To the Editor:
For some time it has baffled me how so many Americans can adhere to the positions, proclamations and averments of Donald Trump, most of which are false, and which, if made purposely, are lies, and, if made unconcernedly, are bullshit, under the definition advanced in Harry Frankfurt’s essay “On Bullshit.”
The explanation for how approximately 30% of Americans can be so consumed by Trump’s frequently febrile, increasingly detached exhortations and practices may be found in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.
Ascribing stupidity as an explanation of Trump support will have the average Democrat clutching their pearls and wailing at the prospect of offending some cohort of citizens. And it will have the effect of angering the 63-83% of Republicans who are definitionally stupid, of course. But the explanation to me seems as certain and inarguable as gravity acting when you drop your keys.
Stupidity as the explanation for support of Trump’s utterances and scribblings is associated with three elements employed by a non-stupid person: independence of thought, avoidance of the comfort of group conformity and facts. Avoidance of these reason strategies effect to pervert critical thinking and a natural and healthy skepticism in considering and measuring the accuracy — the truth — of the utterances or scribblings. Moreover, Bonhoeffer ascribed a lack of morality to the disregard of those rational metrics, and advised that ultimately and consequently, stupidity is more dangerous than pure evil.
He wrote this as an explanation of how the country of poetry, philosophy, art and technology could have become Nazified. And he wrote just before being hanged by the Nazis.
Consider America’s current travail under its putative king with the United States at its dawn. Read the Declaration of Independence; appreciate the acts of King George complained of. Digest that, then consider the ominous parallels with current America to the rise of Nazism in Bonhoeffer’s Germany: a population rightly or wrongly perceiving itself victimized; scapegoating the Jews, homosexuals, immigrants, and non-Christians; the grandiose theft of wealth; cultish monuments; a willing champion pandering to that portion of the population claiming denial of master race status.
Bonhoeffer’s theory is proven.
Frank Peterson
Whittier