Engineering Stupidity

What if the nub of our calamity is that the powerful believe themselves to be divinely chosen to rule over people they have decided are weak and stupid, and so conspire to render them even more so?

JOHN WATERS

Between Good, Evil & Idiocy

What if, in all the public crimes of the past 51 months, we were missing the most heinous of them all? It seems implausible. What if this crime was, in a sense, the only crime among the lot that might be said to have incorporated all the others? What if it was, as the final objective of the demented orchestrators of the, yes, conspiracy, the ultimate purpose of an operation that had been in train for many years before its machinations were observed above ground? What if this was the crime that explained everything, solved all the mysteries and, in its exposure, rendered pointless all the hours and days we had spent in seeking to explain things that seemed to have no cause or meaning other than the purest, arbitrary evil? And what if, in the exposure of this crime, we were able to see that, although our apprehension of evil had been correct from the beginning, our sense of its arbitrariness had been misplaced, that nothing in what had been happening was random, accidental or superfluous, and that everything had its place in the cesspit of wickedness?

Behind the crimes of manifest bloodthirstiness, misanthropy, cruelty and authoritarian bullying, were other more ‘subtle’ crimes — crimes emanating from the skilled practice of the crafts or arts of misdirection, gaslighting, manipulation and behavioural determinism. Since, in dealing with profanity, it is permitted — perhaps even necessary — to use profane words, I shall speak of these in the general context as ‘headfucks’.

For example, one of the things we have puzzled about for the past four years is the way power seemed no longer to be amenable to public opinion — whereas, in the past, an act of criminality or serious failure or negligence on the part of a public functionary or figure or responsibility would have encountered serious consequences in a predictable manner, so that every attuned citizen would have been able to anticipate his downfall within a measurable margin of error. This more or less ended in March 2020. From then on, it was not that evidence of criminality or serious error evaporated, but that these things appeared to occur in a different crucible of evaluation. It was true, of course, that the media was entirely bought and paid for, but this did not seem to provide the entire explanation. There was something else, some strange shift in the culture that seemed to suggest an entirely different culture, an entirely different time, perhaps an entirely different planet.

All was changed without notice. The connection between wrongdoing and consequence seemed no longer to be an issue. The demise of the malefactor was no longer predictable. Information would seep out that seemed to contradict previous statements of a particular actor in a manner seeming to confirm guilt of serious wrongdoing, mendacity or incompetence on his or her part. The matter might, somewhat incongruously, in view of the general criminality and negligence of the journalistic profession, be reported, albeit on page 37 rather than on page one where it belonged. In the early stages, this new reality was misconstrued by or went over the heads of the public. For a time, people absorbed the new normal of consequencelessness for power and assumed, for the most part, that they had simply misunderstood something. Tripping the wires of historical expectation, the mere publication of factual information, however economically, would give rise to expectations that something significant was about to happen, and then it wouldn’t. A government minister had been caught out in a lie, perhaps; or evidence had emerged to suggest that some of the measures employed by the government to ‘combat’ the ‘virus’ had been discredited, exposed as unscientific or downright dangerous. Those who had knowingly been observing such things from the beginning sat back and waited for collars to be felt. The public in general, for some time accustomed to simple obedience, might look up in mild curiosity. A senior figure of the political or health establishment might issue an ambiguous statement hinting at possible wrongdoing, but the following day a report would appear explaining that it had all been a misunderstanding, a misreading of figures, a confusion of definitions, and the whole thing would quietly go away.

Part of the explanation for why such abuses of truth became possible was that an unannounced contract of omertà was in place between the media and political and official entities and bodies, in which the business model of media had flipped from truth to lies. This arrangement required that the media should do or say nothing to draw attention to the perpetration of fraud, or the self-evident institutionalisation of mendacity so as to protect this, but simply report deadpan whatever was issued by way of a formal script by the Regime, no matter how ludicrous, spurious or contradictory.  This meant that the Regime was at all times guaranteed that none of its nefarious acts or statements would be highlighted sufficiently for the ‘coverage’ to have any meaningful impact. Sometimes, however, this pattern would appear to be broken, as per the above instance, when it would briefly appear that the old dispensation had returned, and consequences were about to follow, in this or that context.

