Caldwell to me is an example of being educated to the point of becoming stupid. It describes much of what constitutes the so called intellectual class. In my not so humble opinion.
Re Malcolm Caldwell, 'One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.' - one hopes, anyway (Orwell, Notes On Nationalism)
Great writing. I sometimes worry about Reverso Gadfly. A different picture. If Caldwell didn't know he was a useful idiot then how do I know if I am not?
I would like to live up to the standards of a good society. Being lost, but having freedom, makes it all the more humiliating.
Absolutely splendid summary of our collective mania. Thanks also for the rather comprehensive bibliography.
In particular, I still remember reading “The True Believer” for the first time. It instantly struck me as important, as it skewered a good many of my naive assumptions and sacred cows. Healthily unsettling and provocative. I’ve returned to it a few times - and you’ve inspired another re-reading. Hoffer remains a fascinating character for me: an autodidact who retained a genuine sense of inquiry: to whit, a rarity.
That is really interesting too: I knew he’d been influential, but some of those names are surprising, even so (especially Russell - though to be fair he was also naturally inquisitive and open minded, so perhaps not such a surprise after all).
I really must seek out some of Hoffer’s other work as well - time and funds allowing!
Life itself is the best teacher and clearly Hoffer paid attention. Life is the ultimate laboratory and illustrates one of the greatest failings of the so-called academic class in my opinion. Their laboratory is the classroom, isolated from reality and the daily feedback mechanism that life provides. Tenure only magnifies this "blindness" to reality and fills them with an undeserved self esteem, which they then pass on to their students, along with ruinous debt, unbalanced by any marketable skills. They are a poison in our society.
A simple answer - they are crazy. In the colloquial sense of the word crazy. In the past crazy people were ignored or killed,if they were dangerous. Now we cultivate crazy people, for the wonderful art they create, or the amazing words they string together, or their beauty. They are being elected to the highest positions of leadership, and creating thinking thing machines that they do not understand and can barely control.
Only a cossetted intellectual whose education didn't include a beatdown could say something so deluded and stupid as: “a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others”.
But Sartre was always happy to play the role of savior of the oppressed (even if the only working people he knew were his servants), because this always came down to other people shedding blood while he and his precious theories kept a safe distance.
He and his girl Simone De Beauvoir travelled the world doing PR for just about every Left dictator of the 20th century, all of it only proving that we do not see the world as IT IS but as WE ARE—all those prisoners are just bourgeois being re-educated!—and also that while intellectuals may have superior book-learnin', they are much more susceptible to being duped because they treat their theories like normal people treat their babies, and they'd rather have whole distant countries burn than have to abandon their beloved brainchildren.
Sartre and de Beauvoir moved from Stalinism to Maoism to swooning for Fidel to insisting that "killing a European is killing two birds with one stone," (but of course not killing HIM or his comrades) and then lastly he tried to fit the glass slipper of newest iteration of the proletariat/revolutionary Cinderella onto Arafat and the PLO. But, even being generous to a typical Parisian poser, how exactly does murdering Israeli athletes at the Olympics help the "oppressed poor"? Who did it help and what did it solve?
The sad yet evident truth here is that for the radical Theorist neither Russian or Chinese peasants, black Americans nor Palestinians register as real flesh-and-blood humans to them, they are symbols and props in their revolutionary fantasies, means not ends. This is why they can spend decades cheering the eternal jihad against Israel, the radical frisson it gives them when a (supposed) oppressed bloodies a (supposed) oppressor gives them too much pleasure to relinquish, even if the initial bloodshed only further immiserates their pet victims du jour.
But, as they are our modern postnational post-God priesthood, prophets promising a universalist egalitarian utopia, they will never admit error or suffer any consequences for their reckless mistakes. Being a priest means never having to say you're sorry!
I think these people at the core are extreme narcissists that over time become a sort of psychopaths (similarly what joining cults does to people). That’s their important feature, and all those “words” and “ideas” are created to embellish and serve that monstrosity inside.
