00:00:00.140Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Maple Syrup and Mayhem with me, Posty. Today, we're
00:00:07.120going to discuss something that I've been thinking about a lot. And I've been listening
00:00:11.860to a lot of philosophers lately, and I would like to call it the zombie state, the rise
00:00:18.720of conformity. Have you ever watched an intelligent person suddenly stop thinking for themselves?
00:00:25.720not because they lack the ability, but because the group, the movement, the cult, or the narrative
00:00:32.840made independent thought feel unnecessary or even dangerous. We all know how that went during
00:00:40.100COVID. Today, we're going to look at three philosophers, thinkers, who diagnosed the
00:00:46.800problem from different angles. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he wrote extensively on the rise of mass
00:00:53.960stupidity. Nietzsche on the relationship between truth and the herd. Harry Frankfurt on the0.99
00:01:01.460peculiar modern phenomena of bullshit. These ideas written decades or even a century apart0.67
00:01:11.620in some cases, form a powerful diagnosis of why societies slide into conformity, and how that
00:01:19.640Disconformity corrodes our relationship with the truth itself.
00:01:28.140So let's begin with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
00:01:32.000Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian.
00:01:36.460He was executed in 1945 by the Nazis for his involvement in the resistance.
00:01:42.500I could not find any information on whether or not he was Jewish, but I don't think so.
00:01:46.140While in prison, he wrote a series of reflections that later appeared in Letters and Papers from Prison.0.98
00:01:53.260One of the most striking is his short essay in that book on stupidity.1.00
00:01:59.820Bonhoeffer makes the startling claim that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice is.1.00
00:02:11.040Why? Because you can actually fight evil.1.00
00:02:14.440You can protest it. You can expose it. You can even use force against it. Evil, he says, always carries within itself a seed of unease. People can sense it at some level that something is wrong. But against stupidity, you are pretty much defenseless. Reason doesn't work. And I'm sure everybody's heard that quote, you know.
00:02:37.720Never argue with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you through experience.1.00
00:02:42.980Reason doesn't work. Facts that contradict the personals pre-judgments are simply not believed.
00:02:49.600When the facts become undeniable, they are dismissed as irrelevant exceptions. The stupid1.00
00:02:55.820person is not only self-satisfied, he becomes easily irritated and aggressive when challenged.1.00
00:03:02.760I would argue that this is very similar to the chimp-out that we see amongst a certain demographic of people.1.00
00:03:10.260Crucially, Bonhoeffer insists that this stupidity is not primarily an intellectual defect.1.00
00:03:16.900There are highly intelligent people who are stupid in this sense, and relatively simple people who are not.0.99
00:03:22.620And this can go back to being book smart, street smart, those kinds of different intelligences that people will label other people with.0.99
00:03:32.760that's the same thing. Like you may know a lot about, you may know a lot that you've learned
00:03:37.980from books and theory, but you may not actually have common sense is another way you could put
00:03:43.380it. It is a human and more importantly, a sociological problem. He writes that every
00:03:52.100strong upsurge of power, whether it be political or religious, infects a large part of humankind1.00
00:03:58.940with stupidity. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. Don't let these tattoos1.00
00:04:05.700fool you. I'm a scholar. I read every day. Under the overwhelming impact of rising power,
00:04:13.380people surrender their inner independence. They stop forming an autonomous judgment about the
00:04:19.880new reality. In conversation with such a person, Bonhoeffer says, you feel you are not dealing
00:04:28.920with a person at all, but with slogans and catch words that have taken possession of him. He has
00:04:35.520become a mindless tool, capable of any evil, and at the same time incapable of recognizing it as
00:04:41.740evil. This again could be, you know, this example could be shown during the COVID era where people
00:04:47.920were snitching on their neighbors, snitching on their families, where they, you know, basically
00:04:52.620wouldn't talk to their families and stuff like that because they thought you were evil,
00:04:59.100but they couldn't actually recognize the real evil behind it. This is not born stupidity. It1.00
00:05:05.300is induced. People allow themselves to become stupid or circumstances make them so. And the1.00
00:05:11.560more they need belonging, certainty, and identity, the more vulnerable they become.
