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Second article in the series on Bonhoeffer and stupidity. The first is The Bonhoeffer Who Circulates and the One Who Wrote.

In the previous article, I argued that the viral version of Bonhoeffer loses what is essential in his text: the thesis that stupidity is not a trait of certain people, but an effect of power. At Christmas 1942, Bonhoeffer wrote that every strong display of power, whether political or religious, strikes a large portion of people with stupidity, and that the power of some requires the stupidity of others. That is the starting point of this second essay, and the question that organizes it is an uncomfortable one: does an equivalent display of power exist today?

The quick answer is no. There is no single party, no secret police, no Church aligned with a regime that occupies the entire public sphere. Anyone who compares 2026 with 1942 appears to be exaggerating, and exaggeration has a bad reputation for good reason: it is often the cheapest way to win an argument. But the quick answer confuses the form of power with its mechanism. And what Bonhoeffer describes is not a form; it is a mechanism.

It is worth recalling it precisely. According to Von der Dummheit, the process has three moments. First, a power that imposes itself through its sheer magnitude, whose “overwhelming impression” leaves no room for an independent response. Second, the loss of inner independence (innere Selbständigkeit): the person gives up, more or less unconsciously, the effort to determine their own conduct in the face of what is happening. Third, the occupation of that vacuum by slogans, so that in conversation one is no longer speaking with the person but with the slogans and catchphrases that have taken possession of them. To this Bonhoeffer adds an observation that at the time may have seemed minor: the defect appears less frequently among those who live in solitude than among people and groups inclined toward sociability.

The thesis I propose is that all three moments are present today, and that the analogy with 1942 holds at the level of mechanism even though it does not hold at the level of form. It is important to state from the outset what kind of claim this is. It is not a historical demonstration, but an interpretive hypothesis: a way of reading the present using the tool Bonhoeffer left behind. This article can show that each part of the mechanism has a plausible and, in part, measurable counterpart today; it cannot prove that those parts, taken together, produce the same thing they produced in 1942. With that qualification, the argument is this. Power no longer has a single center and no longer needs to prohibit; it operates as an infrastructure of attention and belonging. The group, which Bonhoeffer identified as a medium, has become permanent and measurable. And the slogan, which he described as something that takes possession of people, now has metrics that reward its circulation. At the same time, the thesis requires a caution largely absent from ordinary discourse about social media: the available evidence does not justify blaming the algorithm as though it were the dictator of our time, nor does it justify absolving it. Both simple versions, as we will see, repeat the problem the first article tried to dismantle.

Power Without a Center

The display of power Bonhoeffer had before him was coercive and had a recognizable direction: a state, a party, centralized propaganda, a Church that had fallen into line. Its force consisted in prohibiting and punishing, but also in occupying every space from which someone might have said something different. If stupidity is the loss of inner independence under the pressure of overwhelming power, the question is what form that pressure takes when no one exercises it from a single center.

Byung-Chul Han proposed an answer in Psychopolitics (Barcelona, Herder, 2014). The power he describes is an intelligent power (smart power), a seductive power that does not prohibit: it does not tell anyone what they may not say; it invites them to say everything, to display preferences, opinions, and desires. Its effectiveness is based not on repression but on participation. Han formulates it through a paradox that helps us read Bonhoeffer from the present: the freedom of being able to generates even more constraints than the disciplinary ought. A power that prohibits at least leaves an outside from which the prohibition can be perceived. A power that seduces leaves no such outside, because it presents itself as one’s own choice.

Shoshana Zuboff describes the material basis of that power. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), she argues that human experience has become free raw material for commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sale, and that what matters now is no longer ownership of the means of production but ownership of new means of behavioral modification. Zuboff calls this instrumentarian power, and her diagnosis is harsh: we pay for our own domination. One need not accept her entire framework, which has serious critics, to recognize the relevant point: an infrastructure now exists whose business model consists in anticipating and shaping the behavior of billions of people. That infrastructure has no single political owner, but it does have owners.

