One of my uncles shared a ten minute video that seems to sum up everything that is going on today. The narrator explains who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer and how he came to his theory of stupidity as being more than an intellectual issue. It is a social and moral issue, too.
I suppose this is what I meant when I used the term ‘stupid’ in my diary yesterday. I spent the evening trying to figure out what I was really trying to say whenever I posit that the Tangerine Terrorist is stupid and his followers are more stupid. When I woke up this morning, my uncle had kindly provided me with Bonhoeffer’s theory!
According to Bonhoeffer, there are 2 types of people in the world: Those who think and those who do not think. A bit of an over-simplification, but I’ll give it to him to explain his theory. It is from this separation that moral and social issues become more apparent.
As best as I can understand it, Bonhoeffer saw the rise of a short, stupid Austrian whose morals were questionable and his attitude toward society was warped by his own psyche. Bonhoeffer also saw others with similarly warped and perverted morals and views towards society gravitate toward the short, stupid Austrian as he was the one giving them permission to act out their worst impulses.
I know this is a simplification of Bonhoeffer’s theory, but cut me some slack. I am writing a diary, not a dissertation. I am showing you the forest, not individual trees, to get people thinking about bigger stuff and how to apply it to today’s problems.
If I remember correctly, Rachel Maddow touched on Bonhoeffer a bit during her podcast about fascism in the US. She warned us about this problem.
The problem is there is a segment of our population that does not want to think, they want to be told what to do. And, the people who think did not show up and show out in the last election because they did not see the segment of the population who do not think as a direct threat to our country: our lesson from the last election is to never underestimate the power of stupidity.
Now, we, the thinking portion of the population, must organize to act against a guy who won the last presidential election by the barest of pluralities. We must remind him every day how stupid he is, how unpopular he is and how weak he is. There are still more of us than there are of his followers.
We need to organize ourselves like a huge symphony and we need every one of us to pick up the instrument that best suits us. We need everyone to play the same song of resistance.
If we think of TT as a one-man carnival barker, spewing so many things at once that he is just one tone, one instrument, we can respond with our own, multitonal symphony to drown out his single note. His single note is hate and division. Our symphony is love and unity.
Do not obey in advance.
Illegitimi non carborundum.