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

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

Stupidity versus evil

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a 20th-century philosopher and

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a 20th-century theologian, known both for his writings and for his resistance to the Nazi system. He was born in the early 20th century to a prominent, quite elite family; his father held the chair of psychiatry at Berlin University, one of the most prestigious positions in the country. When the Nazis came to power and launched the German Christian movement, an attempt to co-opt the Protestant churches, Bonhoeffer ran a counter movement known as the Confessional Church. When war broke out, he joined the anti-Nazi intelligence, feeding information to the Allies and to resistance movements across Europe and in Germany. The Nazis eventually discovered this and imprisoned him in 1943, where he wrote a whole range of letters and diaries — the source of his notes on stupidity, the subject of this talk. He was associated with the 1944 plot to kill Hitler and was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945, a few weeks before it was liberated by the Allies.

What stupidity is not

In his letters, Bonhoeffer makes a slightly bold claim: stupidity is a greater threat to civilization than even evil. But to understand that, we need to understand what he meant by stupidity, because it differs from how most of us use the word in everyday speech.

Stupidity is not the same as foolishness. Foolishness is doing something silly, reckless or imprudent — putting diesel into a petrol car, or, in my case, putting washing-up liquid in the washing machine and causing a disaster. At my son's last birthday party he was given a plastic golf set, and desperate to impress the other parents, I swung the club as hard as I could and sent the ball flying over the gate into the road, hitting a passing car. That is foolishness, but it is not stupidity in Bonhoeffer's sense.

Nor is it the same as a lack of cognitive ability. Sometimes you run up against tasks that are simply beyond what you are capable of. In my own case, I find flat-pack furniture incredibly difficult — even fiddly things like Lego — so I usually pass them on to someone else. Even my five-year-old son is better at building Lego than I am.

And stupidity is not the same as ignorance. If you don't know something, that is either a lack of education or a lack of exposure to the fact. Not knowing the capital of Indonesia is ignorance; you go away, find out that it is — Jakarta, I think — and the ignorance is resolved. That is not stupidity.

Bonhoeffer is careful to say that these three things are not stupidity. But what is?

Bonhoeffer says that stupidity can be defined by three different elements.

1. Outsourcing critical thinking

The first is when we outsource our critical thinking to some kind of third party. It might be a teacher, a parent, a social media influencer, or technology — and today a lot of people do outsource their thinking to technology.

In 2014 the philosopher Robert Howell wrote a paper introducing a thought experiment known as Google morals. He explains that we often use apps to do certain things for us, the most common being Google Maps. Coming here today, for example, I used Google Maps to tell me where to go: it told me to go left, to go right, and here I am. Most people are okay with using Google Maps, even for slightly imbecillic things — if I want to go to Big Ben and it's obviously there in front of me, people will still use Google Maps to get there. But we accept it because navigation is something we're quite willing to outsource to technology.

Howell then introduces an extra idea: imagine the future contains an app called Google Morals, where you type in a question and it tells you what you should do in any situation. Suppose I go to a burger restaurant and ask, "Is it right for me to eat the meat burger or the halloumi burger?" and the app does its working and tells me what to do. The point isn't whether Google Morals reasons properly or not; Howell's point is that we shouldn't be outsourcing our moral reasoning to an app.

This was written in 2014, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to point out that a lot of people today use ChatGPT, Claude and other AI to answer these kinds of questions for them: Is it right to do X? Should I cheat on my partner? Should I stay with my partner? Should I do this job or that job? We are using AI to do the critical thinking for us — and that is an example of what Bonhoeffer would call stupidity.

2. Willful ignorance

The second element of stupidity is willful ignorance. Ignorance itself is not stupidity — but if you are continuously ignorant and take no steps to resolve your ignorance, that is stupidity.

In the ancient Greek world, the oracle of Delphi was reputed to have said that the wisest man alive was Socrates. Socrates famously said that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing at all — an example of ignorance. The reason he wasn't stupid was that he spent his life devoted to trying to resolve it. In the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, Aristotle says one of the worst things that can befall any society is what the ancient Greeks called amathia — willful ignorance, when somebody celebrates the fact they don't know something and takes no steps to resolve it.

In the ancient world we can trace a line from Socrates to Plato to the Stoics which associates knowledge with morality, and being wrong with immorality: the more you know, the better you become. Amathia is the great curse, a great contagion, because there is a rise in people who no longer want to know things and celebrate not knowing them — a kind of inverse elitism where those who do know things are mocked and ridiculed.