There were multiple variations or related syndromes. Mortality figures placed high on a scoreboard in the full view of the public were revised downwards by an official monitoring body, and the corrected figures published in muted form; but, next day, the old figures returned to the scoreboard. Nobody even frowned. An announcement was made banning the holding of picnics and, soon afterwards, the leader of government was filmed larking around at a manifest picnic in a city centre park; his ‘people’ announcing that there was in fact no ban on picnics. No comment. As excess deaths skyrocketed by 15-20 per cent, the media attacked as ‘far right’ anyone who drew attention to this, while themselves publishing bizarre articles as to why people might be having more strokes and heart attacks: too much gardening, perhaps, or not enough exercise.

What was happening here? We have speculated upon such questions for perhaps 50 months, since the immediate aftermath of the coup initiated in March 2020 under the cover of a ‘virus’ and a ‘pandemic. We have speculated about ‘sophisticated’ forms of manipulation and indoctrination, perhaps a form of ‘training’ as in the formation of an AI, except perhaps in a different direction — the purpose here being to manage public perceptions to the extent of imposing a false version of reality on the public imagination. This model has now endured with barely a stumble for some four years, a period in which the Covid fictions, and related inventions, have continued to be believed, or half-believed in a manner capable of being topped-up when necessary, while anything with the potential to damage that objective is disposed of or minimised. In this netherworld of pseudo-reality, the authorities without authority can never be ‘guilty’ of anything — blame has become a condition accruing solely to those who criticise the Regime. Because what is on the news today appears to contradict what was on the news yesterday — without any accompanying corrective or clarifying narrative does not mean that either or both versions were wrong, or that there is any necessary contradiction between them. The authorities will explain all this in due course, and meanwhile we should continue to believe in their good intentions, which are tirelessly focussed on the ‘public interest’ and the ‘common good.’ Orwell, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

A year ago, I wrote that most people have no idea that the information they are being fed, on a number of key topics, is constantly subject to manipulation and spin. I postulate that this has the effect not so much of splitting reality as obliterating it and replacing it with a remote, virtualised simulacrum in which, though the environment appears to remain unaltered, the ‘content’ of the culture is utterly different. There is, at the same time, this ghostly impression of actual journalism, actual accountability, actually existing democracy. It is as though a kind of induced collective amnesia has been contrived to which reality is responding by behaving as though commissioned  as a dramatisation of the general  stupor. Or else, a kind of constant testing process to see how ‘successfully’ the trance has taken and how much more play might be found in it.

This is just one — relatively minor, though central — element of a panoply of adjustments that have been made to our public culture in the past four years, with a clear view to changing the understandings of the public as to the nature of the society it inhabits. All of these changes are manifestly for the worse, but each is either denied or presented as an improvement, a form of ‘progress’, or an initiative in the ‘common good’. Because each element appears to exist separately, and the public conversation is almost entirely spancelled, the broader effect of all this is rarely if ever alluded to.

But, if you pay attention, you will observe that the overall effect is greater than the sum of its apparent parts. What will become clear is that behind everything that is happening is a constantly shifting mindset — let us call it the mindset of the authorities-without-authority — whereby the public is being looked upon with ever-increasing contempt and condescension. But even this sense ceases to be reliable because there is almost no remaining locus of verification for the sense one might have that, once upon a time, things were different: there was respect, courtesy, fairness. The process of raising such a topic in the company of friends is somewhat akin to confessing some grave crime or sin at a family dinner. Rather than either outrage or identification, it meets with a total deadness, as though you have raised some arcane and tedious aspect of a subject like company law or algebraic equations. People glance at one another, embarrassed, and silently agree not to take the matter any further: the drink talking.

This, I find, is an aspect of what has been happening that almost no one has noticed or understood to its depths. Even when people perceive the wrongdoing of the ‘authorities’ and the venality of the journaliars, they seem to regard these behaviours as though aberrational malfunctions within a normative system of naturalistic call-and-response, whereas what is happening is a complete travesty not merely of the news but of the process by which news has long been apprehended, and ultimately of the way information and facts are collectively processed.

As I have often explained, a pseudo-reality is an artificial construct within reality — think of it as a kind of cultural stage-set, made of three distinct materials: contorted language, paralogic and distorted morality — in other words, language rendered meaningless by virtue of its twistedness, illogical logic and spurious moral values that are made to seem compulsive.

