“Is Stupid Worse than Evil?”

“Is Stupid Worse than Evil?”   March 1, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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In a never-ending quest to improve my social life, I was having dinner with a woman who wanted to discuss the chapter of my book, Progressive Faith and Practice, about evidence-based faith. She was increasingly frustrated with my refusal to simply believe in things for which there is no objective evidence. Throwing her hands in the air, she exclaimed, “what you think you know as fact is often proven wrong with the next discovery.” Which was something I was inclined to concede. But she went on to tell me about an archaeologist in Bosnia who had discovered and unearthed these huge pyramids that were covered in bronze. She said that he and proven that they were older than the pyramids in Egypt.

I was skeptical, a discovery of that magnitude would certainly have been broadly covered in the news and surely would have come to my attention. Exasperated, she pulls out her phone to “Google” it and we read together about the Bosnian businessman who claims that these hills are actually ancient, man-made, pyramids. He is not an archaeologist or a scientist of any sort, he is just a guy trying to turn these hills into a tourist site to attract gullible people.

So, we learned two things at dinner that night: the first is that there are no ancient pyramids in Bosnia and the second is that consistently being right does not make me more attractive to women. 

A newspaper column about a particularly stupid bank robber came to the attention of a Cornell University psychologist, David Dunning, and he launched a research project to try to understand why people with little or no information or comprehension are so confident that they are actually experts. 

Now, granted, this bank robber was an extreme case…. He had learned that if you write in lemon juice that the writing will be invisible unless exposed to heat, like being held over a candle. He then concluded that if he put lemon juice on his face, that the bank cameras would not be able to see his face unless he got too close to a heat source. He was actually shocked when he was arrested the day of the robbery. 

But what Dunning and Kruger discovered in their research is that there is an inverse relationship between how much a person knows and how confident they are in a specific field of inquiry. 

Literally the less a person knows, the more self-assured they are that their beliefs are true. Which explains almost everyone who tries to talk to you about something they saw on Fox News. 

I have tended to think that people are not simply gullible about these things but that they find it to be somehow exciting to believe what should be obviously false. You might reasonably conclude that a politician might be power hungry and suffer from entitlement issues but to think that they run a child sex ring out of the back of a Washington pizza parlor requires a nearly complete suspension of rational thought.

But, as Dunning pointed out in his study: “If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent,” (Dunning wrote in Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself. ) He continued:  “The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”

I always return to this observation of one of our nation’s original philosophers, Thomas Paine, who said: To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. 

This is why there is a fairly persuasive bit of political advice floating around these days that suggests that it is a waste of time trying to get a Trump voter to change their vote in the 2020 election because, if they were capable of using critical thinking skills, they wouldn’t have voted for him in 2016. It is much more effective to try to persuade one of the majority of American voters who just didn’t vote in the past to vote this year. The largest block of potential voters didn’t vote.

A Pew study conducted right after the 2016 election showed that what really elected Donald Trump was the inexplicably large number of people who just stayed home. This block of voters skews heavily towards younger voters and minorities who have the feeling that our political system offers them no real hope. It is overcoming that sense of cynicism, of being already defeated, that is our greatest obstacle. But it is hard to convince people who will not listen.

I am a big fan of the New Yorker comedian, Andy Borowitz, who writes satirical news items.  But sometimes you just have to admit that it is funny because it is true. He published this nugget a few years ago but it keeps showing up on the inter-net because, in fact, the earth is endangered by a new strain of fact-resistant humans. 

I am always reticent to draw too many comparisons between the rise of Nazism in Germany and the rise of Trumpism in our age. Hitler was motivated by both murderous racism and a psychopathic lust for power. Trump is motivated by racism rooted in a pathetic inferiority complex and contemptable greed and ignorance. But in terms of the political dynamics, I do find similarities that are worth talking about.

When the pastor and professor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, finally decided that he had to set aside his pacifist views and become involved in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler, you know, like pastors do sometimes, the plot was discovered, and he was imprisoned. While he awaited execution, he was allowed to write letters and I took one of them as our wisdom lesson today. You can feel his pain and anguish as he dismisses his usual polite way of writing in favor of just spelling out how stupid people end up doing more damage in those dark days than do the genuinely evil people involved in the Nazi movement. He was so angry that his people, his countrymen and fellow church members just were not waking up to the nightmare that was going on all around them. 

