Stupid versus Evil

In my inner work today, I needed to understand the difference between stupid and evil.

I remembered a Bonhoeffer essay about stupidity, so I looked it up. Hmmm. Powerful. In IFS terms, “stupid” would be translated as “blended with powerful protectors.”

Goodreads has the main pertinent quote from the essay here:

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.

Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”

When intelligent, otherwise sane, reasoning adults are triggered in a short OR long-term psychological process, they may devolve into child-states, protectors, who do not have access to adult reasoning.

From the perspective of an adult reasoning person, these little children masquerading as adults appear to be “stupid” adults — but if we see behind the mask, to the eight-year-old underneath, they are not ‘stupid,’ just woefully inadequate to the task of adult decision-making and reasoning.

But as Bonhoeffer makes clear — ‘stupid’ — or ‘blended with protectors’ — can be extremely dangerous. You don’t want an eight-year-old running your country, the CDC, or providing your medical care.

Knowing that many, many adults lead their lives from their eight-year-old protectors explains much of human history. The field of psychohistory attempts to make this more clear.

Carlo Cipolla wrote a book, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” which elaborates on the dangerousness of adults blended with child-aged protectors. The graph of intelligent, naive, stupid, and bandit (evil) people was particularly striking: (from The 5 Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, According to Cipolla)

Protectors are, indeed, in the “stupid” square of the chart, because they harm themselves and others.

However, if this chart were three-dimensional and stretched back in TIME, then we’d see the same “stupid” protectors, whose current behavior is inane and harmful, at the appropriate moment in time when their original behaviors were NOT stupid, but in fact, life-saving.

We would see their willful ignorance of basic facts, their delusionality, their Stockholm Syndrome, their people-pleasing, their numbing, their raging, their self-harming, were in fact THE BEST OPTIONS for self-preservation and adaptation to insane conditions at the time.

Ahhh, because in childhood (the genesis of all irrational protector behavior) our child-protectors were simply adapting to the irrationality of the child-protectors of our caregivers and their irrational world.

And in this way, ‘stupidity’ is passed on from generation to generation … protectors creating an irrational world that can only be survived IN CHILDHOOD by adaptive irrationality…

And thus the key to ending the cycle of endless irrationality is for adults to heal their child-states, their protectors, who aid and abet and collude with irrationality.

It means not voting for humans who are actual children in adult bodies. It means not putting them on the Supreme Court, no matter how many times they assert, in an adolescent male rage, “I like beer!” It means not voting for men whose eight-year old protectors think it’s funny to mock people with disabilities. It means saying, “No” to a lot of ridiculousness that passes for normal in culture. Because kids need boundaries, whether they’re eight-year-olds running the lives of 60 year olds, or actual eight-year-olds.