Herbert Simon anticipated the mechanism in 1971, long before the platforms existed. In an essay on designing organizations in an information-rich world, he wrote that information consumes the attention of its recipients, and therefore a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. The phrase is usually cited as an observation about the attention economy, but it has a consequence that connects directly with Bonhoeffer. The “overwhelming impression” he attributed to the display of power no longer requires political magnitude: a volume of stimuli that never stops may be enough. Inner independence requires something very concrete—time and distance in which to form one’s own judgment. What the power of 1942 obtained largely through intimidation, the infrastructure of 2026 may obtain, at least in part, through saturation. It is a reasonable hypothesis, not an established result.

Here the analogy must be handled carefully, because it is easy to exaggerate it. No one goes to prison for ignoring an algorithm. The difference is real and not minor. But Bonhoeffer did not say that stupidity was produced by fear of prison; he said that it was produced by the impression power makes, by its ability to render one’s own response useless or unthinkable. At that level—the mechanism rather than the coercion—power without a center may perform a function analogous to power with a center. And perhaps it has an advantage that the regime of 1942 did not have: it produces less of the discomfort that, according to Bonhoeffer, evil always leaves in those who suffer it. The person who chooses does not feel coerced.

The Group as Infrastructure

Of all Bonhoeffer’s observations, the one that has best survived the passage of time is also the one that initially seemed most marginal: stupidity appears less frequently among those who live apart than among those who are inclined—or condemned—to sociability. Bonhoeffer had no data; he had the experience of watching colleagues, students, and parishioners change their minds as a group. Eighty years later, experimental psychology has given that intuition a name and a measure.

The name is identity-protective cognition, and its principal researcher is Dan Kahan of Yale. The most widely cited experiment, published with Ellen Peters, Erica Dawson, and Paul Slovic in Behavioural Public Policy, is devastatingly simple. Participants were shown a table containing data about the effectiveness of a treatment and were asked to interpret it. When the treatment was a skin-rash cream, participants with greater numeracy performed better, as expected. When the same numbers were presented as the effects of a ban on carrying firearms, responses polarized according to political orientation and accuracy declined. Most importantly, among the participants with the highest numeracy, polarization did not diminish; it increased.

It is difficult not to hear an echo here of Bonhoeffer’s statement that intellectually agile people can nevertheless be stupid. But the echo should not be turned into equivalence. Kahan measures motivated reasoning about politicized data, not the loss of inner independence described by Bonhoeffer. And the evidence has nuances: a replication published in 2024 in the same journal, using a Western European sample, replicated the motivated-reasoning effect but did not find that polarization increased among participants with greater numeracy. What does appear robust is what matters for this argument: when a factual question becomes a signal of belonging, reasoning ability does not protect against bias. Kahan interprets it this way: reasoning ceases to function as a tool for discovering what is true and begins to function as a tool for protecting one’s place within a group. Intelligence does not disappear. It changes function.

This also illuminates the feature I called selective skepticism in the first article. Bonhoeffer said that facts contradicting a prejudice need not be believed, and that in such cases the stupid person can even become critical. That is what the experiment suggests: critical capacity is not absent; it is applied rigorously to data that threaten group identity and suspended when the data confirm it. This is not credulity. It is criticism working in only one direction.

What has changed since 1942 is not the mechanism but its support. The groups to which a German of that period belonged were the parish, the neighborhood, the office, the association, and their boundaries coincided with physical spaces that could be left at the end of the day. Today belonging travels in one’s pocket and never switches off. It is available at every hour, expressed in public, and measured in reactions, followers, and comments. Every opinion expressed is simultaneously a declaration of position before one’s own group, and every deviation carries a visible cost. Bonhoeffer’s observation about solitude therefore acquires a new meaning: it is not that solitude protects through virtue, but that the isolated person does not pay, at every moment, the price of thinking differently. What digital infrastructure has eliminated is not the freedom to think, but the unwitnessed space in which independent judgment could form before being displayed.

Here lies the piece that makes the analogy possible. In 1942, power reached individuals through the group, and it was the regime that determined which opinions marked belonging. Today the group is built upon an infrastructure with interests of its own, and there is no shortage of actors who understand that a factual question turned into a banner is worth more than any argument. If the analogy holds, this would be, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, the point at which the power of some requires the stupidity of others.

The Optimized Slogan

The third moment of the mechanism is the most recognizable. Bonhoeffer wrote that in conversation with a stupid person one senses that one is not dealing with the person themselves, but with slogans, catchphrases, and mottos that have taken possession of them. In 1942, those slogans were manufactured in a ministry and distributed through radio, the press, and public rallies. They had an author. Today the slogan needs no author: it emerges, competes, and is selected according to its capacity to circulate. And what circulates best is neither what is true nor what is reasonable.

