There is a video about this topic at youtube that spurred my reflections here.
The stupidity Bonhoffer studied was the stupidity of the Nazis in 1930s Germany. It was a public and contagious stupidity. For Bonhoffer, this kind of stupidity is more dangerous than malice. More importantly, it is more of a moral failing, than an intellectual one. It may be primarily a failure of the system around him or her, but somehow the individual has given up autonomy and self-direction for the sake of something else.
I just want to mention that the rise of monotheism is an incidence of the stupidity under discussion in Bonhoffer. Every monotheism starts in violence against all other religions. The destruction of paganism in ancient Rome, a crime against humanity that took three centuries to complete, speaks for itself. The crusades, especially the children's crusade, reveal that same stupidity. The inquisition does as well. And what are we to say about the murder of the natives of the Americas, and the commercial enslavement of Africans? Christian stupidity surely played its role there. The pogroms, the witch burnings and the American lynch mobs all belong under the heading of Christian stupidity.
Bonhoffer's Law: authoritarian power grows as stupidity does.
Hard to forget that.
Meanwhile, however, monotheism is just authoritarianism in religious garb. It insists that everyone is subject to it, it judges everyone, it respects no opponents, it looks down on all arts and sciences, on all other pursuits and interests. It believes in its right to dictate to all. Nothing is more important, nothing is more self-righteous than monotheism. Anything that will not bend a knee to monotheism is reviled, debased, shunned or killed. Replace the one god with the one party and you have pure authoritarianism in political rather than religious garb.
In Trump's Big Lie we saw something rare, the birth of a religion. Moreover, the birth of a monotheism. It was and is an attack on all other modes of thought, and a self-exaltation above all science and art. And of course, it is based on a lie. All religions are based on lies. No religion could ever arise around a true statement because you could just know it was true. You don't need to believe it, so you don't need a religion to make you believe it.
