On Folly, Master Chefs and Bonhoeffer

 Dietrich Bonhoeffer. [1]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German pastor and theologian. Arrested for his participation in the 1944 plot to kill Hitler, Bonhoeffer was executed in April, 1945 in the Flossenburg concentration camp, after being convicted by a Nazi kangaroo court.

While in prison Bonhoeffer wrote diverse texts. This is one of them:

"Of Folly", by D. Bonhoeffer.


"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 defense 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 circumstances 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 psychological 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 themselves. The fool can often be stubborn, but this must not mislead 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 find 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 judgment and their shrewdness of mind." (Emphasis added. See here.)

Written by a Lutheran theologian imprisoned by the Nazis over sixty years ago, these thoughts are surprisingly relevant to the current economic policy debate in Australia.

Here I offer one example; I am sure readers (like my friends PeterC and Stubborn Mule) could easily relate:

"In short, expect unemployment to rise, job insecurity to rise, union power to increase and the federal bureaucracy to expand for the duration of the Labor-Greens-Windsor-Oakeshott government, while it blames everyone but itself." (See here)

And that catalogue of real or imaginary calamities, if you believe Paul Sheehan's unlikely narrative, will befall upon Australia because the underpaid hospitality workers want to be paid something extra for working on weekends, while some wealthy celebrity restaurateurs, who employ them and on whose behalf Sheehan seems to speak, don't want to: after all, every dollar they pay their workers is one less dollar they can deposit in their accounts.

The thing is so terrible that some of these celebrities might even have to work themselves! Imagine the outrage.

Unfortunately, I am an agnostic, skeptical about spiritual redemption. We better find another way. You know, just in case.

Image Credit:
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Wikipedia.

Update:
Brilliant blog post by Matt Cowgill debunking dodgy claims that Fair Work is strangling Australian businesses.