The largest study on the subject was published by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral of MIT in Science in March 2018. They analyzed roughly 126,000 news cascades on Twitter between 2006 and 2017, spread by around three million people. False news was 70 percent more likely to be shared than true news, even after controlling for account age, activity, and number of followers. Two findings matter here more than the figure itself. First, the authors associated that advantage with novelty: falsehood was more novel than truth, and novelty is exactly what an attention economy rewards. Second, it was not bots that spread it, but humans. The slogan is not imposed from outside against people’s will; people choose it and pass it on.

The second relevant study was led by William Brady, together with Jay Van Bavel and other colleagues, and published in PNAS in 2017. They analyzed roughly 563,000 messages about divisive political topics and found that each morally and emotionally charged word—words expressing outrage, shame, or disgust—increased message diffusion by around 20 percent. But the most significant finding for this article is another: this moral contagion circulated strongly within each political group and far less between groups. The study measures diffusion, not persuasion, but the pattern suggests that outrage circulates mainly among those already convinced.

Together, the two studies describe a market for slogans governed by clear rules. Novelty beats truth, outrage beats nuance, and belonging beats persuasion. No one designed this market to produce stupidity in Bonhoeffer’s sense. But a system that systematically selects messages that reaffirm the group and punish the adversary favors, as an effect, something very close to the replacement of judgment by slogans that he described. The slogan of 2026 does not take possession of people because someone orders it to; it takes possession because it won the competition for their attention.

One feature of Bonhoeffer’s description finds a disturbing counterpart here. He said that the stupid person is entirely satisfied with themselves and, because they are easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. An infrastructure that rewards moral outrage with visibility turns that irritability into a strategy. Attack ceases to be an outburst and becomes the most effective way to be heard.

The Algorithm’s Alibi

Up to this point, the argument could be read as yet another version of the discourse that now dominates public conversation: social networks made us stupid. That discourse has exactly the structure of the viral version of Bonhoeffer I criticized in the first article. It offers a single visible cause, a culprit who is no one in the audience, and a moral that can easily be shared. And, like that version, it does not survive contact with the evidence.

In July 2023, a team of academic researchers published in Science and Nature the first results of an unusual collaboration with Meta during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Researchers were able to intervene directly in what users saw. In one experiment, led by Andrew Guess, Facebook and Instagram’s algorithmic feeds were replaced with chronological feeds for three months. Users spent less time on the platforms, saw more content from moderate sources and less uncivil content, although they also saw more political content and more content from unreliable sources. But polarization, political knowledge, and core attitudes did not change significantly. In another experiment, led by Brendan Nyhan and involving more than 23,000 users, exposure to like-minded sources was reduced by roughly one third. Exposure to sources from the other side increased and uncivil language decreased, but none of the eight preregistered attitude measures—including affective polarization, ideological extremism, and belief in false claims—changed appreciably.

Even more uncomfortable is the experiment Christopher Bail and his colleagues published in PNAS in 2018. They paid Democratic and Republican Twitter users to follow, for one month, a bot that showed them messages from politicians, media outlets, and organizations from the opposing side. If the problem were simply a lack of exposure to other ideas, such exposure should have reduced polarization. It did not. Republicans exposed to progressive messages became noticeably more conservative, while Democrats exposed to conservative messages moved slightly toward more progressive positions, although that effect was not statistically significant.

For a time, these results were read as an acquittal of the platforms. Research from the last two years requires revising that interpretation—and also its opposite. In November 2025, Tiziano Piccardi and colleagues at Stanford published in Science an experiment conducted without the cooperation of any platform. Using a browser extension, they reordered the X feeds of 1,256 volunteers for ten days during the 2024 presidential campaign, increasing or reducing exposure to posts containing partisan hostility and antidemocratic attitudes. The result was a shift of roughly two points on a one-hundred-point feeling thermometer toward the opposing party, in the expected direction and with no differences between parties. The absolute effect is small, although some specialists consider it comparable to roughly three years of natural change on that measure, while also warning against generalization: the experiment was brief, conducted in an extreme electoral context, and involved self-selected volunteers.

