Everyone does stupid things, but the dumb things we do are not the same as the stupid way we think about the world we live in.

I’ve done research about this topic, and I’ve come away with what I think are some very interesting and concerning reasons about what causes stupidity in reasonably smart people.

Why do millions of people who are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves stop thinking for themselves, which makes them? Well ... that’s what makes them just plain stupid.

In 1943, a German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested for trying to assassinate Adolf Hitler. While he sat in his prison cell awaiting execution, the pastor wrote an essay about how an entire country of reasonably smart people went along with fascism and the plan to exterminate everyone who had been labeled enemies of the regime because the leaders of the regime told them it was the right thing to do.

The pastor titled his essay, “On Stupidity.” He was put to death in 1945, just days before the liberation.

In his essay, Bonhoeffer identified how stupidity destroys a country from the inside out. He said stupidity has nothing to do with how smart we are, or how high our IQs might be or the levels of education we attain.

Three things make people stupid. The first occurs when we let someone else think for us; a leader, a political party, a media mouth. We believe what we’re told and what we hear without questioning, without trying to find out if it’s true. When faced with the challenge that we might be wrong, we might say, “I’ll look into it,” but we never do.

The second thing that makes us stupid is being proud of not knowing anything about a topic. We make no attempt to learn more or try to understand the opposing view. Call it being stubborn or just being lazy. We celebrate our ignorance as if it’s a prize we’ve won in a contest.

The ancient Greeks called human stupidity a “willful ignorance.” Aristotle said willful ignorance is the greatest threat to civilization. Today we have a world of information in our hands with our smartphones and in our homes with our computers, but we don’t bother to do the unbiased research before we make up our minds.

The third thing, and possibly the most devastating thing, we do is go along with a group’s opinions even if we might feel they are wrong. That middle school peer pressure continues when we become adults. We want to be liked, to belong to a group whose members think alike, and belonging matters even if we’re wrong more than truth.

In the novel “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” a runaway slave named Jim says to the boy, “Just because everybody says something is right, don’t make it right.”

It’s not that we can’t think. We make the choice to stop thinking. We make excuses. Too much effort. Too busy. Don’t want to be bothered.

The German pastor said people aren’t born this way. People are made this way. Stupidity might begin in a small group, but like wildfire, the disease spreads and can infect a country’s entire population and that includes doctors, lawyers and professors, people who obviously can think for themselves suddenly join the ranks of the stupid.

Some modern philosophers warn about kissing the ring of any one political party. We don’t ever consider voting for another party’s candidate. Someone once said, “I’d vote for Mickey Mouse as long as he belongs to my party.”

There’s strength in stupidity. When a political leader tells us that anyone who opposes his party hates America and is not a patriot, we stand up and cheer his ridiculous remarks. George Carlin said, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”

Stupid people cheer when they see other human beings they’re told not to like treated with cruelty. They mock anyone who doesn’t think or look like them. That breeds racism against any culture or color other than their own.

A Swedish philosopher said that stupid people get locked inside a cage of their own convictions based upon isolated incidents.

If we challenge their beliefs, they say we’re traitors. They attack not only our ideas. They attack our identities. When they hear an undocumented immigrant commits a crime, they say all illegals are going to commit crimes. Someone on TV tells them people entering our country illegally get everything free from our government, they believe that too rather than find out the facts.

Research says undocumented immigrants do not receive benefits or free health care from the government. They have actually contributed to our economy. In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes. They paid into Social Security but received none of the benefits unless they become citizens. They do jobs that few Americans want to do, like cleaning hotel rooms, installing roofs on houses and picking fruits and vegetables on our farms under 95 degree temperatures.

Coming here illegally is wrong, but to believe all of them are getting better treatment than our citizens is wrong, too.

History has proved that collective stupidity divides a nation’s people. Americans fight Americans because we’ve been told by powerful billionaires we must despise anyone who disagrees with us.

We fail to realize that united we stand and divided we fall, and that nobody wins when lines are drawn in the sand. We all lose when “indivisible” has lost its meaning in the Pledge of Allegiance and “liberty and justice for all” only apply to the powerful and the privileged.

Author Mark Twain once said, “Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” Scientist Albert Einstein said, “Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.”

Perhaps we should all take the advice from a famous movie character named Forrest Gump when he said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com