March 31 (UPI) -- In February 2022, millions of Europeans watched a democratic government resist a military invasion launched, in part, on the premise that its citizens lacked the will to fight. The premise was wrong. But it raised a question that goes beyond any single war: why do leaders, and the societies that follow them, so often misjudge reality so badly? And why does that failure keep recurring, across generations and continents?
The answer lies partly in what several serious thinkers have called collective stupidity -- not the absence of intelligence, but its surrender.
More dangerous than malice
The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison while awaiting execution in 1945, argued that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. A malicious person can at least be confronted and resisted. A stupid person, in Bonhoeffer's sense, is unreachable, because facts do not penetrate and argument has no effect.
Bonhoeffer was not describing low intelligence. He was illustrating a moral and civic failure: the moment when a person abandons independent judgment to an outside force, whether political power, ideology or religious zeal. Once that occurs, they become a tool in the hands of whoever holds authority. Societies do not collapse only through cruelty; they also fall when large numbers of people stop thinking for themselves.