He says: reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – 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.

We call all recognize this phenomenon, can’t we? Though, it isn’t simply that people are misinformed by Fox News or even Russian bots planting conspiracy theories on social media sites, because there is something of the “chicken or the egg” paradox here. Sure, in part, Fox feeds propaganda to the simple and they believe it and they repeat it, but there is also the fact that the simple choose to turn to Fox News because they already believe paranoid and ignorant things and they are simply seeking confirmation of bias. 

But when you use a word like “evil” then you are dragging this political debate into the arena of religion, of spiritual discernment, and ethical deliberation.

Because, as difficult as it is to accept, there are people who are stupid because they simply lack mental faculty, but, and here is the really painful thing, there are people who are stupid because they have chosen stupidity as a preference. 

In fact, the famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, who rather looked a lot like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, literally turned the equation around. Peck defined “evil” as being a kind of militant ignorance . . . a decision to deny facts, ignore information, refuse to accept evidence even when convincingly presented. People don’t want to change the way the live or the way that they make money and so they will simply deny climate science. They will commit, what I will be talking about in a few weeks, a kind of application bias . . . that is, you can tell a woman that buying a gun to protect herself actually increases her chances of being killed with a gun by 17x . . . that is just math, but they will insist, “that doesn’t apply to me.” It is a fact. It is math, but they will refuse to apply that fact to their own circumstances. . .  because they don’t want it to be true . . . for them, it is not true. 

Meteorologist and climate activist, Paul Douglas, has been trying to educate people about how the changes in the climate are directly related to our use of fossil fuels and the transportation choices we make but at every turn, you run into people in the coal and oil industry who want to label you as being a liberal, and dismiss your science as mere conspiracy theories. But, as Douglas says, “Being open to facts doesn’t make you a liberal, it makes you literate.” But we are now in possession of a post-fact society, a fact resistant population that swears that something is not true because they don’t want it to be true.

I have wondered in recent months how we just go on as a society with this child detention policy at our southern border, not just continuing but growing? More than 70,000 kids, from infants to teens, were traumatized, some for months at a time last year, being held in cages in unsanitary and unsafe circumstances and we just go on with our lives like this is somehow acceptable.

Forgive me for showing these horrifying images, but many of us here can remember when, in 1963, a Buddhist monk set himself on fire in Vietnam to draw attention to the immorality of the War in Vietnam. The war continued for another ten years but this self-sacrifice did, in my opinion, make a huge difference in how many people both in America and Vietnam viewed the war. 

In 2010, a college educated man in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, was trying to feed his family by selling vegetables in the street but finally set himself on fire to call attention to the corruption of their government and the oppression of the poor. His sacrifice is widely credited with having started the Arab Spring and bringing about much needed reform in Tunisia. 

 

Please forgive me for planting this image in your minds but I have wondered these past months that if I drove down Texas or Florida and set myself on fire in front 

of a detention center if it would even make a difference in our jaded and morally indifferent nation? I would sacrifice my life to reunite these children with their families, I strongly suspect that many of you would as well . . . I know that are people all over this country whose conscience has been pricked by this wretched policy, but this is not Vietnam of the 1960’s or even Tunisia of a decade ago. What could awaken the conscience of Americans in this age of Trump? Frankly, I don’t think that a high profile martyrdom would do it.

I return again and again to the insight of the French philosopher, Voltaire, who said that “Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities".

We are traumatizing, torturing, dehumanizing, tens of thousands of children every day as a part of our government policy and somehow, we are all just going along with it. 

This much I know, we have one chance to usher in a peaceful revolution and that chance will come to us this fall at the ballot box. As Bonhoeffer said that he would 

“Never again . . . try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous,” so we will not save the soul of our once great nation by arguing with Trump supporters. We must simply outnumber them. 

There can be no excuse for not voting this year. There is no excuse for leaving social change up to martyrs and revolutionaries when it lies within your hands to simply overcome your cynicism, your depression and disappointment and go to the polls and vote for a restoration of sanity. I would be willing to die to restore those children to their families, but my death would not phase the Trump administration. The only thing that will change this is for you, all of you, every single one of you, to vote.