Knobius Maximus
Hair Plug Hitler Is the 21st-Century Matrix of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Stupid Person. What We Learn from Bonhoeffer's Essay "After Ten Years" and Its Section On Stupidity.
Happy New Year, Bluestockings!
I want to thank and welcome my newest paid supporters Leora Elli, Oldhaven and Nancy G. Your paid support goes toward my daughter’s post-high-school education. Thank you.
CONTENT WARNING: Gore and violent images from videos taken from the film The Substance.
“The stupid sow discord by their
insolence.”
Proverbs 13:10
[‘Nowadays’ is a civilization] in which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet.”
Robert Graves, The White Goddess
During New Year's Eve, Hair Plug Hitler on the Nazi House of Hades formerly known as Twitter changed his profile picture to an image of the white supremacy mascot Pepe the frog and his profile name to Kekius Maximus.
Kek refers to the alt-right; its etymology stems from the Egyptian God of darkness and chaos. Kek, whose image from Egyptian mythology depicts the god with a frog head, also symbolizes lack of knowledge.
While Hair Plug Hitler thinks he's being clever merging Kek and Latin to allude to Roman imperialism, the liberated, intelligent and civilized know he’s just a philistine knob. The truth is that Hair Plug Hitler is the 21st-century matrix to an unending stream of internet trolls—a bunch of losers and incels who only find their life’s purpose in insulting, demeaning and harming others sometimes to the point of suicide. The UK already passed a law that would punish internet trolls who do this. They are not even original in that evil rhetoric. The FBI did the same to Martin Luther King, Jr. via snail mail decades ago.
But Hair Plug Hitler's matrix feeds more than trolls. He also feeds stupid people — the same stupid people Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted in his essay “After Ten Years.” Since Hair Plug Hitler and his Mump-Nazi Reich stormtroopers don't value or appreciate art, reading or wisdom, they cannot understand that Hair Plug Hitler is their matrix that endlessly feeds evil, selfish and cruel people that will in the end destroy him.
This was dramatically and explicitly shown in the character of Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore should win The Golden Globe tomorrow and receive an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Elisabeth) in auteur Coralie Fargeat's masterpiece The Substance. Elisabeth was the matrix for her younger self Sue.
Stupid people who endlessly feed on Hair Plug Hitler’s stupid person matrix don't realize, because they are stupid people, that endlessly feeding off Hair Plug Hitler means it won't end well for them either. After using up and killing her Elisabeth matrix, Sue fell apart, made herself and her matrix deformed into a monstrosity, disintegrated, died and ended up wiped away by a street cleaner so no one remembered either one.
We have much to learn from art and history. “History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes” is a quote frequently attributed to Mark Twain. Regardless of who originally made the remark, it asserts that more people need to know about and read Bonhoeffer, a 20th-century Lutheran pastor and theologian the Nazis murdered in their Flossenbürg concentration camp a week before the Allies liberated it.
Before his transference to Flossenbürg, Bonhoeffer was incarcerated in a Nazi prison for his dissent. Among his dissentions was belonging to the Confessing Church that refused to be used as a religious tool to support the Nazi Reich and Hitler. German Christian pastor and theologian Martin Niemöller, who once favored Hitler and the Nazis, was one of its founders.
If one doesn’t think a U.S. Christian Nationalist theocracy financially fueled by broligarchs like Hair Plug Hitler will let other Christian denominations who resist it continue unimpeded, think again. The Confessing Church headed underground when Nazis increased their force against the Confessing Church's resistance.
During his imprisonment, Bonhoeffer wrote numerous letters and essays. These were published in Letters and Papers from Prison six years after his execution. One of those essays is “After Ten Years.”
“After Ten Years” includes a section titled On Stupidity. Because of different translations from the original German, On Stupidity has also been called On Folly as in my translation. I prefer On Stupidity and will use stupidity instead of folly. I find it a more brutal, direct and accurate word choice.
Bonhoeffer said that no matter how learned or intelligent a person is if one has no morals that makes the individual stupid and susceptible to a sociological and violent evil that needs stupid people for it to develop and thrive1 He continues:
The fact that the [stupid person] is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that he is independent. One feels in fact, when talking to him, that one is dealing, not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very nature is being misused and exploited, Having thus become a passive instrument, the [stupid person] will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings.2
To resist stupidity, maintain humanity and achieve true liberation, Bonhoeffer exclaimed that people need to turn their attention from technology toward books and art and that “[n]obility arises from and exists by sacrifice, courage, and a clear sense of duty to oneself and society by expecting due regard for itself as a matter of course; and it shows an equally natural regard for others, whether they are of higher or lower degree.”3
He stresses though that arguing with a stupid person or working to change the stupid person’s mind wastes time and energy. The only thing that will liberate a stupid person from their destructive and devastating stupidity is an “outward liberation” to spark “internal liberation.”4 To devote a portion of our lives arguing with a stupid person is an act of futility.
That doesn’t mean we can’t ridicule the stupid person and stupid people though.
But wait. There's more.
1.) Bust a move with me on Bluesky and Spoutible.
2.) I read Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America after it arrived in 2004 and watched the HBO limited series adaptation in 2020. I know the below scene from the HBO series, which people can watch on Max, will play out with a lot of family and friends who voted for the convicted felon and the adjudicated rapist once the swirling flames from the hell their vote unleashed hits the country, them, their friends and their family.
Indeed. Evelyn is a stupid person.
3.) Join Malcolm Nance’s American FAFO — Focused Action, Focused Objectives— opposition movement. Read about and implement his peaceful and creative plans for Inauguration Day rebellion among them ordering free Inauguration Day tickets from your U.S. Congressperson that you will never use and playing “The Imperial March” on a kazoo then sharing a video of you doing so on your favorite social media platform before, during and after the Inauguration.
4.) Listen to an inspirational and galvanizing song by John Lennon.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” in Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 8.
Bonhoeffer, 9.
Bonhoeffer, 13.
Bonhoeffer, 9.