What this means, in sum, is that the authorities, through their corruption of the media, have built a glass, bulletproof cage for themselves to operate in, where they are in effect impervious to criticism and consequence. This process has not even begun to be understood, and has no discernible prospect of termination. Each new development, no matter how potentially harmful to the perpetrators of the Crime of All Time, can be ‘explained’ away, in what appears to be logical and reasonable terms, always presenting the motives and intentions of the authorities in the most auspicious light possible. The outright compromising of journalism in this period ensures also that media interests have no motivation to expose this process, or own up to their own part in it. This wicked symbiosis, therefore, persists at the centres of our public squares, pumping out a pseudo-reality that is impenetrable even by those who are able to perceive something unusual, because the vast majority, even when something rings strangely, assume the discordant note to be simply a necessary and logical side-effect of the process of emergency management and information conveyance. But it is important to stress that the appearance of this pseudo-reality is such as to be quite the antithesis of mendacious. Its veracity is beyond question because it is not simply a version of reality — it is, or appears unquestionably to be, a description of reality such that any attempt to tell the truth will itself seem to be mendacious and/or paranoid. It does not conceal the truth to conceal reality — it supplants both.

I have just finished reading a book that, better than any of the dozens I’ve read on subjects closely or distantly related to de Covid, captures this aspect of what is happening in the processes I have tried to describe above. These represent a critical aspect of what is happening, an aspect I have long believed to be central to everything we have been experiencing for the past four years. It is a book that explains in detail how that glass, bulletproof cage was constructed, what it is made of, where its strengths and weaknesses are, and what we have to do to demolish it. The book is The Indoctrinated Brain, by Michael Nehls, MD, PhD, a physician and molecular geneticist specialising in immunology.

I thought I’d had just about enough of this kind of book by now, but Nehls breaks new ground with his thesis, which is essentially an exploration of the likelihood that the Covid episode was either planned or exploited to attack the human brain with a view to dulling and refining it for the purposes of asserting technocratic control over humanity. The ‘war against Covid’ and the ‘Great Reset’, he argues persuasively, amount really to a war against human individuality, a war by Western governments against their own peoples and against the 3,000 year-old culture of democratic dissent. He calls it ‘The Great Mental Reset’. It is a book about the deep meaning of ‘headfuck’.

It is not, in outline form, an especially novel hypothesis — we have delved into aspects of it before through the work of Mattias Desmet and others — but Michael Nehls takes us somewhat deeper by proposing that the mode of attack has primarily been upon the autobiographical memory and critical thinking faculties of humans of all ages, exploiting a number of pre-existing factors which had already been causing concern for many years on account of signs that there had been signs of a worsening and accelerating pattern of brain degeneracy throughout Western societies. These factors include bad diet, inadequate sleep patterns and stress — all elements of the unhealthy lifestyles of the ‘modern’ citizen, which serve to starve the human brain of vital nutrients and modes of recovery. The ominous ‘takeaway’ from The Indoctrinated Brain is that these conditions, which leave the human brain suspectible to a depletion of resistance to suggestibility and indoctrination, have worsened radically in the past four years,

Dr Nehls goes into the probable causes of massive worldwide spikes in Alzheimers disease, which he long thought to be mainly culture-related, but has come to believe may be primarily biological and lifestyle-driven, but also susceptible to manipulation by techniques of brainwashing and manipulation that have been around for hundreds of years. He says that Alzheimers is not a symptom of age, but affects the aged predominantly because it takes many years to develop. He believes that the ‘pandemic’ was either timed or weaponised to take advantage of these circumstances to bring the vast majority of the human species to a situation whereby, as the result of the weakening of autobiographical memory and critical thinking, they would become more susceptible to mass enslavement than the human person was at any previous time in history. He describes in detail the biological and biochemical factors which he believes have brought us to this condition of vulnerability, and the methods used in the Covid episode to accelerate the generalised set of socially-constructed or lifestyle-related symptoms already in train.

Dr Nehls is in no doubt that the primary purpose of the Covid initiative was such a programme of mass enslavement. He is agnostic on the issue of whether the ‘virus’ was created specifically for this purpose or merely opportunistically weaponised to further it. My sense is that he avoids deliberating on this aspect because it has already been well ventilated without any definitive conclusion being arrived at, and wishes to avoid his book becoming bogged down in another failure to resolve this question. At the same time, it is reasonably clear that his suspicions lie with the first hypothesis. He is in no doubt that many unconscionable crimes have been committed, particularly in the context of the rollout of the mRNA poison-injections, which he shows are themselves designed to further the agenda of human brain-depletion by attacking the hippocampus, which he asserts represents an attack not only on the human mind, but also on the soul. ‘We are connected,’ he elaborates, ‘to the four-dimensional space-time continuum through the place and time neurons of the hippocampus.’

