Long-time readers of FWIW know that we’ve always given former Greenwich Democratic Town Committee member “Dollar Bill” free rein to emote on these pages because he so perfectly encapsulates the useful idiots used by their betters. He has never – not once – in his many years of posting diatribes, answered a challenge to his wild denunciations of all things right of center, or any of his completely-disprovable assertions. For a while, I gave him more credit than he was due, ascribing his tactics to a disciplined adherence to Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”, but I gradually realized he wasn’t that smart: he’s just another tool.
His reappearance today neatly coincides with this essay by Richard Fernandez, which, while denouncing Obama’s use of another tool, Ben Hughes, to deceive and fool the American public, also includes some observations on stupidity and evil by a man I’d never heard of:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi activist, while in prison waiting to be executed, reflected that “stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice” because evil left behind in its conscious perpetrators “a sense of unease.”
Against true imbecility even reasoning was useless since you couldn’t even appeal to your enemy’s self interest because they were too dumb to see it. “Against stupidity we are defenseless,” he wrote, because imbeciles never feel a qualm. Against the stupid “neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything … reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict … simply do not need to be believed … 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.”
Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. … 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.
…
In conversation with [the stupid man] one virtually feels that one is not dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. … Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also become 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.
The essay – read the whole thing – includes this dispiriting summary of what’s going on today:
“To him the German people had become an audience watching a madman on stage. Ben Franklin had the idea before Bonhoeffer, when he observed that a functioning republic required thinking voters but tyranny needs only groupies. Society is stupid in the same way, stuck on celebrity, stuck on being groupies for Hillary, Bernie, Donald, Obama and Kim Kardashian.”
Ugh.
