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Malice or Stupidity: Look at Our Leaders and You Make the Call

Hanlon’s Razor says: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Malice or Stupidity: Look at Our Leaders and You Make the Call

Hanlon’s Razor says: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” So, look at the leading opinion shapers and politicians now. Which are malicious and which are merely stupid?

Bill Whittle and Alfonzo Rachel unpack the ethics and principles behind the daily news. Our Members fund this enterprise, and unlock access to exclusive features and content, including our Member-written blog. Click the big green button above to join. We also accept donations from Members and non-Members alike, using PayPal or credit card, when you click the big blue button above. Thank you.

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23 replies on “Malice or Stupidity: Look at Our Leaders and You Make the Call”

The moral sense. The Garden. Sounds like you may have started listening to Jordan Peterson’s biblical series or a related lecture.

He takes it a bit further and looks at the “naked” part. He knew he was vulnerable. And since he knew he was vulnerable, he knew how, and what would hurt him … which meant he knew how to hurt others. Intentionally.

Which is evil.

I think Zo is absolutely on point in this one. Goin’ a little Scott Ott on us here playing Devil’s Advocate.

Although I’m going to deviate here when it comes to Hitler. There is NO WAY he didn’t know what he was doing, especially in the end, was wrong. He didn’t have a higher power … not really … that he looked to. He had deicided in some form or another that HE WAS that higher power.

And 9/11 … same thing. Evil can take over the heart and mind. And it always has, and it always will. The BEST we can do is to create a society where that happens less often. Where we minimize that by properly nurturing souls from birth. And at least 10,000 years of distilled wisdom has, in the last, say, century or so, been thrown out the window due to human hubris. And look at the things that have happened over the last century.

That … the creating of such a society … starts locally. Clean up your room. And then it spreads outward from there.

If you are taking any delight in doing something that harms another and that delight comes in whole or in part from that harm … that’s evil creeping in. Or taking over.

Civilization is basically rules to curb the evil in human nature. Boxing itself is something I’ve never liked. I’ve never liked the idea of two people beating the crap out of each other … for entertainment. Maybe one can argue it’s an outlet to for us to collectively vent the instincts we suppress so that we can HAVE a civilization.

But for that, I think I like football better.

Victor Davis Hanson says what the godless radicals of today are trying to achieve is bringing their idea of perfection for human beings by mandating rules for them to follow. It’s basis is malice.They can’t deal with the reality of the imperfectability of human kind. This is their quest. A quest that can never be won. Some would call it INSANE.

I was taken back by the failure of Zo to outright answer Bill’s question. It gives too much wiggle room for the advancement of evil to try to justify it for whatever reason. Look out Zo! Let your nay be nay and your aye be aye. You did clear up what you thought eventually. Walking the ridge of uncertainty gives the impression that you have something to hide or you can’t express accurately what you say you believe.

Since I seem to be the first one saying it, let’s call this “Brother Bob’s Razor”: Never attribute political stupidity to that which can be explained by malice”

“ Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

– CS Lewis

Interesting points made many years ago by Dietrich Bonhoeffen, A German clergy who stood against Hitler and paid with his life. However his works and thoughts live on. 

Some quotes TOP 25 QUOTES BY DIETRICH BONHOEFFER (of 425) | A-Z Quotes (azquotes.com)

More to the subject of the show he said in a letter while in prison

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
His essay on the subject is now a well circulated video

Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity – Sprouts — Free Videos for Schools and Learning (sproutsschools.com)

Malice or stupidity? Yes. Both. It doesn’t matter which.

It is inconsequential which fountain the damage to our society flows from, the end result is the same either way.

I’m not saying it’s not important to delineate, define and understand a problem. I’m saying that the source of this problem, be it stupidity or malice or indifference or space aliens, is a secondary issue to the damage being caused. The net result whether stupidity or malice is the driver is identical. Either way we end up with equivalences whose difference to us is inconsequential.

Ron White famously said “You can’t fix stupid”. He’s right about that. If the problem is stupidity and not simple ignorance then it cannot be remedied by information, education and persuasion. Stupidity will not yield to those things.

Malice will not yield to those things either.

The malicious and the stupid are lost to reasoning. Those things cannot be converted to good will and intelligence. If that worked every pupil in every school would carry the potential for straight “A’s” and Lucifer himself would have repented his rebellion. These things very nearly carry the force of natural law.

Intelligence can be described as a matter of horizons. The lower the intelligence the closer the horizon.

There’s nothing we can do, no argument we can make nor education we can supply that will alter a person’s place on the bell curve of human intelligence.