For Theorists, their Theory is child and brainchild and means the same thing that a book means to a novelist or a painting means to an artist—their life's work and maybe even their ticket to immortality. Yet the Theorist not only imagines personal immortality, but imagines his Theory as a new divine revelation that might just change the world. This is some serious grandiosity!
The two most extreme in this regard were probably Marx and Freud, who protected their Theories and followers and the movements based on them like a mama does her babies and who unleashed intense vitriol on anyone who threatened their sacred ideas. I think they both spent much of their later years battling all enemies and rivals.
Like I said before, the great danger here is when people become means not ends. The 20th-century's engaged intellectuals had a terrible track record when it came to real-world politics, as their theories could not survive intact once unleashed into the real world of messy, fractious humanity—which of course led them to blame the people, not the theories. They also made one of the crucial errors Theorists always make, imagining people as either lumps of clay to be molded and/or believing we'd all be and think just like the Theorist does if only properly educated.
But celebrities like Sartre, de Beauvoir and Foucault (who pimped for the Ayatollah yet didn't even apologize or reconsider once the Ayatollah began massacring both fellow Leftists and fellow homosexuals), because they see themselves as floating above grubby human accountability, that's for the little people, and their followers and disciples wouldn't have it any other way.
It is definitely in some part malignant narcissism and part cultural aristocracy, where the lord/lady always leaves messes for others to clean up. I think Mencken nailed it here:
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
A neighbour of mine set up an orphanage in Cambodia because the sex tourist trade is leaving plenty of abandoned children in its wake, many of whom are HIV positive.
She told me that during the time of Pol Pot's mass murders, the regime ended up killing anyone who wore eyeglasses, because it meant they could read.
Great article thank you. This story reflects university life then and even more, now. The true believers and useful idiots do very well in the system - and encourage the same in their students. The brightest are the best able to read the holy texts and advance the good cause.
Caldwell was not unusual in being both a true believer and a useful idiot as you suggest - it is very (increasingly) common to see both characteristics in those at the top.
Covid exposed this on a larger canvas - as you suggest - and the fervour for vaccination reflected all the horrors you describe. It similarly ignored any inconvenient truths and left a pile of unacknowledged bodies in the wake of its truth.
A fascinating read, thanks Frederick. And here’s my simplistic take. The world is divided into those who feel the need to belong to a tribe (a human instinct) and those who are able to rise above the tribe. The tribal people blind themselves to what the tribe is doing in their desperation to belong. They are cowards. We see endless variations of the tribe throughout history but it’s the individual thinkers who end up rescuing societies from total disaster because they are brave enough to stand up to the tribe. It’s why Christian societies are so successful. Christianity encourages individual responsibility. Authoritarian regimes crush individual responsibility and in doing so they crush progress.
That depends on how we define progress. China is doing far more with high speed rail than the UK is able to do today, it seems. But railways were always the arteries of empire.
Wow. Brilliant. You had me til the lockdown. I don’t think the lockdown was meant to be totalitarian. People got crazy about someone wearing a mask in a park which is ridiculous. But during COVID we medical people (I’m an MD) didn’t know what we were dealing with. Learning that we had to place people prone in the ICU and turn them because their own immune response to the virus was smothering the patients. Having to improvise equipment and use one vent for two people. My friend in India had an aunt die because they couldn’t get a ventilator for her. I had colleagues die. So no it’s not nurses dancing on tik tok and banging pans- what an insult and conflation.
You must have missed the part where I said: "I'm not talking about epidemiology, which is a different argument." The conflation, I'm afraid, is yours. Nothing in the piece touches what you and your colleagues faced, and it's not my intention to insult you or anyone else. What interested me was the social and psychological effects of the lockdowns.
