If you want a single rule for modern life, here is an honest one: treat stupidity as a system failure, not a personality quirk.

The threat is not low IQ. The threat is people with perfectly good brains switching them off, outsourcing judgment to a crowd or a feed, and then acting with full confidence. That pattern scales, travels fast, and is hard to unwind once it hardens into “how we do things.”

We are not getting rid of stupidity. The more realistic plan is smaller and colder:

  • Map how it spreads through crowds and institutions
  • Turn down the amplification in our tools and platforms
  • Notice when we start running the same script ourselves

What stupidity is, in practice

For this conversation, stupidity is not “being dumb.” It is a recurring mode with a few clear markers:

  • You skip basic checks even when they would take seconds
  • You follow a script because it feels safe, not because it fits
  • You screen out any signal that would force you to adjust

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a cell in Nazi Germany, argued that stupidity was more dangerous than evil. Evil at least knows it is choosing. You can expose it, argue with it, block it. Stupidity shows up as cheerful certainty. It is just “the way things are,” backed by a chorus that has stopped asking questions.

Scale that up and you get:

  • Agencies that cling to procedures long after the world has changed
  • Crowds that enforce norms nobody has actually walked through in plain language
  • Leaders who surf this inertia instead of cutting across it

From inside, it feels like normal life. From outside, it looks like a factory still running at full speed after someone swapped the blueprints.

Fast, cheap, and stupid: platforms as accelerators

Fast forward to today: same stupidity, shinier tools.

Social media does not just tolerate stupidity. It tunes for it. Algorithms reward knee jerk reactions over slow thought, outrage over nuance, and slogans over ideas. AI assistants could act like lab partners and push back. Most are tuned to be polite affirmers instead, smoothing over rough edges and mirroring whatever they are fed.

The result is a public square where the loudest idiot wins the microphone time and everyone else starts self censoring to avoid becoming the next target.

The mechanics are boring and lethal:

  • Short posts and reaction buttons compress everything into yes, no, or “look at this clown”
  • Recommendation systems show you more of whatever kept you scrolling, not what you are missing
  • Corrections arrive late, in small print, and never go as viral as the original nonsense

Nobody at the console has to be a cartoon villain. Give a system the wrong metrics and ordinary people will happily optimize stupidity into the core.

Polarization as a stupidity engine

Polarization is where this becomes structural.

The main problem is not disagreement. Adults should disagree. The problem is how predictably they do it. You can often guess someone’s position on a completely unrelated topic once you know the label they wear on one issue. That is not thinking. That is a sorting algorithm.

Carlo Cipolla, in his small book on the “laws of human stupidity,” defined stupid behavior as harming others without gaining anything yourself. A lot of current politics fits that description neatly. People pour time and energy into:

  • Trying to humiliate the other side in ways that do not improve their own lives
  • Blocking policies that would help them because the wrong camp supports them
  • Destroying basic working relationships over abstract purity tests

The damage lands on shared infrastructure: courts, civil service, local trust, the ability to solve even simple problems together. The payoff is a brief emotional high and maybe a viral clip.

Bonhoeffer’s warning bites here. Once a group treats thinking for yourself as disloyalty, stupidity stops being an accident and becomes a membership requirement. It is easier to laugh at the other side than to tell your own crowd to stop chanting and start reading.

Performed stupidity: when cluelessness is a tactic

Manfred Kets de Vries uses “pseudo stupidity” for something sharper: pretending not to understand as a way to control the situation.

You see versions of it everywhere:

  • Politicians who suddenly “do not recall” basic facts whenever responsibility appears
  • Executives who act baffled by the side effects of incentives they personally signed off on
  • Influencers who flatten complex topics into junk food because nuance does not pay

This is not the same as the mass fog Bonhoeffer described, but it plugs into it. When leaders perform confusion or anti intellectualism, they give everyone behind them permission to stop paying attention. If the person in charge treats understanding as optional, why should anyone else bother.

Cipolla would point out that this looks shrewd in the short term and stupid in the long term. You can ride the wave for a while. But you also train your own base to ignore evidence, distrust expertise, and obey mood over structure. That is not a stable foundation for anything you might want to build.

You are probably not the exception

It is comforting to imagine stupidity as someone else’s problem. “Those people.” Other countries. Other timelines.

The awkward part is that most of us are running the same shortcuts. We:

  • Share links we did not read past the title
  • Repeat clever phrases that match our priors and never bother to unpack them
  • Zone out when reality cuts against a story we like

We typically notice the pattern only when it hits us directly. A policy we cheered turns out to be unworkable. An online pile on lands on someone we know. A leader “on our side” says something so off the rails that we have to choose between loyalty and basic sanity.

Cipolla’s first law is that everyone underestimates how many stupid people there are, including in their own circle. Bonhoeffer’s point is that refusing to join the chorus is the first line of resistance. Kets de Vries reminds us that some fog is theatrical, not accidental.

Put together, the landscape is ugly and simple: nobody gets a safe viewing platform. If you live inside modern systems, you are in the blast radius.

Stupidity as a design and hygiene problem

Treating stupidity as pure morality gives you self righteous speeches and no traction. Treating it as fate gives you shrugs. Treating it as a design and hygiene problem at least gives you levers.

At the individual level, the moves are unglamorous:

  • Pause one step before you share, donate, sign, or outrage share
  • Ask who benefits if this story stands unchallenged
  • Look for a single cheap fact that could prove it wrong
  • Keep at least one channel in your life that reliably disagrees with you in a careful way

At the systems level, the work is heavier and less optional:

  • Build tools that do not exclusively reward speed and anger
  • Give some people explicit authority to say “this is nonsense” without being treated as traitors
  • Design exit ramps: ways for institutions to back out of bad decisions without total collapse

None of this cures stupidity. It just keeps it from owning the control room every time something stressful happens.

Stupidity used to move at the speed of rumor around a village. Now it moves at the speed of infrastructure. The real question is not whether other people are idiots. The real question is what kind of channels we build and maintain, and whether those channels make it easier to think, or easier to coast along with the loudest fool in the feed.