He offers clear arguments based on a quite awesome grasp of his material.

‘Based on the fact that the virus only poses a threat to a small, well-defined group of people, the principle of herd health should have been applied from the outset to break the chains of infection through adequate vitamin D supplementation and to prevent the cytokine storm and thus severe courses of infection. Instead, the damage to autobiographical memory and the overwriting of one's own identity is achieved with remarkable precision through spiking and the many other COVID-19 measures, combined with incessant anxiety propaganda. This ensures that individuality as a product of our personal experience is lost and replaced by the official narrative. A calculated loss of psychological and mental health is part of this highly efficient mental reprogramming. You could put it this way: Adequate vitamin D (prohormone) levels in the general population, prevented by appropriate propaganda, produced the deaths from an otherwise rather harmless viral respiratory infection that were necessary to enforce the brain-damaging measures, including spiking. Perfidiously, the (deliberate) failure of this policy in terms of health care is now being used as a justification to give the WHO powers that would not otherwise have been possible.’

This very day, Dr William Makis MD, a noted medical warrior against the poison shots, has tweeted about three new surveys which bear out Dr Michael Nehls’ thesis to the letter. You can read his tweet here.

Two of the surveys were conducted in South Korea, the third in Latvia. All three demonstrate serious brain damage arising from the Covid-related nMRA injections — in this instance in respect of ‘vaccines’ purveyed by Pfizer and Moderna.

Study #1: (2024 May 28, Jee Hoon Roh et al) Shows a potential association between COVID-19 vaccination and development of Alzheimer's disease, This South Korean study of 519,330 vaccinated and 38,687 unvaccinated. mRNA Vaccinated at 3 months: +140% higher (mild Cognitive Impairment) (MCI); +23% higher Alzheimer's Disease (AD).

Conclusion: ‘Evidence suggests a potential link between COVID-19 vaccination, particularly mRNA vaccines, and increased incidences of AD and MCI’.

Study #2: (2024 June 4, Hong Jin Kim et al) — Psychiatric adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination: a population-based cohort study of 4,348,412 individuals living in Seoul, South Korea, revealed: ‘Cumulative incidence of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, sleep disorders, and sexual disorders at three months following COVID-19 vaccination were higher in the vaccination group’. Depression +68%; Anxiety, dissociative, stress, somatoform +44% Sleep disorders +93% Sexual disorders.

Study #3: (2024 Apr.11, Lazareva et al) — New-onset psychosis following COVID-19 vaccination: ‘Our systematic review aimed to examine cases of new-onset psychosis following COVID-19 vaccination.’

A total of 21 articles described 24 cases of new-onset psychotic symptoms following COVID-19 vaccination. 54% were female, mean age 34 years, mean onset time was 6 days. Duration of psychotic symptoms ranged between 1 and 2 months with a mean of 52 days. Overall, 50% of patients achieved full recovery. (50% did not)

CONCLUSION: ‘Data suggest a potential link between youth, mRNA, and viral vector vaccines with new-onset psychosis within 7 days post-vaccination.’

The overall summary reads:

Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines cross the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB). We are now starting to get solid evidence of BRAIN DAMAGE caused by COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines. So when you get your COVID-19 Vaccine, after 3 months you get these bonuses: +140% Mild Cognitive Impairment +23% Alzheimer's Dementia +68% Depression +44% Anxiety, dissociative, stress, somatoform +93% sleep disorders ++ sexual disorders increased risk of psychosis within 7 days especially if you're in your 30s with only 50% chance of recovery.

Dr Nehls’ thesis is unusual in that it is communicated via a mix of medical, cultural, political and philosophical viewfinders. Dr Nehls’ chief focus is on the systematic erasure of ‘autobiographical memory’ — by which he means the continuous narrative of the human being by which we derive our senses of the meaning, continuity and direction of our existence. In this regard, he explains, the perpetrators seek to abolish meaningful apprehension of future events and weaken resistance to tyranny in a manner calculated to render us amenable to indoctrination, manipulation and the rewriting of our private thoughts. Drawing on medical and scientific evidence, and invoking continually the works of Orwell and Huxley — by way, I intuit, of providing a backdrop of comparison for something that is otherwise unprecedented — he describes a war of daily indoctrination being waged against the human race, ‘not only against our freedom of thought and speech, and our most basic beliefs . . . but also against the ability to think and our individuality.’ The desired tyrannical outcome of this is for humanity to become ’happy’ in its newfound chains, technological subjugation, and dispossession, which goals amount to the declared and unabashed ambitions of the motherWEFfers, who fear the ineluctable possibility that there will in the future exist in the world people smarter than themselves.

