Author: Robert Břešťan, HlídacíPes.org
COMMENTARY. Politicians strive to win voters over with the heart, with emotion, yet in most cases it ultimately boils down to the state of one’s purse—full or empty. Which is, after all, a profoundly emotional matter.
But politics is about far more than money. It concerns the economic future, to be sure, but also the security, social, international and interpersonal dimensions. History teaches us how readily a person who was free only yesterday can become an instrument of evil in the hands of others.
Stupidity consists in the voluntary submission to external influences, in blind obedience and the rejection of critical thought—conditions that enable the spread of evil and ideologies. To be sure, people face hardships; some live on the brink of poverty, others in debt enforcement.
Often we fail to see it, or choose not to. As the Czech sociologist Daniel Prokop puts it: “Those who insist that we are actually doing well here often fail to acknowledge that living standards vary greatly and refuse to admit that problems exist.”
Let us concede, then, that in Europe as a whole we are doing well, but in the particulars problems abound. And yes, these are sometimes underestimated, overlooked or oversimplified.Take the claim that “these people” care less about everyone doing better than about ensuring that if they are suffering, others should suffer too. Yet…
Frustrated, frightened, angry, disillusioned people—educated and wealthy ones among them, those yearning for regime change of any kind—become easy prey for extremists and populists. It is so today; it was so in the past.
And the past is worth studying. For what was possible then is equally possible now. An atmosphere of resentment can swiftly turn into one of hatred, with the surest glue being the following of a leader and the identification of a common enemy.
The author of these lines recently encountered ideas formulated in 1943 from a Gestapo prison by the German pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He wrote that stupidity is more dangerous than evil.
He did not regard stupidity as a lack of intellect but as a moral failing. He stressed that it lies in voluntary submission to external influences, blind obedience and the rejection of critical thought—conditions that enable the spread of evil and ideologies.
“Against stupidity we are defenceless. Protests avail nothing. Explanations are useless. Facts that contradict prejudices are not accepted—and if they are, they are twisted,” Bonhoeffer wrote.
Though he was executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945, his words—alas—remain strikingly pertinent.
Stupidity flourishes where thought is replaced by loyalty and doubt branded treason, where the simple solution is always the right one and anything complex is suspect, where others are either enemies or fools. This is the basic infrastructure of evil. And there are those among us who openly admit that they would gladly open the door to an enemy seeking to “overthrow this regime” and actively assist him.
Primo Levi, the writer and Auschwitz survivor, analysed human obedience in his reflections on the Holocaust and warned of the peril posed by ordinary people who blindly follow authority without critical thought: “Monsters exist among us, but still more dangerous are the ordinary people, the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.”
These are not outdated notions tied to their era. Prominent Czech psychiatrists speak of the evil within us and how easily it can be roused—especially when some politicians deliberately provoke it.
Professor Jiří Horáček, the new director of the National Institute of Mental Health, recently observed of societal anxiety and uncertainty that “the last thing left when other certainties collapse is nationalism.”
The psychiatrist Petr Pöthe, for his part, says that even among us live people “who, under circumstances I can imagine, would kill or rape your daughter, march you off to a concentration camp, torture your mother before your eyes or help those who do.”
It is worth recalling the German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt: “The mob always cries out for a strong man, a great leader. For the mob hates the society from which it is excluded, just as it hates the parliament in which it is not represented. Hence referendums—in which modern mob leaders have achieved such outstanding results—are an old device of politicians who rely on the mob.”
We live in peculiar times. Times of plenty, freedom, relative security… and of latent threats simmering not far beneath the surface. The dam can break from without or from within.
This may make for sombre reading, but it bears repeating. And above all—when necessary, stand against evil.