Your introduction to this essay makes it sound like parts of it are a slog instead of what it is which is a very well constructed, thought out analysis using history and philosophy in approachable language. Thank you. Restacked.
Part 2 Bonehoeffer: They stop being individuals. And here's 4:38 the scariest part. In conversation with 4:40 him, Bonhaofer says, one virtually feels 4:43 that one is dealing not at all with a 4:45 person, but with slogans, catchwords, 4:47 and the like that have taken possession 4:49 of him. You're not talking to them 4:50 anymore. You're talking to the ideology 4:53 that's colonized their brain. They've 4:55 become a vessel, a repeater, a tool. And 4:58 the worst part, having thus become a 5:00 mindless tool, the stupid person will 5:02 also be capable of any evil and at the 5:04 same time incapable of seeing that it is 5:07 evil. They can commit atrocities and 5:10 feel righteous doing it because they're 5:11 no longer thinking. They're obeying. So 5:14 now you understand why your arguments 5:16 don't work. You think you're talking to 5:18 a person, but you're actually talking to 5:20 a system, a mental framework that 5:23 filters out anything that threatens its 5:25 stability. Bonhaofer explains it 5:27 perfectly. The stupid person is often 5:30 stubborn, but he is not independent. 5:32 Stubbornness looks like strength, like 5:34 conviction. But it's the opposite. It's 5:37 fragility disguised as certainty. 5:40 Because deep down they know. If they let 5:42 one doubt in, the whole structure 5:44 collapses. So they double down. They 5:47 attack. They deflect. Not because you're 5:50 wrong, but because you're right. And 5:52 that's unbearable. This is why Bonhaofer 5:54 says, "Never again will we try to 5:56 persuade the stupid person with reasons 5:59 for it is senseless and dangerous." 6:00 [music] 6:01 Dangerous. Because when you challenge 6:04 their belief system, you're not just 6:06 disagreeing, you're threatening their 6:08 identity. And people will fight to the 6:10 death to protect that. [music] Now, 6:12 here's where it gets even darker. 6:13 Bonhaofer noticed something crucial. 6:16 People who have isolated themselves from 6:18 others or who live in solitude manifest 6:20 this defect less frequently than 6:22 individuals or groups of people inclined 6:24 or condemned to sociability. 6:27 Translation: Stupidity is a group 6:29 phenomenon. The more you need to belong, 6:32 the more vulnerable you are. It would 6:34 seem that stupidity is perhaps less a 6:36 psychological than a sociological 6:38 problem, he writes. [music] 6:40 And then he drops the bombshell. Every 6:42 strong upsurge of power in the public 6:44 sphere, be it of a political or of a 6:47 religious nature, infects a large part 6:49 of humankind with stupidity. [music] 6:51 It's almost a law of nature. The power 6:53 of the one needs the stupidity of the 6:56 other. [music] Think about that. Every 6:58 authoritarian regime, every cult, every 7:01 mass movement, they don't succeed 7:03 because people are dumb. They succeed 7:05 because people surrender their 7:07 intelligence in exchange for certainty 7:08 and belonging. And once that trade is 7:11 made, you can't reason them out of it 7:13 because they didn't reason themselves 7:15 into it. So what's the solution? 7:17 Bonhaofer is brutally honest. Only an 7:20 act of liberation, not instruction, can 7:22 overcome stupidity. You can't teach 7:24 someone out of it. You can't debate them 7:26 out of it. They have to be freed from 7:28 it. And here's the tragic part. In most 7:30 cases, a genuine internal liberation 7:33 becomes possible only when external 7:35 liberation has preceded it. Meaning 7:38 what? The external power structure has 7:40 to collapse first. The regime has to 7:43 fall. The leader has to die. The 7:45 movement has to crumble. Then and only 7:48 then can people wake up. Until that 7:51 happens, we must abandon all attempts to 7:53 convince the stupid [music] person. It's 7:55 not cynicism, it's survival. Bonhaofer 7:59 wrote this letter in December 1942. 8:02 4 months later, he was arrested. 2 years 8:05 later on April 9th, 1945, he was hanged 8:09 just weeks before Germany surrendered. 