In one of the most harrowing periods of modern history, a quiet German theologian stood up and tried to speak truth to his nation. His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he was executed by the Nazis just fifteen days before Germany surrendered. He wasn’t a soldier or a politician, but he may have understood the battlefield of the human soul better than anyone in his time–or ours.

Bonhoeffer’s greatest warning to the world wasn’t just about the rise of evil. It was about the rise of stupidity. And he didn’t mean ignorance or lack of intelligence. He meant something far more dangerous: the willful surrender of thought. He meant the kind of blindness that settles over a society when people choose comfort over clarity, conformity over conscience, and slogans over truth.

He wrote, “Stupidity is more dangerous to the good than malice.” Why? Because malice can be confronted. You can expose evil. You can resist it, challenge it, shine a light on it. But stupidity–that moral laziness and intellectual fog–cannot be reached. It doesn’t listen. It doesn’t think. It doesn’t even know it’s in darkness. And that makes it far more potent than evil.

Bonhoeffer watched as highly educated men–professors, pastors, professionals–abandoned their discernment and handed themselves over to the ideology of the state. They repeated propaganda like gospel, no longer asking whether something was true, only whether it was safe, or popular, or required. And as the Nazi machine roared to life, most people didn’t fight it. They just agreed with it. That, Bonhoeffer realized, was the real crisis.

He observed something chilling and profoundly relevant to our times: “The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.” Tyrants don’t rise alone–they ride to power on the backs of people who refuse to think. People who find it easier to parrot slogans than examine beliefs. People who prefer the safety of groupthink to the risk of moral courage.

Bonhoeffer saw that this stupidity was not an intellectual defect, but a spiritual one. It was a refusal–not an inability–to think. He called it a psychological phenomenon that emerges in crowds, movements, and ideologies. And it spreads like cancer. Because the “stupid,” as he defined them, are not lacking in brainpower–they’re lacking in will. They’re emotionally and spiritually swept up in the illusion of certainty, without having earned it through discernment. And they cling to that illusion with a religious fervor.

We see this today. On both sides of every divide, people have stopped asking what’s true. Instead, they ask what’s safe to believe. What’s acceptable to say. What won’t cost them their job or their reputation. But as Bonhoeffer made painfully clear: when truth is surrendered for safety, it’s only a matter of time before destruction follows.

So, what do we do?

Bonhoeffer didn’t offer easy answers. He didn’t say we could debate people out of their fog. In fact, he said you can’t. The fog is a choice. The slogans are a refuge. But he did say one thing: we must speak words of moral liberation. We must speak not to the mind that has surrendered, but to the conscience that still stirs beneath the surface. Speak not just to logic, but to the soul.

People don’t always respond to facts. The “stupid” don’t ask Is this true? They ask Is this allowed? Is it popular? What will it cost me to believe this? And so, we need to offer something deeper. We need to offer the courage to see. The courage to look at something clearly, to sit with discomfort, and to reawaken the conscience.

Because the conscience–that quiet voice inside each of us–is not gone. It’s just been buried under years of fear, noise, ideology, and self-protection. And when we speak with clarity and moral conviction, we’re not just offering information–we’re offering permission. Permission to wake up. Permission to be brave. Permission to think again.

This is the most important insight I’ve ever shared. Bonhoeffer handed us a map, not just of his time, but of ours. He explained why people can no longer hear each other. Why one side shouts and the other side doubles down. Why truth feels powerless. It’s not because truth has failed. It’s because the audience surrendered its ability to receive it.

But there’s hope. Because Bonhoeffer didn’t just see the problem–he lived the solution. He kept speaking. He kept writing. He kept resisting. And in doing so, he reminded us that even if the fog is thick, the light still exists. We don’t have to surrender our thinking. We don’t have to live in the fog. We can choose clarity. We can choose conscience. We can choose courage.

Bonhoeffer was killed for trying to awaken the soul of his nation. But his words still speak. And they remind us that the fight we’re in is not just political or cultural–it’s spiritual. It’s a battle between fear and freedom, between fog and truth, between surrender and awakening.

Let us be among those who choose to see.