The Alibi

A companion to What It Costs to Think, and an argument against part of it.

Albert Speer was Hitler's architect, then his minister of armaments — the man who ran the war economy on the backs of millions of forced laborers. At Nuremberg he took a position no other senior defendant took: he accepted general responsibility for the regime while denying specific knowledge of the extermination. He had been an administrator. A technician. He hadn't known.

He got twenty years. Others hanged.

That is the fact the popular telling of this story reliably inverts. Speer was not punished for pleading ignorance. He was saved by it. The tribunal found the technocrat-who-didn't-know defense credible enough to keep him alive, he served his sentence and walked out of Spandau in 1966, and he spent the rest of his life as the respectable Nazi, the one who admitted enough to be forgiven.

The defense has not held up. Historians spent decades dismantling it, and in 2007 a letter of his surfaced in which he acknowledged being present at Posen in October 1943 when Himmler described the extermination of the Jews to assembled officials — the very event he had always insisted he left before.

So the case is not an example of willed ignorance being seen through. It is an example of willed ignorance working — and that changes what the posture is. Not knowing is not merely a failure. It is a strategy with a documented payoff, and it was rewarded at the most consequential trial of the twentieth century.

Hold that, because it is what makes the rest of this difficult.

What Bonhoeffer Actually Claimed

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his notes on stupidity around Christmas 1942, for a small circle of friends — before his arrest, not from the cell, though it is usually told the other way. He was hanged at Flossenbürg in April 1945, weeks before the camp was liberated.

His claim is stranger and harder than the version that circulates.

He is not saying that stupid people are dim. He is explicit that stupidity is not an intellectual defect at all. Highly intelligent people can be stupid in his sense, and people of limited intelligence often are not. It is a moral condition — or more precisely a sociological one. It is something that happens to people, from outside, under particular conditions.

The conditions are conditions of power. Bonhoeffer observed that any surge of power — political, religious, institutional — produces a corresponding stupefaction in a large portion of those under it. The relationship runs one direction: it is not that stupid populations enable strongmen, but that the ascendancy of a strongman manufactures the stupidity it requires. People under it surrender independent judgment not because they were persuaded but because the structure made independence pointless and conformity free.

And then the part that ought to stop anyone who writes about critical thinking: he says that against stupidity we are defenseless. Reasons do not land. Contradicting facts are disbelieved, and where they cannot be disbelieved, they are set aside as exceptions. The person is not reachable by argument, because argument was never what put them there.

His conclusion follows from the diagnosis. Since the condition is produced by external power rather than by internal deficiency, it lifts only when that power is broken. Not through instruction. Through liberation.

The Objection to My Own Essay

Last week I argued that the discipline of independent thought should be taught to everyone, early, and I listed what it would cost — that it isn't armor, that it's slow, that it costs standing. I still think that essay is right about what it says. Bonhoeffer's argument is an objection to what it assumes.

If stupidity is a knowledge deficit, curricula are the answer. If it is a condition manufactured by power, curricula are beside the point, and my proposal is a plan to inoculate people against a disease that does not enter through the route I named.

And there is a piece of evidence for his side that I cannot wave off. Germany in 1932 had, by most measures anyone could apply, the best-educated population on earth. The most rigorous universities. The strongest philosophical faculties in the world. Its professors, doctors, lawyers and pastors did not prove resistant — many of them supplied the machinery. Otto Ohlendorf held a doctorate in law and commanded an Einsatzgruppe that murdered ninety thousand people. Speer was, by any ordinary measure, a capable and cultivated man.

If twelve years of the best education available did not protect the most educated society in Europe, my confidence that a better-designed curriculum would have done it is not evidence. It is hope with a lesson plan attached.

Where He Overreaches

Now the other direction, because his claim has a defect of its own and it is the same defect I flagged in my own essay's ending.

"Defenseless" is unfalsifiable as stated. If no argument can reach the stupid person, then every failed argument confirms the theory and no successful one can count, since success would only prove the person was never in the condition. That is a closed loop. It may still be true, but it cannot be tested in the form he gives it, and a claim built so that nothing can disturb it should be held loosely — including this one.

And his own case refutes the strong version. The same power structure, applied to the same population, did not produce uniform capture. Bonhoeffer himself did not convert. Neither did the Confessing Church. In February 1943, in Berlin, the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men stood in the Rosenstraße for a week and their husbands were released — under the regime, at its height, in its capital. That October, Denmark moved almost its entire Jewish population to safety.

If the structure were sufficient, there would be no variance. There was variance. So power is a powerful cause, not a complete one, and something distinguished the people who held.

And his prescription hands the problem upward. Liberation, not instruction means: wait for the power to break, and hope someone else breaks it. That is precisely the posture I have argued against elsewhere — the routing of responsibility to a level where no individual has to do anything. It is a strange conclusion from a man who joined a plot to kill the head of state.

What I Think Actually Survives Both

Here is the position I can defend after taking his argument seriously.

Training does not make the discipline free, and it does not make anyone immune. What it does is change the price. Bonhoeffer is right that a sufficient structure will buy almost anyone — but structures pay different amounts for different people, and what raises your price is not intelligence.

Look at what the people who held actually had in common. Not education; the professors folded. It was membership somewhere else. Bonhoeffer had a church, a family, a professional network, and a body of commitments that predated the regime and answered to something other than it. The Rosenstraße wives had a bond the state had no purchase on. Denmark had a national self-understanding older than the occupation.

That is not a curriculum. It is a structural property of a life: how many separate places you belong to, and whether any of them can survive your losing standing in the others. A person with one identity, one source of income, one set of friends, and one information supply has a price the structure can easily meet — not because they are weak, but because conformity costs them nothing and dissent costs them everything they have. A person with several genuinely independent memberships is expensive.

So the practical version of my earlier essay's argument is smaller and more concrete than the one I made. Do not just teach the analytical moves. Build the conditions under which using them is survivable. Keep company with people who would still take your call after you changed your mind about the thing your group is defined by. Maintain at least one commitment that does not depend on your standing in the others.

That is not a defense against the world Bonhoeffer described. It is a way of raising your price in it, which is the only thing on offer.

The Exit I Am Not Going to Leave Open

There is a reason essays about stupidity perform well, and it is not that they improve anybody. It is that the category as normally presented has a convenient outside, and every reader places themselves in it. You have already thought of someone while reading this. So have I. That reflex is the entire mechanism by which the piece fails to do anything.

So, the version with no outside.

Speer was better educated than most people reading this. He was more capable, more disciplined, and more accomplished. Whatever quality you are relying on to make you the exception, he had more of it. And what he produced, at the end, was not a monster's defense but a reasonable man's: I was doing my job, the information was not in front of me, I did not ask. That is not an alien posture. It is the most ordinary posture there is.

If you want an actual test instead of a flattering one, it is this. Name a belief you hold that would cost you real standing to abandon — your position in a group, your reputation among people whose regard you need, your sense of who you are. You have one. Everyone does. That is the belief on which you are currently unavailable to evidence, and no amount of reasoning skill changes it, because reasoning skill is what you would deploy to defend it.

I have mine. I can name two and I suspect the dangerous ones are the two I cannot.

That is where Bonhoeffer leaves us, and I do not think he was wrong to leave us there. Where I part from him is only this: he says we are defenseless and must wait for liberation. I say we can at least know the shape of the thing, raise our own price, and keep the company of people who will tell us when we are converting.

It is not much. It is more than waiting.