8:11 [music] He never lived to see the 8:13 liberation he wrote about. But his words 8:15 survived and they're more relevant now 8:17 than ever because we're living in an age 8:20 of manufactured stupidity. Algorithms 8:23 that reward certainty over curiosity. 8:26 Echochambers that punish doubt. 8:28 ideologies left, right, religious, 8:31 secular, that demand total loyalty in 8:34 exchange for belonging. And millions of 8:36 people, smart people, educated people, 8:39 are making the same trade Bonhaofer 8:41 warned about. They're surrendering their 8:43 independence, becoming vessels for 8:45 slogans, repeating ideas they never 8:47 questioned, and attacking anyone who 8:49 dares to think clearly. So, here's the 8:52 hard truth. If you've been wondering why 8:54 it feels so lonely to think for 8:56 yourself, this is why. You're not 8:58 broken. You're just refusing to make the 9:01 trade. You're keeping your independence. 9:03 And in a world addicted to certainty, 9:06 that makes you dangerous. But it also 9:08 makes you free. Bonhaofer's final words 9:11 on the subject were these. The fear of 9:13 God is the beginning of wisdom. Meaning 9:16 what? That real intelligence isn't about 9:19 having all the answers. It's about 9:21 staying humble enough to keep 9:23 questioning, brave enough to stand 9:25 alone, and strong enough to resist the 9:27 comfort of stupidity. [music] That's the 9:29 theory. And now you know why they never 9:31 wanted you to hear it.
Brilliant writing. Thank you Frederick
Thanks!
Caldwell to me is an example of being educated to the point of becoming stupid. It describes much of what constitutes the so called intellectual class. In my not so humble opinion.
Re Malcolm Caldwell, 'One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.' - one hopes, anyway (Orwell, Notes On Nationalism)
Great writing. I sometimes worry about Reverso Gadfly. A different picture. If Caldwell didn't know he was a useful idiot then how do I know if I am not?
I would like to live up to the standards of a good society. Being lost, but having freedom, makes it all the more humiliating.
Thanks, Mandy. The fact that you're asking that question is probably the best evidence that you're not.
Absolutely splendid summary of our collective mania. Thanks also for the rather comprehensive bibliography.
In particular, I still remember reading “The True Believer” for the first time. It instantly struck me as important, as it skewered a good many of my naive assumptions and sacred cows. Healthily unsettling and provocative. I’ve returned to it a few times - and you’ve inspired another re-reading. Hoffer remains a fascinating character for me: an autodidact who retained a genuine sense of inquiry: to whit, a rarity.
Thanks, Richard. Hoffer is fascinating, as autodidacts often are. His fans included Eisenhower and Reagan, and even Bertrand Russell, I believe.
That is really interesting too: I knew he’d been influential, but some of those names are surprising, even so (especially Russell - though to be fair he was also naturally inquisitive and open minded, so perhaps not such a surprise after all).
I really must seek out some of Hoffer’s other work as well - time and funds allowing!
Life itself is the best teacher and clearly Hoffer paid attention. Life is the ultimate laboratory and illustrates one of the greatest failings of the so-called academic class in my opinion. Their laboratory is the classroom, isolated from reality and the daily feedback mechanism that life provides. Tenure only magnifies this "blindness" to reality and fills them with an undeserved self esteem, which they then pass on to their students, along with ruinous debt, unbalanced by any marketable skills. They are a poison in our society.
Nailed it. Yes: that’s why we must always pay attention. Life serves up lessons at unexpected moments…
A simple answer - they are crazy. In the colloquial sense of the word crazy. In the past crazy people were ignored or killed,if they were dangerous. Now we cultivate crazy people, for the wonderful art they create, or the amazing words they string together, or their beauty. They are being elected to the highest positions of leadership, and creating thinking thing machines that they do not understand and can barely control.
