We can all take a leaf out of the skeptics's book and recognize that we just cannot know a great many things. And so saying I don't know is a courageous act. And by doing that, you invite other people to also say they I don't know as well. In my experience, when I come across somebody who says, "I don't know," I actually respect them more than somebody who is happy to bullshit about a topic they know nothing about. But the next step is to appreciate what Bonhoeffer was talking about what real stupidity means. And this is to challenge those who are willfully ignorant. Because to stay ignorant about something, ironically, takes determination and commitment. You have to stay ignorant by avoiding any information that might correct you. And so as a society we need to be less accepting of those who say I don't know and I don't care about not knowing. For Bonhoeffer that is the greater problem. And for Aristotle in his politics it might even be the death of civilization.

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