The criminals chose their moment carefully. Intelligence- and creativity-depletion were already rampant, especially in the West, arising from the nature of modern lifestyles — poor diet, stress, sleep-deprivation, consumption of passive infotainment, lack of reading, et cetera — with radical consequences for mental health and independent thinking. As stated, these processes of degeneration have been radically speeded up in the past four years.

The Indoctrinated Brain, which was published last year, is a book designed to be read by both practitioners and laypersons, and therefore invites a degree of reader-discretion. Not being expert in brain mechanisms or their governing lingo, I found myself having both to concentrate intensely on some of its descriptions while remaining conscious that skipping would be counterproductive in the apprehension of such a closely argued thesis. Though I lack specialist knowledge in brain anatomy and functioning, I find Dr Nehls’ thesis convincing on this broader and more generalised level, since it accords with much of what we have already observed or gleaned about the methodologies used by what, after J.K. Rowling, Dr Nehls characterises as the ‘Dementors’ who have targeted the human race for subjugation, exploitation and plunder. Of this there is no longer any doubt, and among the benefits of The Indoctrinated Brain is that it sketches out a persuasive map of how the crime of human debasement was pulled off from its public starting-point in the spring of 2020. Particularly engaging is Dr Nehls’ exploration of how, in the depths of the lockdown in 2020, nightly chronicles of the day’s misery were employed to take advantage of the ‘ego depletion’ of television viewers (tiredness, essentially) to engage their minds in a manner designed to cause the overwriting of autobiographical memories, and simultaneously the wearing down of rational processes.

Though proferring the core of the book as his expert opinion, he is more diffident when it comes to his broader thesis. Like a prosecutor, he seeks to formulate his argument so as to create logical connections rooted, in general, in data or circumstantial evidence. However, the connections he makes are many and dazzling. He states the facts as he sees them, outlines his conclusions, and invites us to make a decision. As in a legal trial, he says, he seeks to convince his readers, the jury, of the overall truth he is expounding.

‘However,’ he adds, ‘my thesis does not have to pass a court of law or a peer review process, but rather you as my jury. In the end, it does not even matter whether the scientific evidence presented and the testimony of the protagonists of the Great Reset convince you that behind the brain damage taking place there is a grand plan for global transformation. In case my thesis is not presented convincingly enough, or even if it turns out to be wrong, and the accelerated loss of mental capacity is due to a completely random development, there is still no time to lose in eliminating the causes of this catastrophic process unfolding beyond any reasonable doubt. I am convinced that it is unlikely to be a coincidence. And if, as I suspect, indeed intent is behind it, this also has an impact on the form of counter defense required. It is not enough to simply adapt one's way of life to human nature when influential forces are at work to prevent it.’

For my part, I say: Guilty as charged. The overall sense I came away with from the book is that it establishes beyond all doubt the case that ‘measures’ ostensibly directed at ‘saving lives’ and ‘protecting health’ were in truth designed to damage at numerous levels the minds and constitutions of human beings, by imposing sundry distresses and affronts to reason, using (un)social distancing, masking, induced stress and loneliness, loss of sleep, lack of exercise, malnutrition, fear- and anxiety-generation, and multiple other factors. We already knew or suspected this, but Dr Nehls places these questions in a larger frame, and fills in a great deal of additional detail. Moreover, he enables the reader to consider these various factors as part of a single argument, brilliantly advanced and expertly argued. All of the factors he explores he traces back to a single trauma: brain injury, inflicted by lockdown ‘measures’, mRNA-caused (‘spiking’. he calls it) hippocampus damage, and the routine weaponisation of stress by fear-porn and anxiety-inducement (leading to what he calls ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder), and studied isolations/alienations of multiple kinds to match different categories of human, in order to accelerate these processes of degeneration. All this, of course, is the kind of thing journaliars call ‘conspiracy theory’, but we don’t call them journaliars for nothing: It’s because they’re worse than good-for-nothings.