3. Conformity

The third element of stupidity is conformity, and this is what Bonhoeffer saw from his prison cell in 1943: people he grew up with, educated in the same university systems and the same schools, suddenly becoming part of the Nazi operation.

Conformity reminds me of something Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil, which has an entire chapter devoted to truth. Nietzsche argues that philosophers, academics and writers often become obsessed with the idea that truth has a value in and of itself. But if you look at the history of humanity and where we are today, people don't care about truth as a thing — what matters more is loyalty and identity.

For example, in 2022 the philosopher Chris Ranalli wrote a paper about indoctrination, asking what makes somebody indoctrinated. Ranalli argues that indoctrination is not defined by believing one thing or another. It's when you close your citadel to any alternative positions — when you associate your belief with an identity, so that you are that belief, and you see any rivals to that position as a kind of test of faith, a kind of temptation. The indoctrinated person doesn't belong to any one camp: not the atheist or the believer, not right wing or left wing. It's about how you keep those beliefs.

What Ranalli is saying is what Bonhoeffer was saying too: when we conform to some kind of groupthink, we surrender our own ability to do critical thinking and offload it to somebody else.

Ordinary stupidity vs. intelligent stupidity

The writer and philosopher Robert Musil developed a distinction between ordinary stupidity and intelligent stupidity. Ordinary stupidity is what most people associate with cognitive ability — some people just can't do certain things; I can't do flat-pack furniture very well. Intelligent stupidity is when somebody who is otherwise incredibly able, talented, articulate and erudite uses their abilities for some foolish end. What Musil and Bonhoeffer were writing about was, of course, Nazism: a system populated by intelligent people using their abilities for an incredibly foolish end.

Bonhoeffer argues that stupidity is a greater problem than evil because evil is a known problem: there is intention behind the malice. We picture evil as the Dark Lord Sauron from Lord of the Rings—dressed in black, with orcs and fiery volcanoes—and in our own world we recognise serial killers and genocidal tyrants. Once evil can be identified, the good of the world can rally around and resist it. Bonhoeffer has a quotation saying that evil contains within it the germ of its own subversion: once something is known to be evil, the good people of Minas Tirith can gather and fight the dark lord.

Stupidity poses two problems. First, society is far more tolerant of it: when someone says they don't know something and makes no effort to learn, we brush it off—"that's just how they are." Second, stupidity is much harder to identify, because not everyone is a Sauron, a serial killer, or a tyrant.

We do have real-life evil people. In the UK, the Jimmy Savile scandal broke in 2012 when he was exposed for abusing children—an obvious evil, and the good of the world rallied: the judicial system, the police, and witnesses opposed it. In 2017 there was Harvey Weinstein, where the same happened and he was arrested and imprisoned. More recently there are the Epstein files. In each case the evil person was eventually imprisoned—or, in Savile's case, already dead.

The question that follows is: who knew what was going on? Who didn't ask questions, who was wilfully blind, who was stupid in the Bonhoeffer sense? In the Nazi regime, Albert Speer embodies this. He was intelligent and educated, Hitler's architect, and eventually minister for munitions and production. At the Nuremberg trials he claimed he knew nothing—about the Holocaust, the trade, or the evils of the Nazi machinery. The tribunal found this ridiculous: an intelligent man could not have been unaware. He was imprisoned rather than executed, but the verdict was that he should have known better—his stupidity was no excuse. That is why stupidity is so hard to find and why Bonhoeffer considers it worse than evil: it is part of the system, drags down institutions, and makes everyone more corrupt and worse off.

Debating the stupid person

A quotation that has circulated since the early internet says that debating an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon: you can play as well as you like, but the pigeon will jump on the board, crap on the pieces, and return to its flock declaring victory. It captures exactly what it feels like to debate someone stupid in Bonhoeffer's sense. Such a person doesn't question their own beliefs and won't accept any contrary position. You might bring facts and the most logical arguments you can devise, but they will see you as an enemy, an other, a kind of temptation.

Language offers examples of how people repel contributions with certain phrases, whatever their belief system. "Trust the science" makes sense on paper—read peer-reviewed papers, check the expert consensus—but it is often used to bat away opposition. "Do your own research" likewise sounds good, but is often used to dismiss an alternative position. Debating such a person is so difficult because they are playing by a different rule system.

