How Did the West Become So Stupid?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theory is now a conspicuous reality

John Leake

Mar 3, 2024

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a Substack post about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 1943 essay “On Stupidity.” At this time last year, I was concerned that Bonhoeffer’s observations seemed to be ever more pertinent to our own era.

This morning, while reading that Russian intelligence intercepted a phone conversation between ranking German military officers about blowing up the Crimea Bridge, I realized that much of the West, including Bonhoeffer’s native Germany, is now officially stupid.

We live in an era in which patent nonsense is widely accepted by most of our political class and media, and (apparently) by at least half the adult population. And it’s not the garden variety stupidity of being distracted and not paying attention. What we are now seeing is a reversion to the intellectual and emotional life of a 7th grader—a perfect storm of emotional dysregulation, lack of perspective, truculence, and gullibility.

When did this happen and how did it happen? Increasingly it seems to me that the genesis of this contagion is that our debt financing of EVERYTHING has enabled us to become detached from reality without suffering corrective consequences.

Every time it seems that reality might intrude and send us back to concerning ourselves with real things instead of adolescent fantasies and obsessions, another CRISIS erupts that gives our central banks yet another excuse for another round of massive credit expansion.

Since 2020, credit expansion has been accompanied by inflation, which seems to have accelerated and intensified the problem.

Inflation destabilizes every aspect of life, including our perception of reality. As Paul Cantor noted in his essay “Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics.”

Everything threatens to become unreal once money ceases to be real. I said that a strong sense of counterfeit reality prevails in "Disorder and Early Sorrow." That fact is ultimately to be traced to the biggest counterfeiter of them all — the government and its printing presses. Hyperinflation occurs when a government starts printing all the money it wants, that is to say, when the government becomes a counterfeiter. Inflation is that moment when as a result of government action the distinction between real money and fake money begins to dissolve. That is why inflation has such a corrosive effect on society. Money is one of the primary measures of value in any society, perhaps the primary one, the principal repository of value. As such, money is a central source of stability, continuity, and coherence in any community. Hence to tamper with the basic money supply is to tamper with a community's sense of value. By making money worthless, inflation threatens to undermine and dissolve all sense of value in a society.

I thought of this essay when Bud Light’s advertising team had its “Weimar Moment” by casting a burlesque actor named Dylan Mulvaney as a “spokeswoman” for the Bud Light brand.

I believe this was the greatest act of stupidity ever committed in a business setting in history. Only people with money to burn would even contemplate such folly, much less go through with it.

Here in Texas, Anheuser-Busch products are distributed by Ben E. Keith. The CEO, Howard Hallam, is a prominent member of my community in Dallas. I was saddened to hear that backlash against the Mulvaney gag created distress throughout the company, which employs hundreds if not thousands of working men. How could the directors of Anheuser-Busch be so disconnected from their customer base and the wellbeing of their company and its distributors?

All of us do stupid things, especially in our younger years. With luck, our stupid acts do not result in our death or ruin, and over time we gain wisdom. At the moment, the West appears destined to share the fate of these guys.