Of Folly

​29 December 2022 Reflections on 
Bonhoeffer's Of Folly - After 10 (3) Years !

​In December 1942 Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his Christmas letter from prison. It was titled "After 10 Years" reflecting on how Germany had lost its Freedom. In 1932 Germany clebrated its last Christmas in Freedom. Before that Germany had 10 more years to recognize and resist the brewing dangers of tyrannical ideologies and narratives. Likewise during the last 3 years the whole world has been progressively abandoning its freedoms by giving in to the great deception of our time. The price for freedom will go up every year. As a people we have only got two options, go through the relatively smaller pain of resisting now or pay a much higher price in suffering the bigger pain to come. 

https://jochenteuffel.com/2018/06/12/im-zusammenleben-der-menschen-gibt-es-gesetze-die-staerker-sind-als-alles-was-sich-ueber-sie-erheben-zu-koennen-glaubt-dietrich-bonhoeffers-text-nach-zehn-jahren/

https://archive.org/stream/DietrichBonhoefferLettersFromPrison/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer_Letters_from_Prison_djvu.txt

https://jochenteuffel.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/bonhoeffer-nach-zehn-jahren.pdf

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Of Folly !

​Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than malice. You can protest against malice, you can unmask it or prevent it by force. Malice always contains the seeds of its own destruction, for it always makes men uncomfortable, if nothing worse. There is no defence against folly. Neither protests nor force are of any avail against it, and it is never amenable to reason.

If facts contradict personal prejudices, there is no need to believe them, and if they are undeniable, they can simply be pushed aside as exceptions. Thus the fool, as compared with the scoundrel, is invariably self-complacent. And he can easily become dangerous, for it does not take much to make him aggressive. Hence folly requires much more cautious handling than malice.

We shall never again try to reason with the fool, for it is both useless and dangerous. To deal adequately with folly it is essential to recognize it for what it is. This much is certain, it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. There are men of great intellect who are fools, and men of low intellect who are anything but fools, a discovery we make to our surprise as a result of particular circumstances.

The impression we derive is that folly is acquired rather than congenital; it is acquired in certain cir- cumstances where men make fools of themselves or allow others to make fools of them. We observe further that folly is less common in the unsociable or the solitary than in individuals or groups who are inclined or condemned to sociability. From this it would appear that folly is a sociological problem rather than one of psychology. It is a special form of the operation of historical circumstances upon men, a psycho- logical by-product of definite external factors.

On closer inspection it would seem that any violent revolution, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind. Indeed, it would seem to be almost a law of psychology and sociology. The power of one needs the folly of the other. It is not that certain aptitudes of men, intellectual aptitudes for instance, become stunted or destroyed. Rather, the upsurge of power is so terrific that it deprives men of an independent judgement, and they give up trying — more or less unconsciously — to assess the new state of affairs for them- selves.

The fool can often be stubborn, but this must not mis- lead us into thinking he is independent. One feels somehow, especially in conversation with him, that it is impossible to talk to the man himself, to talk to him personally. Instead, one is confronted with a series of slogans, watchwords, and the like, which have acquired power over him. He is under a curse, he is blinded, his very humanity is being prostituted and exploited. Once he has surrendered his will and become a mere tool, there are no lengths of evil to which the fool will not go, yet all the time he is unable to see that it is evil. Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation of humanity, which can do irreparable damage to the human character.

But it is just at this point that we realize that the fool cannot be saved by education. What he needs is redemption. There is nothing else for it. Until then it is no earthly good trying to convince him by rational argument. In this state of affairs we can well understand why it is no use trying to fmd out what ‘the people’ really think, and why this question is also so superfluous for the man who thinks and acts responsibly.

As the Bible says, ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’. In other words, the only cure for folly is spiritual redemption, for that alone can enable a man to live as a responsible person in the sight of God. But there is a grain of consolation in these reflections on human folly. There is no reason for us to think that the majority of men are fools under all circumstances.

What matters in the long run is whether our rulers hope to gain more from the folly of men, or from their independence of judgement and their shrewdness of mind.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, December 1942