00:05:17.440only liberation not instruction can overcome it and often external liberation must come first
00:05:26.980before internal freedom is possible again so we need to liberate us from the you know tyranny
00:05:35.060that's uh anarcho-tyranny that is the ruling power right now before we can actually become
00:05:42.120internally liberated, according to Bonhoeffer. Now let's turn to Nietzsche. Decades earlier,
00:05:52.820Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed a deeper cultural condition that makes this kind of mass surrender
00:05:58.500or mass psychosis, as they call it now, possible. In his essay, On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral
00:06:06.780sense? Nietzsche asks a radical question. Where does the drive for truth even come from?
00:06:14.980His answer is unsettling. In the beginning, the intellect is used mainly for deception,
00:06:21.180because survival amongst competing individuals requires cunning. But humans also need to live
00:06:27.780socially in the herd. So a peace treaty is made. We invent fixed designations for things. Language
00:06:34.860creates the first laws of truth. What we call truth, Nietzsche says, is a movable host of
00:06:41.200metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms, which after long usage seem to a people to be fixed,
00:06:50.720canonical and binding. Truths are illusions, we have forgotten our illusions, worn out coins that
00:06:57.460no longer function as coins, but are treated as pure metal. To be truthful in the social sense,
00:07:04.320often means simply to lie in the conventional herd approved way. This is mass psychosis,
00:07:10.960right? Believing what the in or what the group is saying, believing what the overarching,
00:07:16.180you know, facts are, I guess you could say, and refusing to think for yourself.
00:07:25.500This leads directly into Nietzsche's lifelong critique of herd morality. In Beyond Good and
00:07:32.720evil and on the genealogy of morality, Nietzsche argues that modern European morality is essentially
00:07:39.640the morality of the herd animal. The herd values what makes life safe, predictable, and equal.
00:07:46.920Sympathy, mediocrity, conformity, and avoidance of anything rare or dangerous.
00:07:52.960The independent spirit, the one who stands alone, the one who questions the sacred values of the
00:07:59.600group. These become evil in the eyes of the herd. High and independent spirituality is experienced
00:08:07.540as a threat. Nietzsche saw that the will to truth itself can become corrupted. When the herd
00:08:15.520monopolizes the word truth for its own perspective, the genuinely truthful person is branded with the
00:08:22.480worst names. For Nietzsche, the real philosophical task is not to conform to the prevailing truths,
00:08:29.240but to have the courage to create new values, to become what he called the free spirit, or later
00:08:35.880the overman. This requires hardness against oneself and a willingness to stand outside the comfort of
00:08:43.140the group. Conformity, in Nietzsche's view, is not just social pressure, it is a metaphysical and
00:08:50.400moral surrender, the preference for the average over the exceptional, the safe over the true.
00:08:58.180Now, this brings us to the third thinker in our list here, Harry Frankfurt. In 1986,
00:09:04.700the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a short essay called On Bullshit.
00:09:09.280It was later expanded into a small book that actually became surprisingly popular.
00:09:15.020Frankfurt makes a precise and important distinction.
00:09:19.000The liar knows the truth and deliberately tries to hide it or misrepresent it.
00:09:25.160The liar is still oriented towards the truth.
00:09:28.600He respects it enough to try to conceal it.0.90
00:09:31.900The bullshitter, by contrast, is indifferent to whether what he says is true or false.
00:09:38.920His goal is not to report reality or to conceal it.
00:09:42.900His goal is to produce a certain impression, to advance an agenda, to appear a certain way.0.98
00:09:50.160Frankfurt writes, the essence of bullshit is not that it is false, but that it is phony.0.93
00:09:55.560What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made.0.99
00:10:02.480Because the bullshitter does not care about the truth value of his statements,0.97
00:10:07.960bullshit is, in Frankfurt's judgment, a greater enemy of the truth than lying.1.00
00:10:12.900The liar still plays the game of truth and falsehood.1.00
00:10:16.620The bullshitter abandons the game altogether.1.00
00:10:22.280It's just such bullcrap, you guys.1.00