In Aristotle's Rhetoric, he distinguishes three ways people come to believe something: logos, rationality—reason, good debate, facts and evidence; ethos, a person's character, reputation and status; and pathos, emotion and feeling. Even Aristotle, the epitome of the rational philosopher, was well aware that logos plays second place to ethos and pathos. The same holds today: when debating, you may assume both sides are playing by logos—that if you lay out your argument from premises to conclusion with all the evidence, the other person will concede. But what Bonhoeffer says about the stupid person, the pigeon on the chessboard, is that they don't care about the logos; they care about the ethos and the pathos. To have any proper debate and discussion, you have to play according to their game.

When we talk about stupidity, we usually picture a particular person in our heads—someone from our own life, perhaps, or someone we met recently. But the philosopher Nathan Balentine argues that stupidity can take many forms and come from many angles. He describes a phenomenon within academia known as epistemic trespassing.

The most intelligent, able, and educated people you know can be guilty of this intellectual stupidity. Balentine talks about domain specificity: knowing your own area particularly well. An astrophysicist, for example, may be incredibly knowledgeable about stars, black holes, and the movement of planets. Epistemic trespassing is when that astrophysicist thinks that because they know so much about one area, they can also tell you about another. It could be an astrophysicist claiming to know political science, a car mechanic claiming to know tree surgery, or a doctor claiming to know economics.

According to Balentine, epistemic trespassing often has two causes. The first is intellectual pride. If you are at the top of your game—with accolades, praise, awards, and a body of students hanging on your every word—that is an ego boost, and it breeds intellectual pride. You then think you can walk into different disciplines and tell them what is true and what is false.

The second cause is an overestimation of transferable skills—skills that apply across a range of disciplines. At a basic level, reading is transferable: the astrophysicist, the economist, the neuroscientist, and the tree surgeon can all read. Writing an essay and analyzing data are also transferable skills. But trespassers assume that because they can analyze data in one area, they can analyze it in another, without considering the wider knowledge required to make sense of that dataset.

So stupidity isn't limited to any one type of person. It can be anywhere, including the academy—an incredibly intelligent person who steps outside their lane.

Indoctrination and how to resolve it

Chris Finalei wrote a 2022 paper on indoctrination, examining the factors that make someone indoctrinated. He is clear early on that anybody can become indoctrinated—Christian or atheist, left-wing or right-wing, meat eater or vegan—depending on how they hold their beliefs.

The difference is that the indoctrinated person sees every rival to their belief system as an enemy. They associate their beliefs with a certain identity, so anyone who challenges those beliefs is treated as opposition. In online discourse, for example, it's common to attack "mainstream media." A certain brand of conspiracy theory holds that any evidence, article, or position from mainstream media should be immediately discounted because of who wrote it or which outlet published it. That is what Finalei would call indoctrination: people are so used to viewing certain sources as the enemy that they won't consider anything those sources say.

The second part of the paper asks the harder question: how can we resolve this? We have to be aware that we ourselves might be indoctrinated in certain key areas. I suspect most people watching this, myself included, reject information and evidence when it comes from a certain person, in a certain way, or about a certain topic.

The clearest solution is to provide a kind of off-ramp, because challenging your beliefs is difficult—especially when you associate them with your identity. You need to create an environment where criticizing or doubting a belief is considered safe. This is where we lean on Aristotle again: logos will only get us so far. Rationality, logic, and laying out evidence take you up to the door, but to go through it you need a certain ethos—a certain character and warmth of personality. When discussing ideas with someone, we should bear in mind how important that warmth is, developing a relationship where ideas can be criticized and discussed openly without feeling confrontational.

When stupidity becomes dangerous

Stupidity can be funny, particularly when it's paired with ignorance. At Christmas, my stepbrother turned to me and asked, "Do reindeer exist?" I said yes, and we all had a laugh. If someone asks what Hitler's surname was, that's funny too. Those are examples of harmless ignorance. But Bonhoeffer says that isn't the same as stupidity. Stupidity becomes dangerous when it walks through the corridors of power.

Stupidity becomes dangerous when we surrender our own critical thinking and outsource it to somebody else—when we let a political party, a group, or a tribal identity do the thinking for us. Then you enter a kind of zombie state, pushed along by people who may have malicious intent. Someone sharing a flat-earth conspiracy theory in the pub over a few beers might be funny; you might joke about it. But if an education board is teaching flat earth to students, that's a problem, because the institution itself is allowing a willful stupidity where accepting not-knowing becomes the default—and that is stupidity occupying power.

