Video of the day -- Bonhoeffer on "stupidity"

What he's talking about here is not so much stupidity in the literal sense of low intelligence, as a certain form of closed-mindedness -- the refusal to consider information that conflicts with whatever world-view one has adopted.  In its practical effects, this might as well be literal stupidity.  Certainly such mental rigidity is dangerously abundant in our own society today.  We see it in hard-line right-wingers' truculent dismissal of any challenge to their increasingly baroque alternate reality of conspiratardia and paranoia, and in hard-line left-wingers' strident and bullying denial of the harmfulness and unpopularity of woke-ism -- and, most recently, in their refusal to face its role in this month's election defeat.  Bonhoeffer is right that this is more of a moral failing than an intellectual one.  Some people can and do overcome it in themselves (here's one example), but freeing someone else who is truly committed to it seems nearly impossible.