Malice is similarly intractable. Some thesaurus synonyms for “malice” are “malevolence”, “spite” and “venom”. Malice is a manifestation of wickedness.

My point is not that the situation is hopeless and nothing can be done about stupidity and malice, au contraire mon amis. You must understand the problem before you can solve it. These are things that need to be understood about stupidity and malice in order to counter their negative effects on our society.

The moves open to us in this regard are clearly not persuasion and education. The only thing that works against this sort of problem is containment and elimination. We put crooks in jail. We go to war against monsters like the Nazis. We contained Soviet Communism until it imploded. We eliminate murderers by executing them (or in my opinion should do). We contain the mentally handicapped in programs specifically designed to help them achieve whatever their potential allows. Etc.

This works the other way around too. The malicious and the stupid try to contain us by the ever shrinking boundaries of cancel culture and political correctness. They try to eliminate us by silencing our voices and stealing elections. The malicious are not necessarily stupid and the stupid are not necessarily malicious … But they compliment each other nicely.

The best strategic approach to dealing with the malicious and the stupid is to devise means of containing and eliminating them. I’m not talking about pogroms, purges and concentration camps. I’m talking about appealing to and converting the good-willed, not-stupid majority.

There are a lot of them but the problem is they’re about as stubborn and set in their ways as everyone else.

How do we know they’re out there? Watch for signs and indications that betray their presence.

Things like the fact that CNN’s viewership has dropped to 10% of what it was at its peak. Where did all those people go and why did they leave? It’s not enough to know that CNN is tanking and revel in the joy of that fact, though personally I certainly do that too. We need to find out where they went and harvest as many of these “in the wind” viewers and voters as possible.

Because they are now available to be persuaded and educated.

90% of the people who used to comprise the CNN audience are now potential conversions because they know enough to abandon a platform that manipulates and deceives them. That’s a big step in overcoming their own inertia and stubbornness that they have accomplished of their own volition. Those people are now reachable and the very fact that they fled CNN is proof they’re likely the kind of good-willed but misinformed ignorant people that can nominally be brought over to our side.

However, if you’re a “my way or the highway” Conservative you’re not going to reach any of them. If you insist on the very purest Conservative doctrines and ideologies then you’re part of the problem. Because right or wrong, you’re a very, very tiny minority in the US.

Personally I think we need the very purest Conservative doctrines and ideologies very badly. I subscribe to the vast majority of those positions but … I don’t insist that everyone do what I want them to or even do what I do.

For example; If you hear or worse say things like “Fox News is dead to me” because Fox News said or did something somewhere along the line that you absolutely cannot agree with and have thereby abandoned and now vilify the largest Conservative outlet for Conservative voices and opinions on the entire planet — Then you should seriously reconsider the wisdom in doing that.

I’m not running a commercial here for Fox News. They’ve done a few things that I find unacceptable too. Over time they’ve corrected some of them but had I abandoned and vilified Fox News I wouldn’t know that. Fox News is still the largest, loudest voice exposing Leftism in America and that’s not an opinion its a simple fact.

That’s just an example, I could give many others but that demonstrates the point I’m making. Which is don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater and don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.

Someone who is 70% on my side is well into the side of things I want to see them on. As they learn more they may come around even further. Or not. In this case, close enough is good enough because this is a battle for our prosperity, our society and our Republic. Your nose being out of joint about something you don’t like is petty and venal in comparison.

So lighten up a bit and get out there converting former CNN viewers and such like to our side. They’re out there and they’re available. Don’t slam the door in their faces in the process.

Bill did not seem to make the point, and I think Zo did but not clearly: there is an objective evil someone can do. Hitler can try to make any claim or justification but what he did was evil. This, I think, is separate from maliciousness, as evil can still be done with ignorance. If you are stupid and have not thought through your actions, you could do something that you should know will harm someone but you are not intending that harm, having not thought through the consequences. This I would say is the case of people that continue to vote for Democrats even with the recent past actions of the party, people that try to “vote for the candidate” and then are surprised when the supposedly moral candidate votes in lock step with the party to further evil. Some of the people running about pulling down statues are also working in ignorance, though that is more of their lack of education regarding history and the destiny of cultures that forget their history. There are others though that are egging these protesters on, encouraging them in their actions with goals in mind and injury to the body politic that are acting in malice.
If you are doing something to someone else and you know that will harm them without any further good (excluding surgery for example or slapping someone in a panic to get them to snap out of it) I think that would be the definition of malice. Fauchi’s attempts at research might fall under malice, but just because something is illegal does not make it wrong. Someone might not understand the testing and prevention protocols and think something is too great a risk (and if done in the US where we would hold to those protocols vs China where maybe they did not) but I am not sure if taking such a gamble is malicious. I am also not sure if it was just “a bad idea” or evil because I do not know enough about what exactly they were trying to do and how careful they were in doing so. The other hand though holds that if the policy is to not do something that you think is right, there is a certain morality to not do that thing. Unless that thing is something that you are instructed to do by Someone greater… but then you better be right or you will be doing wrong.

