We are accustomed to thinking of evil as a formidable force—a cunning, intelligent shadow that threatens the very foundations of our societies. We imagine it as a well-oiled machine of oppression, a brilliant strategic mind orchestrating chaos. But what if our fear grants it too much credit? What if the more unsettling truth is that true evil is often profoundly, catastrophically stupid?
This isn’t to diminish its horrors. It is to understand them. The evil that shapes history is rarely the product of genius; it is more commonly the output of profound moral and practical foolishness. It mistakes cruelty for strength, domination for wisdom, and short-term terror for lasting power. It is a blundering giant, capable of crushing the individual in its path but often tragically inept at posing a genuine, lasting threat to the collective whole when that collective is awake, coherent, and resilient.
Consider the archetype of the petty tyrant, the schoolyard bully grown up. Their method is to target the isolated, the straggler, the one who seems momentarily separated from the herd. This is their chosen battlefield because it is the only one where their tactics work. They rely on the paralysis of the victim and the apathy or fear of the bystanders. Their “stupidity” lies in the belief that this same strategy can scale indefinitely—that a society is just a collection of stragglers to be picked off one by one. They fail to comprehend the emergent power of community, the shared values, the invisible bonds of mutual aid that they themselves have not cultivated and cannot fathom. Their vision is myopic, seeing only the immediate submission they can inflict, blind to the slow-burning fuse of collective defiance they light.
This foolishness manifests in a blatant disregard for simple, human realities. Evil systems burn books, but forget that ideas live in minds. They silence dissenters, not understanding that martyrdom seeds revolution. They hoard resources and power, crippling the very infrastructure and goodwill a society needs to thrive, ultimately starving the machine they seek to feed. It is the stupidity of the parasite that kills its host. The threat is immense for the individual caught in the gears, but the act dooms the mechanism itself.The great historical nightmares we recall were not defeated solely by heroism (though that was essential), but also by their own inherent flaws—their strategic idiocy, their unsustainable brutality, their failure to understand that human beings, when united by a common hope, are not simply resources to be spent. The collective—the family, the village, the network of trust, the nation united in purpose—represents a complexity they cannot manage. They can terrorize it, they can wound it deeply, but to truly and finally break it requires a subtlety and nurturing intelligence that their project of extraction and domination inherently lacks.
Recognizing this is not an invitation to complacency. It is a call to a specific kind of courage. The blundering nature of evil means its greatest ally is our disconnection. It thrives when we see ourselves as isolated individuals. Its primary threat is not its brilliant plan, but its ability to make us forget our own collective strength. The antidote, then, is not just to condemn the evil, but to actively be less stupid than it is—to forge and tend to the bonds it ignores. To notice the straggler and bring them back into the fold. To value the shared truths and systems of support that make a people resilient.
The evil that stalks our world often has a loud voice and a heavy hand. But listen closely, and you’ll hear the hollow ring of a shallow mind. Look closely, and you’ll see it is building on sand. Our task is to be wiser. To be connected. To be a collective that is simply too intelligent, too interwoven, and too alive for its crude tools to dismantle. The threat to the individual is real and terrifying. But the ultimate failure of evil is written in its own staggering foolishness.