Inflicting Stupid

Here’s why your QAnon uncle doesn’t make sense anymore — and why #QElon spent $44 billion on Twitter

Cartoon generated by Midjourney AI with the prompt “Elon Musk as Uncle Sam pointing his finger”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and an anti-Nazi dissident in Germany during WWII. He was arrested in 1943 for his resistance to Hitler — who had Bonhoeffer hanged in April 1945, just before the concentration camp he was imprisoned in was liberated. 🇺🇸

In this letter he sent to friends from prison, Bonhoeffer discusses his ‘theory of stupidity.’

“The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.“ [emphasis added]

In other words, you aren’t necessarily born stupid. Sometimes people turn stupid because of the groups they’re in. He’s describing what happens to cult members.

Here Bonhoeffer efficiently describes how cult dynamics lead to fascism:

“Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”

This a video illustrating Bonhoeffer’s Theory. It’s well worth 5 minutes of your time:

Here is the corollary to Bonhoeffer’s Theory:

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

— Voltaire

Hitler figured out that you can inflict stupidity on people, to the point that they no longer retain their previously held critical thinking skills or moral boundaries. In other words, group dynamics can be manipulated to brainwash people. Brainwashed people can be manipulated into genocide.

Which brings us to #QElon.

Elon Musk is not stupid, he is a psychopath with no empathy. However, Elon Musk is intentionally inflicting stupid on hundreds of millions of people.

Here is a small section of his timeline over the past few days:

These words are expertly designed to inflict stupid on as many people as possible. When the world’s [edit: second] richest man says stupid things, stupid ideas in circulation are validated and strengthened in people’s minds while smart things are diminished or erased.

QElon knows this, which is exactly why he is doing it. That’s why he’s literally recreating QAnon. He wants to create a nuclear explosion of stupid.

Finally, Bonhoeffer makes the critical point that the only way people can be liberated from stupidity, is to liberate them from the environment that is making them stupid in the first place.

“Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.”

Bonhoeffer was murdered by the Nazis for refusing to allow them to inflict him with stupid. Unfortunately, the Nazis are back and their wannabe fuhrer has a firehose of flammable stupidity that he is spraying the country with. #QElon

There Is Nothing “Neo” About These Nazis

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