It is not a good sign
Only a cossetted intellectual whose education didn't include a beatdown could say something so deluded and stupid as: “a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others”.
But Sartre was always happy to play the role of savior of the oppressed (even if the only working people he knew were his servants), because this always came down to other people shedding blood while he and his precious theories kept a safe distance.
He and his girl Simone De Beauvoir travelled the world doing PR for just about every Left dictator of the 20th century, all of it only proving that we do not see the world as IT IS but as WE ARE—all those prisoners are just bourgeois being re-educated!—and also that while intellectuals may have superior book-learnin', they are much more susceptible to being duped because they treat their theories like normal people treat their babies, and they'd rather have whole distant countries burn than have to abandon their beloved brainchildren.
Sartre and de Beauvoir moved from Stalinism to Maoism to swooning for Fidel to insisting that "killing a European is killing two birds with one stone," (but of course not killing HIM or his comrades) and then lastly he tried to fit the glass slipper of newest iteration of the proletariat/revolutionary Cinderella onto Arafat and the PLO. But, even being generous to a typical Parisian poser, how exactly does murdering Israeli athletes at the Olympics help the "oppressed poor"? Who did it help and what did it solve?
The sad yet evident truth here is that for the radical Theorist neither Russian or Chinese peasants, black Americans nor Palestinians register as real flesh-and-blood humans to them, they are symbols and props in their revolutionary fantasies, means not ends. This is why they can spend decades cheering the eternal jihad against Israel, the radical frisson it gives them when a (supposed) oppressed bloodies a (supposed) oppressor gives them too much pleasure to relinquish, even if the initial bloodshed only further immiserates their pet victims du jour.
But, as they are our modern postnational post-God priesthood, prophets promising a universalist egalitarian utopia, they will never admit error or suffer any consequences for their reckless mistakes. Being a priest means never having to say you're sorry!
Great work, thanks!
I think these people at the core are extreme narcissists that over time become a sort of psychopaths (similarly what joining cults does to people). That’s their important feature, and all those “words” and “ideas” are created to embellish and serve that monstrosity inside.
For Theorists, their Theory is child and brainchild and means the same thing that a book means to a novelist or a painting means to an artist—their life's work and maybe even their ticket to immortality. Yet the Theorist not only imagines personal immortality, but imagines his Theory as a new divine revelation that might just change the world. This is some serious grandiosity!
The two most extreme in this regard were probably Marx and Freud, who protected their Theories and followers and the movements based on them like a mama does her babies and who unleashed intense vitriol on anyone who threatened their sacred ideas. I think they both spent much of their later years battling all enemies and rivals.
Like I said before, the great danger here is when people become means not ends. The 20th-century's engaged intellectuals had a terrible track record when it came to real-world politics, as their theories could not survive intact once unleashed into the real world of messy, fractious humanity—which of course led them to blame the people, not the theories. They also made one of the crucial errors Theorists always make, imagining people as either lumps of clay to be molded and/or believing we'd all be and think just like the Theorist does if only properly educated.
But celebrities like Sartre, de Beauvoir and Foucault (who pimped for the Ayatollah yet didn't even apologize or reconsider once the Ayatollah began massacring both fellow Leftists and fellow homosexuals), because they see themselves as floating above grubby human accountability, that's for the little people, and their followers and disciples wouldn't have it any other way.
It is definitely in some part malignant narcissism and part cultural aristocracy, where the lord/lady always leaves messes for others to clean up. I think Mencken nailed it here:
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
Well done.
A neighbour of mine set up an orphanage in Cambodia because the sex tourist trade is leaving plenty of abandoned children in its wake, many of whom are HIV positive.
She told me that during the time of Pol Pot's mass murders, the regime ended up killing anyone who wore eyeglasses, because it meant they could read.
