15.09.2026 Diary XV The banality of evil and stupidity

15.09.2026 Diary Page XV

Not thinking is also a choice. And the most dangerous is the one who is sure of themselves.

Today I have a question in my head: why do people think themselves so clever?

I am not asking in anger. Or let me put it this way, I am asking a little in anger but what I really wonder about is under the anger.

A few days ago I wrote about not knowing worth. Some things I saw this week took me to the back room of that entry. Next to not knowing worth there was something else: not knowing that you do not know. And the ease it gives, that unshakeable confidence.

Those who are sure of themselves

Some people never hesitate.

They listen to a subject for five minutes and deliver their judgment. They explain how a job is done without ever having done it. They know what a person thinks without ever listening to them. They do not ask questions, because they see nothing to ask.

At first I used to admire these people. How clear, how certain, how strong. And I was saying “I wonder” after every sentence. Did I misunderstand, did I think it through incompletely, is there another possibility?

Now I look differently. Hesitation is sometimes not weakness. It is thinking itself.

There is a well-known study in psychology. The one Dunning and Kruger published in 1999. It shows that people who are incompetent in an area can find it hard to see their own incompetence precisely because of that incompetence. To notice what you do not know you need a certain amount of knowledge. Without it, a person can think themselves much better than they are.

I also know how exaggerated this finding has become on the internet, it is used everywhere like a slogan. But the idea at its core feels very familiar to me.

The person who does not know that they do not know sleeps more easily than the person who thinks they know.

The banality of evil

From here my mind went somewhere else.

The book Hannah Arendt wrote after following the Eichmann trial. I had put it in the books section too, Eichmann Kudüs'te (Eichmann in Jerusalem). There Arendt describes a man who took part in terrible crimes and does not find the monster she expected. In front of her is an ordinary official who speaks in stock phrases and does not think.

This is what Arendt calls “the banality of evil.” That evil does not always come from a deep darkness, a great hatred or a satanic plan. That sometimes it comes only from not thinking. From never trying to see what you do from someone else's place.

This idea has been much debated over the years, I know. Whether Eichmann was really that ordinary has been questioned too. But the part that matters to me is this: not thinking is not an innocent void. Anything can fill it.

About two weeks ago I wrote about a simple form of evil. A childlike form. Why one person hurts another. Today's thought is like its big brother.

Is stupidity more dangerous than evil

Then there is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In a text he wrote at the end of 1942, in the middle of the war, he says that stupidity can be a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil.

When I first read this sentence I wanted to object. I had thought evil is evil, stupidity is at least without intent.

But the stupidity Bonhoeffer describes is not a lack of intelligence. Clever people can be stupid in this sense too. What he means is a person setting aside their own ability to think and handing it over to slogans, to the crowd, to power. When you talk to such a person you do not find a person in front of you, you find captured sentences. You cannot convince them with logic because logic is not on the table anyway.

Against someone ill-intentioned you can at least build some resistance. You can see the evil, you can name it. But against the self-assured shallowness of someone who has stopped thinking, you do not know what to do.

The banality of stupidity

I call this stupidity in its everyday form.

The small, daily cousin of big historical disasters. In a workplace, in a meeting, in a family, in a group of friends.

A decision made without thinking what it will do to others. The sentence “this is how I think” counted as the end of a discussion. Someone else's labour being looked down on only because it is not understood. A person being summed up with a label and passed over.

As someone with ADHD I have seen a very familiar face of this stupidity. “If they paid a bit more attention it would get better.” “Everyone's attention wanders, you're exaggerating.” “It's a fashionable diagnosis.” Most of the people who say these sentences are not ill-intentioned. They just have not thought. And they are not bothered at all by not having thought.

What tires me most is not evil. It is being so comfortable with not thinking.

Turning back to myself

While writing this entry I do not want to fall into a trap. Thinking myself clever while criticising those who think themselves clever.

Because this trap stands very close.

I have moments of not thinking too. Moments when I judge a person from half a sentence, when I am sure of what I know on a subject but have never really questioned it, when I take what the crowd says to be my own idea. Especially when I am angry. Anger shortens thinking.

So at the end of this entry I want to leave a few questions, not for others, for myself.

Do I really know this, or do I only think I know?

Did I think what this decision will do to someone else?

Did I listen to the person in front of me, or was I preparing my answer?

When did I last change my mind?

Defending hesitation

For years I was ashamed of my “I wonders.” Of being someone undecided, unsure, who overthinks everything.

Today I want to defend those “I wonders” a little.

I know questioning everything is sometimes tiring, sometimes paralysing. I live analysis paralysis too. But the more I see the shallowness of a mind that has stopped questioning altogether, the more compassionately I look at my own hesitation.

Maybe intelligence is not knowing. It is being able to notice what you do not know.

And the first resistance against evil is not great heroism. It is only stopping and thinking.