The final — approximately — quarter of the book broadens out from the technical to a more philosophical approach. Here, Dr Nehls speaks as a layman seeking to place his medical argument in a cultural and societal context. In doing so, he raises some profoundly interesting and relevant questions, reopening discussions which, for various reasons, have been deemed settled in the internal discourse of the Resistance, and ignored outside of it. These relate to the precise nature of evil, how it works and what might be the prevailing misunderstandings about it. His core argument here is that we have misdefined the concept of evil, arising in large part from the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, whereby mankind has come to regard itself as intrinsically prone to evildoing. Dr Nehls, citing the work of the Danish historian, Roger Bregman, begs to differ, holding that the vast majority of humanity is ‘basically good’, and human action therefore tends towards kindness. He goes on to argue that this base pattern is disturbed and distorted by power, its pursuit and accrual, which is where, I feel, his argument about neurological manipulation and destruction becomes central. Powerful people, he argues, are incapable of empathy, because the pursuit of power blocks the normal human capacity to ‘mirror’, i.e. to match and simulate the emotional responses of others — as in smiling when the other party to a conversation smiles, or unconsciously mimicking the distress or anxiety of someone relating a difficult experience or misfortune. This lack of mirroring capacity, and therefore of empathy, leads powerful people to distrust those who are relatively powerless, to regard them as unintelligent and in need of constant management and supervision. Dr Nehls cites Roger Bregman from his book Humankind: ‘If you are powerful, you are more likely to think other people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, and regulated, censored and told what to do. And because power makes you feel superior to other people, you’ll believe al this monitoring should be entrusted to you.’

‘So maybe’, Nehls extrapolates, slightly over-egging his own point, ‘the protagonists of the Great Reset are not really evil at all but just have a self-image that is completely exaggerated in this sense? It is plausible that they suffer from some kind of God complex, since they are “idolized” by many people because of their power. . . . [O]ne could even assume that they feel chosen and may even be convinced that they are doing good.

‘Perhaps,’ he muses, ‘we have all contributed, however inadvertently, to making the powerful feel so powerful: Feeling powerless has the exact opposite effect on the other person and plays into the hands of the powerful.’

He cites Bregman again: ‘Psychological research shows that people who feel powerless also feel far less confident. They're hesitant to voice an opinion. In groups, they make themselves seem smaller, and they underestimate their own intelligence.’

And, as Bregman observes In Humankind, these uncertain responses are convenient for those in power, because ‘self-doubt makes people unlikely to strike back’. From here there develops a downward spiral, in which the people feel more and more stupid, gifting the powerful an ever-growing sense of superiority. It is hard to see how this mechanism of, in effect, manufacturing brain-degeneration, if consciously operated, does not amount to some approximate definition of a category of evil, but Dr Nehls takes this point no deeper.

Instead, he moves to seeking a new definition of stupidity, citing the German theologian and Resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis in April 1945, just before the end of WWII, for his alleged part in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In a letter written to several friends/accomplices in January 1943, to mark the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power, Bonhoeffer considered the difficulty of stupidity, which he described as ‘a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice’:

I confess I went down this road a couple of years ago in a diary reflection on the level of apparent stupidity then confronting us in our streets and cultures, in which I cited Bonhoeffer at some length.

I proposed then — June 2022 — that we needed to become smarter about stupidity, since it seemed even at that time to be so ubiquitous at every level of our societies and civilisation that it threatened our freedoms and futures more than any other single factor. ‘For 27 months,’ I wrote, ‘we have had to deal with Olympic-standard stupidity at the political level, at the level of public conversation, and within our most intimate realms.’

Stupidity is not the same as ignorance, however. In fact, it can accompany great learning and mastery of vast amounts of information. In many situations, what happens is that, when emotional or psychological factors take over — often under the sway of external manipulation — a person we are accustomed to experiencing as intelligent suddenly becomes dense and sheeplike.

I cited Bonhoeffer:

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 than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

Is this not a precise statement of the conditions I described at the top of this article? What Bonhoeffer described, I noted in that 2022 entry, is ‘all but precisely what we have been observing over the past couple of years: stupidity as a form of obedience, a wilful denseness that facilitates the avoidance of responsibility, and that manifests largely as a mob phenomenon. Intelligence, we have noted, is no guarantee of exemption.’