Great article thank you. This story reflects university life then and even more, now. The true believers and useful idiots do very well in the system - and encourage the same in their students. The brightest are the best able to read the holy texts and advance the good cause.
Caldwell was not unusual in being both a true believer and a useful idiot as you suggest - it is very (increasingly) common to see both characteristics in those at the top.
Covid exposed this on a larger canvas - as you suggest - and the fervour for vaccination reflected all the horrors you describe. It similarly ignored any inconvenient truths and left a pile of unacknowledged bodies in the wake of its truth.
A fascinating read, thanks Frederick. And here’s my simplistic take. The world is divided into those who feel the need to belong to a tribe (a human instinct) and those who are able to rise above the tribe. The tribal people blind themselves to what the tribe is doing in their desperation to belong. They are cowards. We see endless variations of the tribe throughout history but it’s the individual thinkers who end up rescuing societies from total disaster because they are brave enough to stand up to the tribe. It’s why Christian societies are so successful. Christianity encourages individual responsibility. Authoritarian regimes crush individual responsibility and in doing so they crush progress.
That depends on how we define progress. China is doing far more with high speed rail than the UK is able to do today, it seems. But railways were always the arteries of empire.
Wow. Brilliant. You had me til the lockdown. I don’t think the lockdown was meant to be totalitarian. People got crazy about someone wearing a mask in a park which is ridiculous. But during COVID we medical people (I’m an MD) didn’t know what we were dealing with. Learning that we had to place people prone in the ICU and turn them because their own immune response to the virus was smothering the patients. Having to improvise equipment and use one vent for two people. My friend in India had an aunt die because they couldn’t get a ventilator for her. I had colleagues die. So no it’s not nurses dancing on tik tok and banging pans- what an insult and conflation.
You must have missed the part where I said: "I'm not talking about epidemiology, which is a different argument." The conflation, I'm afraid, is yours. Nothing in the piece touches what you and your colleagues faced, and it's not my intention to insult you or anyone else. What interested me was the social and psychological effects of the lockdowns.
Ok
Your introduction to this essay makes it sound like parts of it are a slog instead of what it is which is a very well constructed, thought out analysis using history and philosophy in approachable language. Thank you. Restacked.
Brought here by the algorithm, with acknowledgement of the irony.
Too many notes! jk, it’s brilliant.
Part 2 Bonehoeffer: They stop being individuals. And here's 4:38 the scariest part. In conversation with 4:40 him, Bonhaofer says, one virtually feels 4:43 that one is dealing not at all with a 4:45 person, but with slogans, catchwords, 4:47 and the like that have taken possession 4:49 of him. You're not talking to them 4:50 anymore. You're talking to the ideology 4:53 that's colonized their brain. They've 4:55 become a vessel, a repeater, a tool. And 4:58 the worst part, having thus become a 5:00 mindless tool, the stupid person will 5:02 also be capable of any evil and at the 5:04 same time incapable of seeing that it is 5:07 evil. They can commit atrocities and 5:10 feel righteous doing it because they're 5:11 no longer thinking. They're obeying. So 5:14 now you understand why your arguments 5:16 don't work. You think you're talking to 5:18 a person, but you're actually talking to 5:20 a system, a mental framework that 5:23 filters out anything that threatens its 5:25 stability. Bonhaofer explains it 5:27 perfectly. The stupid person is often 5:30 stubborn, but he is not independent. 5:32 Stubbornness looks like strength, like 5:34 conviction. But it's the opposite. It's 5:37 fragility disguised as certainty. 