Canary in a Covid World: My Essay on Stupidity

Essays on propaganda and censorship by 34 thought leaders.

Editor C.H. Klotz recently published a remarkable collection of essays by 34 thought leaders titled Canary in a Covid World: How Propaganda and Censorship Changed Our (My) World.

Chris just tweeted an excerpt from my essay (Chapter 27) “On Stupidity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theory explains much of the COVID-19 Pandemic Response.”

Readers of this Substack are familiar with my reflections on Bonhoeffer’s famous essay. However, for my essay in Canary in a Covid World, I greatly expanded my reflections on how Bonhoeffer’s observations of the German people in the thirties and early forties serve as a useful interpretive framework for examining the incredibly stupid COVID-19 Pandemic response in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, and (of all places) Germany, whose stupid public officials should have known better.

Please share Chris’s tweet of Chapter 27) “On Stupidity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theory explains much of the COVID-19 Pandemic Response” with your networks, and please consider buying the book!

P.S.: Fellow Substack author, Sasha Latypova just wrote of my essay and post:

This is a great essay and I like Boenhoffer. However, I disagree that the government response to covid-19 was "stupid". It wasn't. It was a very intelligently and carefully planned mass murder, consolidation of central power and transfer of assets. The response from targeted victims was stupid, especially targeted victims with advanced medical/science degrees and credentials, those were monumentally stupid. The perps acted very intelligently and with malice aforethought.

These are cogent thoughts, and I agree with Sasha that the Pandemic response was very carefully planned by well-organized people with a high competence for scheming. However, I still believe their schemes, their propaganda, and their censorship were crude. To understand what I mean, watch the video recordings of EVENT 201, and note the cheesy superficiality of the production.

Thus, the pandemic response planners were clever in the way that Joseph Goebbels was clever. We now look back on Third Reich propaganda and much of it seems hyperbolic and ridiculous. Viewing it now, we marvel that the German people were so seduced by it. I suspect that, years from now, we will look back on the Pandemic response, with all of its crude propaganda and obvious lying, and marvel that so many were such suckers.

The last three years are an example of the catastrophe that ensues when the citizenry of a constitutional republic neglects education in history, civics, logic, and critical thinking. As James Madison observed:

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.

Dr. McCullough and I find Madison’s observation so applicable to our current state of affairs that we have made it a guiding principle of the McCullough Foundation’s Mission.