Slightly less than two years before that, I wrote in an article titled ‘The New Kind of Stupid’, that we appeared to be confronted by some new phenomenon that was neither stupidity nor unintelligence, but perhaps to some extent a new strain or variant ‘which is particular to de Covid’:

What we are dealing with here is a new and infinitely more dangerous kind of stupid than anything we have witnessed hitherto. We are literally being imprisoned by the stupidity of others, who refuse to see that they are being lied to from morning till night, who snort in derision at those who seek to alert them, to urge that they turn off their TVs and read one of the thousands of articles that expose the official lies or/and explain why these lies are being purveyed. This stupidity, previously harmless enough, is the shackles that restrain our once free bodies, minds and souls, rendering us and our children and our children’s children amenable to an unimaginable future of serfdom and coercion.

Once upon a time, stupidity was the preserve of the uneducated. In that sense, it came before schooling — it existed where the balm of instruction had not managed to extend. But the new kind of stupid is post-education: It affects those who have their arse pockets stuffed with papers proving their credentials and qualifications. Its symptoms are many but the principal among them is the confusion/conflation of intelligence with powers-of-retention, causing honest people to fall into a misplaced demeanour of servility before it. In reality, this pseudo-intelligence majors in obedience to power and susceptibility to propaganda and public relations. It genuflects before science and delights in learning off jargon with which to bamboozle the commonsensical.

Bonhoeffer also, as Dr Nehls underlines, argued that ‘every strong increase of power, whether religious or political, infects a large part of humanity with stupidity. It is almost as if there were a sociological-psychological law according to which the power of one requires the stupidity of another.’ Man, confronted by power, tends more or less to surrender his intellect and independence of thought. But, herein, Dr Nehls insists, lies an opportunity, the process having been recognised and understood, to put it into reverse. We need to rid ourselves of the ‘false image of the mental superiority of the powerful, as well as our own supposed lack of intellect, power and influence. Furthermore we must correct our assumption that human beings are basically evil. This narrative is the real fundamental problem that has brought us to this precarious situation, the infamous beginning of all evil.’

Dr Nehls argues that the hypothesis diagnosing man as intrinsically evil is a misunderstanding rooted in religion and prolonged by media reportage of primarily the negative aspects of human behaviour. He points out that, in the story of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were punished for a ‘crucial flaw’ that was actually nothing of the kind: curiosity, ‘which is part of his hippocampal nature.’ The centrality of this story to the biblical version of reality, he argues, has contributed to elevating the notion of man’s essential evilness to some kind of absolute truth — constant reiteration has done the rest. This syndrome, he says, is subject to a vicious circle whereby its triggering of suspicion and hostility provokes a self-fulfilling but fallacious validation. This, in turn, has enabled the world’s rulers — seen and unseen — to implicitly claim a ‘God-given’ right to supervise and control their fellow humans. This explains too the oft-observed acquiescence of the majority to the imposition of such controls and restrictions — as a means of keeping their fellows in check, even though no one individual is convinced of possessing a bad character, or even that our friends or relatives are evil either. Overwhelmingly, he says, human beings are kind. constantly manufacturing oxytocin, the ‘love hormone’ and being nice to one another. But, instead of acting on our own experience of reality, we infer the general character of humanity from the characters of its rulers, and the media works 24/7 to prevent us from rumbling this self-deceit.

We might start a revolution, he says, by pursuing the logic of these facts and circumstances. Again citing Bregman, he suggest that the idea of our doing so is one that might make our rulers nervous: ‘It’s an idea that is legitimised by virtually every branch of science. One that’s corroborated by evolution and confirmed by everyday life. An idea so intrinsic to human nature that it goes unnoticed and gets overlooked.’

We need urgently to rid ourselves of the sociopaths who have slipped into the roles of rulers. Why should self-appointed, so-called elites make the most crucial decisions about the future of humanity just because they are rich? It is absurd on its face. In reality, what we call ‘elites’ are people so drunk on their will-to-power, their hubris and their vanity that it does not seem to occur to them that they might not be as smart as they believe.

An interesting but perhaps incomplete diversion Nehls makes from this argument is into the realm of empathy, which he correctly identifies as an ambiguous and therefore sometimes dangerous response. In the Covid episode, the drivers of the lie led the people into their trap by weaponising an atavistic sense of fellow-feeling — kindness, if you like — which caused people to obey objectively ludicrous ‘measures’ because they were told these would ‘save lives’, and later to accept an untested - and, as it turned out — potentially lethal injection because of the alleged need to protect ‘the wider community’. The core of his argument here is that a suggested imperative to protect those close to us can cause us to lose sight of the bigger picture, and thereby cause greater damage in the long term and at a geographical distance. There is such a thing, he says, as ‘an excess of empathy’. He cites Paul Bloom and his book, Against Empathy, in which he argues against empathy in favour of ‘rational compassion’, because empathy makes one ‘less sensitive to the suffering of greater and greater numbers of people.’