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

On the personal level, we can dig up, scrutinize and analyze our beliefs — accept, reject, or modify them — in three ways of varying intensity.

The first is to take a leaf from Karl Popper's book. Popper introduced falsification: a theory is good insofar as it can resist falsification, and if no falsifying data is available to it, or you never present the theory with falsifying data, then the hypothesis, theory, or belief is bad. For example, all of us hold beliefs we aren't entirely sure about. In my own head, I'm not sure about my meat eating — whether I should eat meat, whether it's right or wrong. Popper would say: go and introduce yourself to as many falsifying arguments as you can. Read arguments from vegans and vegetarians, look at information about battery farms or the latest biology on animal sentience. Challenge your own belief. That's the first thing we can each do individually: escape your echo chamber.

The second thing is interpersonal, and it links back to what Chris Rali said about indoctrination. When talking with someone else, appreciate that beliefs are not just specimens on a table to dissect and poke. They are deeply personal — we are all involved in our beliefs — and certain beliefs are so personal that we reject challenges viscerally, because it feels as though the person is attacking who we are.

Growing up, Pluto was a planet — I'm not even sure what it is now. But that is what William James would call a dead belief for me: my life goes on, and I can live happily not knowing whether Pluto is a planet. Other beliefs do matter to me, though — about parenting, family, friends, work, exercise, eating. When discussing those live, important beliefs — what James calls momentous beliefs — we should appreciate there is a degree of personality to them. Be personable, be warm, allow people to defend themselves, and don't make the debate an issue of personality.

The best embodiment of this is Socrates. In Plato's dialogues, Socrates discusses things in a very non-confrontational way by asking open questions. He doesn't say "you're wrong," doesn't offer counterpositions, doesn't call anyone names or call them stupid, idiotic, or evil — he asks questions. The dialogues are condensed, and perhaps a romanticized account of what a Socratic dialogue looks like, but over the course of the conversation both parties come out better: both have analyzed their beliefs and hold stronger beliefs as a result. So in interpersonal belief systems, always approach from a Socratic position.

The third thing is institutional: we need to create and foster a culture of dissent and debate. In 2018, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote How Democracies Die, laying out the factors that lead to a democracy's collapse, looking at history and applying it to the modern day. Two key elements stand out. The first is abuse of power — when a president, prime minister, Congress, or parliament oversteps their constitutional or historical power. The second, and to my mind more important, is the illegitimization of opposition: when you start saying the opponents are monstrous, evil, satanic, demonic, and should be struck off — that no dissent or rival positions should be allowed in this organization, this Congress, this parliament. Their argument is that when those two factors emerge, democracies will suffer. We see the same in other institutions, in corporations and businesses, when leaders make decisions without any consultation.

So at the institutional level we should think about committees, debate, and welcoming dissent. I recently interviewed the philosopher Sebastian Purcell about Aztec philosophy — a subject I knew nothing about — and he introduced me to an idea I can't get out of my head: the Aztec decision circle. When an Aztec was confronted with a difficult decision, or didn't know what to believe or do, they would consult their decision circle — perhaps four, five, six close friends or relatives who would offer advice, but crucially also offer dissent and alternative positions. Purcell has an entire chapter titled "the wise do not think for themselves." I love that idea: a decision circle, consulting people who will also dissent.

According to Bonhoeffer, intelligence is measured by the ability to think critically: to take evidence, condense it, accept what is good and reject what is bad. It means thinking for yourself—don't outsource your thinking to technology, an influencer, an academic, a teacher, or your parents.

What you see in power, particularly in democracies, is that once people are elected they are no longer seen as individuals but as part of a party system. In party democracies like the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Europe, people are expected to surrender their own critical thinking to the wider party—you have to toe the line. In the UK there is the three-line whip: a whip is a party official who goes around to politicians saying, "You know which way you're voting today, don't you? You're not going to vote the other way, are you?" Each politician may have their own beliefs and may have applied genuine critical thinking to the issue, but they must vote along party lines and obey the whip. Versions of the whip exist across all sorts of political parties. Bonhoeffer's point is that when you gain power, you are expected to toe the line in this sense.