In February 2026, Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya published in Nature the largest independent experiment to date on X’s algorithm. Over seven weeks, nearly five thousand U.S. users were randomly assigned to either the algorithmic or chronological feed. Activating the algorithm increased engagement and shifted political priorities and news interpretation toward more conservative positions; disabling it, by contrast, produced no significant political effects. In neither direction did party identification or affective polarization change. The most revealing finding was another: users switched to the algorithmic feed began following more conservative and political-activist accounts, and those accounts remained in their networks after the algorithm was turned off.

That finding helps explain why the 2023 experiments found no effects: turning off the algorithm does not undo the network the algorithm helped construct. The effect lies not only in what is shown each day, but in the shape of the group that remains. A study presented in April 2026 at the CHI conference, led by Jason Burton, adds another piece. In a controlled experiment with one thousand participants, engagement-based ranking personalized according to approval from one’s own group produced more polarized and less accurate beliefs than any other ranking criterion tested, and yet participants rated it as the most informative.

The picture left by the evidence supports neither of the two simple versions. It is not true that the algorithm is harmless: it can shift attitudes in measurable, though modest, ways, and its most durable effect may occur through the reconfiguration of social networks. Nor is it true that it is the dictator of our age: its effects are small, asymmetric, context-dependent, and cannot by themselves explain the polarization we observe. If this evidence evokes anything in Bonhoeffer, it is less his phrase about overwhelming power than his observation about the group: infrastructure acts above all through whom one is with, and that cannot be undone by flipping a switch.

Bail’s experiment, meanwhile, evokes another sentence from the 1942 text: trying to persuade the stupid person with reasons is useless and also dangerous. The resemblance is suggestive, but it should not be forced. Bail measured the effect of one month of exposure to messages from the opposing side in a U.S. sample, and the hardening of attitudes was clear in only one of the two groups. It does not prove that persuasion is impossible; it warns that exposure to the other side, when it arrives as confrontation, can produce the opposite of what it seeks.

The algorithm’s alibi also performs another function that deserves to be named. By locating the cause in a machine, it absolves everyone else: political leaders who turn factual questions into banners, media organizations that live from outrage, religious and business leaders who benefit from loyal audiences, and also each of us. Bonhoeffer did not blame the radio. He blamed the power that used it, and he named the relationship precisely: the power of some requires the stupidity of others. The relevant question in 2026 is not what the algorithm does to us, but who needs us to think the way we do and what tools they use to achieve it. The platform is one of those tools, and one of the most powerful, but it is not the hand that moves it.

What External Liberation Would Mean Today

If the analogy holds at the level of mechanism, it must also hold at the level of remedy. Bonhoeffer was categorical: stupidity is not overcome through an act of instruction but through an act of liberation, and in the overwhelming majority of cases inner liberation becomes possible only after external liberation. In 1942, that had an unequivocal meaning: the fall of the regime. The question is what it means when power has no center.

The first answer offered today is regulation. The European Union adopted the Digital Services Act (DSA) in 2022, which goes considerably beyond content moderation. According to the analysis by the Mozilla Foundation, Article 27 requires all platforms to explain in clear language the main parameters of their recommender systems. Article 38 requires the largest platforms to offer at least one recommendation option not based on profiling. And Articles 34 and 35 require them periodically to assess systemic risks arising from their services—including risks to democratic processes—explicitly taking into account the design of their recommender systems, and to adopt measures to mitigate those risks.

Enforcement has already begun. On December 5, 2025, the European Commission imposed on X the first fine for non-compliance with the DSA, amounting to €120 million, in part for obstructing independent researchers’ access to the platform’s public data. This is not a technical detail. Without that access, experiments such as those by Piccardi or Gauthier would be much more difficult, and without them there would be no way to know what the machine is actually doing.

This is, for the first time, an attempt to act on conditions rather than on individuals, and in that sense it moves in the direction Bonhoeffer indicated. But its limits are obvious. Transparency can become what Mozilla’s own analysts call transparency theater if platforms merely describe, in vague terms, parameters that no one can verify. The non-profiled option is binary and must be actively chosen by each user, which reintroduces the very problem it is meant to solve: it asks the individual to perform an act of will against an infrastructure designed to prevent them from doing so. And above all, the experiments of 2023 and 2026 suggest that turning off the algorithm does not by itself undo what the algorithm has already done: the network of followed accounts remains. Regulation of the machine is necessary, but it is not external liberation. At most, it is the removal of one of its obstacles.