He also quotes Bloom, from a magazine interview: ‘Empathy’s design failings have to do with the fact that it acts like a spotlight. It zooms you in. But spotlights only illuminate where you point them at, and for that reason empathy is biased.’

I am less than certain of the drift of this argument, especially where Dr Nehls seeks to align the negative aspects of empathy with the tribal urge to band with like-minded peoples and oppose this who are not like-minded — which he calls ‘love of the close by’ at the expense of the far-away. There are what might be termed evolutionary reasons for why we experience a greater sense of loyalty to those who are near, as compared to those who are distant, but more and more the media deliver the distant and its troubles and dump the lot on our living room carpets, creating irresolvable guilt and unjustifiable shame. In other words, this is a much bigger cultural argument, it being now a statable case that constructed historical guilt may be making many of the formerly nationalists peoples of the modern world hostile to their own pasts and cultures. But there is something in the ‘downside of empathy’ viewpoint nonetheless: perhaps in the sense that we tend more easily to feel on a selective basis a pseudo-empathy that can quite easily be induced by propaganda. In a sense, this syndrome mirrors the misunderstanding that arose in the lockdown period to the effect that the ‘precautionary principle’ involved doing the maximum to avoid and ameliorate the danger being postulated by ‘experts’, whereas that actual principle requires two sets of calculations: a measurement of the likely consequences arising from the immediate danger (of virus, war, et cetera) and the deleterious effects of the measure proposed as a panacea. It is necessary to be kind to others, but also to consider the possible negative consequences for still others who may not for the moment feature in the call-to-compassion.

Another difficulty Dr Nehls identifies is a tendency to sympathise on a moralistic basis that may be subjective. He argues against what he calls ‘supernatural’ apprehensions of the concept of evil, which he believe to be poor bedfellows of scientific exploration.

The concept of ‘rational compassion’, proposed by Paul Bloom, is an interesting place to begin identifying more precisely where to pinpoint the problems contributing to the misfiring of empathic responses (as in the Covid episode) but it helps only if we can sort out the philosophical tangle that bedevils these territories. A key problem is that our cultures tend to categorise all virtues as potential or unattainable absolutes, whereas as the Greeks understood, each virtue needs properly to be seen as the mean on a spectrum stretching between two detrimental extremes — generosity, for example, which sits halfway between miserliness and reckless performative munificence, both of which are dangerous, and perhaps equally so. What Dr Nehls is calling for is really no more than the application of reason to matters of public or private consequence, which, as he says, requires ‘a fully functioning hippocampus’, bringing us back to the core point of his quite excellent book.

But what, then, might we say is this ‘new’ ‘stupidity’? It is, for certain, a proclivity towards obedience, a surrendering of everything — body, mind, soul — to another who is deemed worthy and powerful enough to fill the place where God once stood tall over the world. It is, in a sense, master and sub. It is also, in a distant sense (!), the summoning up of an earthly figure to replace the One who has been terminated — powerful (somewhat), charismatic (a little anyway, but the power helps), intelligent (well . . . !) — who enters into the place once filled and animated by faith. We may greet this realisation with a moralism to the effect that it is the salutary arrival of just desserts for faithlessness; or we may deliberate along the lines that it is an interim stopping-off point on the road to total evolution; or we may begin to ponder whether there is not something fundamental about the human structure that requires this space to be filled by something, let it be faith or abasement, summoned up hope concerning what we cannot know or a dwindling light of certitude concerning what we know only too well: that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the dimming of the light will make it easier. And it is better than irrationality. And everyone will be in the same boat, and not an ark or any of that nonsense.

The new kind of stupid is a willed blindness to truth and fact, born of a desire to maintain faith in power and to vindicate decisions arrived at earlier on the same basis, even when these have been unspeakably disastrous.

But, to conclude, let’s have another snatch of Bonhoeffer, in which he floats the possibility that his redefined concept of ‘stupidity’ might, in cultural terms at least, be addressed by perhaps tuning down the voice of the mob in our midst:

If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. 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. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. 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. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

—  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works/English, vol. 8), Fortress Press, 2010.

Source: John Waters Unchained