In 1969, Lawrence Peter gave us the Peter principle: in an organization, the skills and knowledge that get you promoted carry you up the ladder until you reach a point where you can no longer be promoted because your abilities can take you no further. Bonhoeffer's argument is almost the inverse. To become elected and powerful, you have to be intelligent and demonstrate critical thinking—but once you occupy the position of power, you are expected to toe the line and sacrifice your critical thinking to what someone else says, outsourcing your thinking to your leader or the party whip.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche devotes an entire chapter to truth, saying that philosophers, academics, and writers have become obsessed with the notion that truth should be valued in and of itself. Nietzsche argues that if you look at how people actually treat truth, it is not valuable in itself—it is a tool in a box, to be used. This makes evolutionary sense: knowing the truth often helps you. It's good to know that the red snake is dangerous, that the mushroom will kill you, or that the other mushroom will give you calories. But Nietzsche also notes that truth often plays second place to conformity, because it often pays to be part of the pack—the tall poppy gets cut down first. In institutions, corporations, and organizations, truth matters less than toeing the party line. It's better to be seen as good, to be seen as someone who knows their stuff, than to be concerned with the truth.

This connects to Harry Frankfurt's famous paper on bullshit, which distinguishes the liar from the bullshitter. The liar, on the face of it, seems bad—but Frankfurt argues the liar is actually better than the bullshitter, because the liar still cares about the truth. When someone lies to you, they are trying to warp reality: they want you to believe a falsehood is true, which shows they recognize that being called true carries value and prestige. The bullshitter doesn't care about truth at all. They will say whatever it takes to get their own ends and to win. Call them out on their lies and they will smile, shrug, and say, "I don't care, let's move on." Frankfurt considers this the worse problem, because it normalizes lying and a disregard for the truth—and when that happens, you get conformity, and, according to Bonhoeffer, a world heading toward something like Nazi Germany.

Frankfurt wrote the article in 1986, arguing that bullshit was on the rise then, and many people today would say it is rising again. Which raises the question: why are we seeing such a rise in bullshit?

One reason for the rise in bullshit is that we are all expected to have an opinion — on politics, the latest celebrity drama, the latest movie or album release. But we cannot possibly know everything about everything, or talk about everything confidently, competently and articulately. Into a world where opinions are expected, the bullshitter naturally rises: we bullshit because those without an opinion are considered stupid or ignorant. Yet what Bonhoeffer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all say is that those who admit they don't know something are actually the wisest of all.

Orwell and the hollowing of language

A better reflection of the mechanisms behind stupidity today can be found in George Orwell's 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. Orwell argues that the language we use around economics and politics has become hollow, flatter and vaguer — and as a result, our thoughts about politics and economics have become flatter and vaguer too. When asked our opinion on an issue, we are often presented with a menu of clichés and ready-made platitudes, limited to rattling those off.

A politician on camera says we must make "necessary sacrifices" — a cliché and a euphemism for you are worse off. No leader will say "you, the people, are worse off," so they say "necessary sacrifices" instead. "Negative growth" is a cliché and a euphemism for a recession: the economy is much worse off, but they retreat to the euphemism. Orwell says we see this flattening, this regression to the cliché, all the time — and not just in politics but in institutions. If the boss calls you in and says, "We're going to have to make some efficiency gains," that is a cliché for having laid off 10% of the company. They are hiding behind the language, behind the platitude.

This makes sense because it gives leaders plausible deniability. We have entire teams devoted to storytelling and messaging rather than truth and clarity, because it's easier to say "negative growth," "necessary sacrifices" or "collateral damage" than to accept the stark truth that civilians have been killed or that you are worse off.

Assertion instead of dialectic

Social media has a whole range of problems — our attention span, the lack of real-life connection — but one often ignored casualty of the social media age is the lack of proper debates and discussions. Two and a half thousand years ago in ancient Greece, Plato attacked the Sophists, paid philosophers who taught people how to argue, how to win an argument. Protagoras, known as the greatest of the Sophists, has his famous line that "man is the measure of all things." Protagoras and the Sophists would love the social media age, because what we are seeing is the age of assertion. We think that if somebody says something in 140 characters or in a 90-second reel, that counts as a debate. But Plato's point in the ancient world was that a debate needs more time and the maturity of thought to challenge ideas in a space that is not about identity and not confrontational. What we see today is a rise in debate and not enough dialectic.

The online world encourages reposting and status-seeking: you get a kick of dopamine every time somebody likes what you say. So 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 thought them through — and your community, your tribe, your niche of the internet rewards you for it. This is a great example of what Bonhoeffer calls stupidity: people valuing conformity and the tribe more than their own critical thinking abilities. Millions of people perfectly capable of independent thought are outsourcing their beliefs to others — perhaps a friend posting something on social media.