The second answer is more difficult and also more faithful to Bonhoeffer. If the power of some requires the stupidity of others, external liberation does not consist only in dismantling a tool, but in changing the equation for those who benefit from using it. In the final paragraph of his text, Bonhoeffer left the criterion in writing: everything will depend on whether those who govern expect more from people’s stupidity or from their inner independence and good sense. Translated into 2026, the question is not only what the platform allows, but what the political system rewards. As long as turning a factual question into a badge of identity remains the most effective way to win elections, audiences, or followers, there will be actors willing to do it with whatever tools are available. External liberation, in a society without a dictator, requires changing those incentives: political financing, the quality of public media, the existence of institutions capable of producing facts that all groups recognize as shared.

It must also be said that this translation comes at a cost, and the cost is mine, not Bonhoeffer’s. In the first article I argued that one cannot remove the theological foundation of his remedy and continue attributing the result to him. The same applies here. For Bonhoeffer, external liberation was a necessary but insufficient condition: the only true overcoming of stupidity was inner liberation for a responsible life before God, a higher commitment that relativizes every earthly power. Regulation, incentives, and institutions are a secular version of the first half of his remedy. The second half has no obvious equivalent in a pluralistic society, and it would be dishonest to pretend that it does. What might occupy that place without itself becoming a new display of power is precisely one of the questions left open.

This leads directly to the problem the third article will have to confront. A democracy cannot respond to the manufacture of stupidity by manufacturing its own official truth, because that would reproduce the display of power it seeks to dismantle. But neither can it simply watch while the conditions of deliberation are destroyed. Between those two extremes lies the question of who draws the line between the reasonable adversary and the person who deliberately acts against public debate, and with what legitimacy.

The Factory Without a Visible Owner

The analogy between 1942 and 2026 seems exaggerated only if one looks in the wrong place. If one looks for a dictator, a single party, or centralized censorship, none appears, and whoever insists on the analogy seems alarmist. If one looks instead for the mechanism Bonhoeffer described, its pieces appear, although with different degrees of evidentiary support. There is a power that imposes itself through magnitude, even if that magnitude consists of stimuli rather than force. There is a form of motivated reasoning, measured in the laboratory, in which intellectual ability is placed at the service of belonging. There are slogans that occupy the place of judgment, selected by a market that rewards novelty over truth and outrage over nuance. And there is now experimental evidence that infrastructure can durably reconfigure groups.

None of this proves the analogy. Proving it would require something that, as far as I know, is not available: long-term studies measuring not only attitudes or polarization, but people’s capacity to form and sustain an independent judgment when their group thinks otherwise, and how that capacity relates to sustained exposure to this infrastructure. Until then, the analogy functions as what it is: a strong hypothesis, coherent with the available evidence and useful for directing the question. What can be said is that dismissing it merely because there is no visible dictator is, once again, to confuse form with mechanism.

What changed is the form, and the change is not irrelevant. The power of 1942 produced, at least in some people, the discomfort Bonhoeffer regarded as the germ of resistance: one knew who was in charge and could hate them. The factory of 2026 has no visible owner, presents itself as freedom of choice, and for that very reason probably generates less discomfort among those who inhabit it. It is harder to resist a power one experiences as one’s own.

That is why the algorithm’s alibi is so tempting and so damaging. It gives power without a center a convenient face, a machine no one elected, and in doing so absolves everyone who uses it for their own purposes. Bonhoeffer would not have accepted that escape. His formula remains an especially useful analytical tool precisely because it points not to a technology but to a relationship: the power of some requires the stupidity of others. In 2026, as in 1942, the question is not whether people have become stupid, but who needs them that way.

And the warning with which the first article ended remains, carrying even more weight here. The factory has no outside. No one reading this text on a screen, between one notification and the next, is in a position to stand on the shore and point at those who remained inside. If the mechanism is sociological, it reaches all of us, and the only honest reading of Bonhoeffer in 2026 begins by asking which slogans have taken possession of oneself.

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