5:40 Because deep down they know. If they let 5:42 one doubt in, the whole structure 5:44 collapses. So they double down. They 5:47 attack. They deflect. Not because you're 5:50 wrong, but because you're right. And 5:52 that's unbearable. This is why Bonhaofer 5:54 says, "Never again will we try to 5:56 persuade the stupid person with reasons 5:59 for it is senseless and dangerous." 6:00 [music] 6:01 Dangerous. Because when you challenge 6:04 their belief system, you're not just 6:06 disagreeing, you're threatening their 6:08 identity. And people will fight to the 6:10 death to protect that. [music] Now, 6:12 here's where it gets even darker. 6:13 Bonhaofer noticed something crucial. 6:16 People who have isolated themselves from 6:18 others or who live in solitude manifest 6:20 this defect less frequently than 6:22 individuals or groups of people inclined 6:24 or condemned to sociability. 6:27 Translation: Stupidity is a group 6:29 phenomenon. The more you need to belong, 6:32 the more vulnerable you are. It would 6:34 seem that stupidity is perhaps less a 6:36 psychological than a sociological 6:38 problem, he writes. [music] 6:40 And then he drops the bombshell. Every 6:42 strong upsurge of power in the public 6:44 sphere, be it of a political or of a 6:47 religious nature, infects a large part 6:49 of humankind with stupidity. [music] 6:51 It's almost a law of nature. The power 6:53 of the one needs the stupidity of the 6:56 other. [music] Think about that. Every 6:58 authoritarian regime, every cult, every 7:01 mass movement, they don't succeed 7:03 because people are dumb. They succeed 7:05 because people surrender their 7:07 intelligence in exchange for certainty 7:08 and belonging. And once that trade is 7:11 made, you can't reason them out of it 7:13 because they didn't reason themselves 7:15 into it. So what's the solution? 7:17 Bonhaofer is brutally honest. Only an 7:20 act of liberation, not instruction, can 7:22 overcome stupidity. You can't teach 7:24 someone out of it. You can't debate them 7:26 out of it. They have to be freed from 7:28 it. And here's the tragic part. In most 7:30 cases, a genuine internal liberation 7:33 becomes possible only when external 7:35 liberation has preceded it. Meaning 7:38 what? The external power structure has 7:40 to collapse first. The regime has to 7:43 fall. The leader has to die. The 7:45 movement has to crumble. Then and only 7:48 then can people wake up. Until that 7:51 happens, we must abandon all attempts to 7:53 convince the stupid [music] person. It's 7:55 not cynicism, it's survival. Bonhaofer 7:59 wrote this letter in December 1942. 8:02 4 months later, he was arrested. 2 years 8:05 later on April 9th, 1945, he was hanged 8:09 just weeks before Germany surrendered. 8:11 [music] He never lived to see the 8:13 liberation he wrote about. But his words 8:15 survived and they're more relevant now 8:17 than ever because we're living in an age 8:20 of manufactured stupidity. Algorithms 8:23 that reward certainty over curiosity. 8:26 Echochambers that punish doubt. 8:28 ideologies left, right, religious, 8:31 secular, that demand total loyalty in 8:34 exchange for belonging. And millions of 8:36 people, smart people, educated people, 8:39 are making the same trade Bonhaofer 8:41 warned about. They're surrendering their 8:43 independence, becoming vessels for 8:45 slogans, repeating ideas they never 8:47 questioned, and attacking anyone who 8:49 dares to think clearly. So, here's the 8:52 hard truth. If you've been wondering why 8:54 it feels so lonely to think for 8:56 yourself, this is why. You're not 8:58 broken. You're just refusing to make the 9:01 trade. You're keeping your independence. 9:03 And in a world addicted to certainty, 9:06 that makes you dangerous. But it also 9:08 makes you free. Bonhaofer's final words 9:11 on the subject were these. The fear of 9:13 God is the beginning of wisdom. Meaning 9:16 what? That real intelligence isn't about 9:19 having all the answers. It's about 9:21 staying humble enough to keep 9:23 questioning, brave enough to stand 9:25 alone, and strong enough to resist the 9:27 comfort of stupidity. [music] That's the 9:29 theory. And now you know why they never 9:31 wanted you to hear it.