At the same time we are seeing the rise of the influencer: people 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, like, and comment on my reel." This encourages groupthink — the sacrifice of your critical thinking to become part of the group.

Social media acts like a puppet master without a puppeteer: we are shown what we should see, believe, and say, and we go along with it because the algorithm tells us so. Whenever I post about stupidity, the lack of critical thinking, or the rise of groupthink, those posts do very well — people repost them saying "look, it's you guys over there," pointing at others. But what Bonhoeffer, Aristotle, Plato, and the philosophers all say is that we should apply the same logic to ourselves. We need to introspect and ask: am I guilty of indoctrination in the Chomsky/Frankfurt sense? Do I hold any belief I haven't questioned?

Descartes and radical doubt

The archetype of self-questioning is René Descartes. In his Meditations, he says everyone should at least once in their life question everything they believe, because it's so easy to walk through life inheriting our beliefs. We repeat what our parents said, we repost what our friends posted — many of our beliefs are given to us, implanted in our heads. Descartes argues we should occasionally throw all of those beliefs out, because one, two, three, or many of them may be corrupt.

He gives the analogy of an apple barrel: we know that somewhere inside is a rotten apple. We could take the long, diligent time to pull every apple out and look for the rot, but Descartes says you should throw all the apples out and start from scratch. When you're growing up, so many beliefs are simply given to you — at five years old, you do what your parents say. But as an adult you have rationality and critical thinking abilities, so now is the time to assess your beliefs.

This isn't easy. Descartes 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 otherwise we can't be sure we don't hold indoctrinated beliefs, or unquestioned and possibly wrong ones.

Avoid real-life echo chambers

We should also reconsider our relationships with other people. Social media algorithms are very good at throwing us into echo chambers, and the worry is that we replicate that in real life — surrounding ourselves only with yes men and the ideologically pure, people who agree with us on everything. Philosophy says we should have 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. Don't occupy real-life echo chambers, because if you do, you'll never be able to challenge your own beliefs and can never be sure they are true, right, and good.

A thought experiment on why you believe

There's a thought experiment I like to suggest for those who want to analyze their own beliefs: what would you do if the entire world suddenly hated your belief? What would you do if you would lose your reputation, your status, or your job for believing something? For some things, such as 2 + 2 = 4, it's hard to imagine surrendering the belief. But what about your other beliefs? The experiment highlights what Nietzsche was saying: do you believe these things because they are true, because they are right, or because they are socially advantageous?

It might turn out that some beliefs are merely socially advantageous, but that doesn't necessarily mean you must jettison them. It does mean you need to look at them carefully and see whether they are actually worth holding.

Discuss ideas through philosophy, not confrontation

When you debate an idea with someone, it can degrade into a confrontational argument. I'm often asked how philosophy can help. Philosophy is unique in that it presents ideas in an objective way, and I'm often amazed at how honest and open people are with me about their beliefs when we discuss an idea. When you're discussing something Simone de Beauvoir wrote, or what Bonhoeffer or Descartes says, you aren't discussing yourself directly — you're discussing yourself in a roundabout way. By dissecting these arguments and this philosophy, you are actually dissecting your own beliefs in a non-confrontational way, much closer to what Aristotle and Plato would have approved of.

The ancient skeptics and "I don't know"

The third lesson comes from the ancient skeptics, a Greek school of philosophy concerned with happiness — in particular ataraxia: how to be less mentally disturbed and find peace of mind and tranquility of thought. The skeptics made a bold claim: 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 a movie, a political policy, or a geopolitical position, say, "I'm sorry, I don't know enough about the situation to give a good answer." If you want to be happier, calmer, and get on with more people, get used to saying "I don't know" from time to time.

What we can do to reverse stupidity

So what can we all do to reverse what Bonhoeffer and Frankfurt saw in society, and what Chomsky points out in his work on indoctrination? The first thing is to model what we want to change. We can all be better at saying "I don't know." We can take a leaf out of the skeptics' book and recognize that we simply cannot know a great many things — saying "I don't know" is a courageous act, and by doing it you invite others to say it too. In my experience, I respect someone who says "I don't know" more than someone happy to talk nonsense about a topic they know nothing about.

The next step is to appreciate what Bonhoeffer meant by real stupidity: challenge those who are willfully ignorant. Ironically, staying ignorant takes determination and commitment — you have to avoid any information that might correct you. 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.