Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice
... but often they come hand in hand.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
253 points (99.6% liked)
Today I Learned
24103 readers
830 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Coupled with aggressively willful ignorance from the masses and deliberate lies from leaders, media, and social media and we get what we have with the Reich Wing in the US today.
For anyone who doesn’t know who Dietrich Bonhoeffer was:
was a German Lutheran pastor, neo-orthodox theologian and anti-Nazi dissident who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity's role in the secular world have become widely influential; his 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship is described as a modern classic.[1] Apart from his theological writings, Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Nazi euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of Jews.[2] He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel Prison for 1½ years. Later, he was transferred to Flossenbürg concentration camp [where he was executed by hanging].
No its malice manipulating stupid that is the real danger
And also malice masquerading as stupidity. George Bush and Trump in the US, and Boris Johnson in the UK.
Im unfamiliar with Bush's brand of evil, save for the WMD shenanigans, but there's no way 3 people in my lifetime have been in charge while also being as stupid as they present themselves.
Im twice as smart as they acted and I struggle to get Team Leader position in a factory. Something is fucky.
Edit : probably a lot more leaders in a lot more countries playing the lovable bumbling "aw he's trying his best" card.
It's much easier to become president when your daddy was in charge of the CIA and then the president, and your brother is governor of a state you shouldn't have won. You're not a team leader in the factory because you don't kiss enough ass and your dad wasn't in a position to promote you past the point of failure.
When you type Bush you actually type Dick Cheney. Taking in that, you begin to get the hang of Bush administration
Both can be true.
Because stupidity can be used as a mask for malice
Plausible deniability .... generally doing things and pretending that you have no knowledge or awareness of what happened so its not your fault and you have no responsibility
It's modern day politics and race baiting these days .... you say one thing to be an absolute turd and when you get called on it all, you deny everything, redirect, and ignore everything ... your malicious self keeps hiding behind the mask of stupidity to keep doing whatever it is you want to say or do all the time ... then do it again and again until your behaviour is so normalized that it's no longer seen as malicious or stupid ... it's just normal now.
Also, a malicious individual can use stupidity of the masses to get in power and get their way
"Ignorance is the only evil" — Socrates oe smth
Ignorance can be treated with instruction/information. That isn't the problem with stupidity.
...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.
Socrates was talking about willfull ignorance, amathia.
Doesn't translate well into English. Read the originals
Sorry, cant read greek. Im aware of this, which is kind of the opposite vibe
Yeah me neither, but we can read about them. I used to link this good article about it, but it's gone down now, unfortunately.
Wayback machine to the rescue!
That should work but I'll paste a bit anyway
Belangia helpfully adds: “A-gnoia means literally ‘not-knowing’; a-mathia means literally ‘not-learning.’ In addition to the type of amathia that is an inability to learn, there is another form that is an unwillingness to learn. … Robert Musii in an essay called On Stupidity, distinguished between two forms of stupidity, one he called ‘an honorable kind’ due to a lack of natural ability and another, much more sinister kind, that he called ‘intelligent stupidity.'”
Belangia also quotes Glenn Hughes, from an essay entitled “Voegelin’s Use of Musil’s Concept of Intelligent Stupidity in Hitler and the Germans,” providing a further elucidation of the concept of amathia (italics in the original):
“The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”
Just to be clear: amathia is referring to both kinds of stupidity yes?
Uh agnostic is not knowing and amathic is not learning, afaik
By my understanding of the texts an agnostic person would possibly learn a thing when you teach them, but an amathic person wouldn't. That's the difference. One just lacks the info the other refuses to accept it.
And the article loans other essays which quote third essays and it's kinda hard to keep track. The whole thing is only like 1.5-2 pages, worth a read.
I know it’s a nuisance, but PLEASE fix the formatting. It’s a great quote, but the bizarre spacing is driving me nuts. Thank you!
It looks perfectly fine on my device? IOS/Voyager? I don’t see what you see apparently.
There are no paragraphs, which makes it too much effort to read.
For that, you can thank Bonhoeffer and the writing conventions of his era ;)
Oh, okay. I’m just using the website. Look at it in Safari. It’s kinda weird.
Hate to say it but I checked in Safari and Firefox, both look fine… not sure what’s going on with what you see.
It’s likely the newline whitespace characters in your post being handled differently on their home instance. They’re usually invisible but you can see them by inspecting the page. The first appears between “evil;” and “it.”
You can remove these characters by hand, using a text formatting tool, or just by pasting into a field that doesn’t support them like a browser address bar. 🤙
I copy/pasted it through the address bar. Hope that helps whoever might have had difficulty.
Really nice of you dude. Thank you for your post.
Well, that’s odd. Ignore it, then. Thanks for checking!
Does it look better now?
What about one wrapped inside of the other? A perfect defense then.
The good take care of the evil. The evil take care of the stupid. The stupid take care of the good. A perfect loop.
In what way do the stupid take care of the good?
"Take care", like the mob "took care" of problems.
Correct.
See COVID