Heinlein again …

Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind, it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

I’m not advocating killing anyone, yet. We have a long way to go before that kind of thing becomes necessary. Most of the people I’ve talked to that call for violent revolution are living out the hero’s role of a movie playing in their own minds. Such types are not at all helpful.

That said, Heinlein’s point is well made. No one, even the most evil people like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin (who killed a lot more people than Hitler) and Mao (who killed even more people) think they’re the villains in the story. They think they’re doing what’s right and making the hard choice that must be made. That they think that and proceed to do what they do is all the proof of evil anyone needs.

This is a common symptom of totalitarianism. “I’m sorry, I really am. I’ll cry my little crocodile tears while we put you to death but you must be silenced. This is really your fault, your refusal to shut up has brought you to this sorry state all of your own volition.”

Look for this sort of thing and you’ll find evil propping it up every time.

If I can hop up on a Biblical soapbox for a moment, I think we can gain a lot of insight from Romans 14.
Romans 14 gets into a lot of interesting points about conscience. One thing that is pointed out multiple times is that if your conscience tells you that something is wrong, for you, it is. I don’t see any morality in eating shellfish, so for me, they are clean to eat. However someone else could just as easily think that eating shellfish is wrong, so doing so would violate their conscience, and be sinful.
I make no secret of the fact I am a moral absolutist. I think there are moral truths and realities external to my own subjective experience. Nailing those down can be a little tricky but I think it’s worth looking at the two greatest commandments for starters. Basically, to be unloving is morally wrong (which is another idea discussed a couple times in R14). Doing something awful to other people is not suddenly made fine because MY conscience says it’s okay.
TL;DR – The heart can make clean things unclean, but cannot make unclean things clean.
Now let me go full Psaki and circle back to the video. Based on the talk between Bill and Zo, it kind of sounded like in their minds, conscience was the dividing line between malice and ignorance. I’m having a hard time deciding if I agree. Hitler thought he was doing the right thing for Germany, but that doesn’t make it right. His heart was poisoned beyond recognition by all kinds of toxicity and evil. He was suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, which is itself evil.
I think the act of justifying malice is an act of malice. Coming up with an excuse for one’s actions does not make them right just because it satisfies one’s own heart.

Right-on, Bill!
Moral relativism is the consequence of a society full of people who are so open-minded that their brains have fallen out of their heads and onto the floor to be trampled by swine. Stupidity is contagious.

Malice, as you have pointed out, is not just words or deeds that are intended to harm another, but also actions that pose a greater risk of harm to others than oneself. The malice is not just the deed, but the rationalization and justification that follows–except for sociopaths who don’t have that particular problem. Faux-chi probably believes he is trying to achieve a greater good and is willing to gamble with the lives of millions to do it. Other than his reputation, his own risk is minimal. And then he lies about it, That, indeed, is both malicious and evil.
While listening to your segment, I was reminded of the John Knowles book “A Separate Peace” in which one boy deliberately cripples his best friend out of simple jealousy.

A little more Hillary malice , election night 2000, she waited until Rick Lazio started his concession speech and then walked out to speak knowing every TV director would switch to her cutting him right off the air. Malicious and graceless.

Good discussion. The last two years have brought home to me that malice truly exists and is perpetrated by those willfully and joyfully committing acts of violence in the form of depriving people of their health, their livelihoods, their freedom and ultimately their lives. The people behind this: Fauci, CDC, WHO, WEF, NGO’s, all the alphabet agencies and the hidden puppeteers of the Biden administration, all of them are acting with malice aforethought to further their agenda of a one world government, a grand reset that will seat them at the helm of power over the remaining pawns they’ve allowed to exist to serve them. I will even go so far as to assert that to claim these demons are “people” is grossly inaccurate. They are Demons and must be defeated.

Well said, especially your last statement. I have always believed people such as this are not simply misinformed, but evil. We should not try and reason with them, we need to simply defeat them.

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