STUPID IS AS EVIL DOES
Why do smart people believe stupid things? Why do good people do evil?
We assume evil is a monster we can recognize—a figure of mustache-twirling malice. We assume stupidity is a lack of facts. We are wrong.
The most dangerous force in the world is not ignorance. It is brilliance weaponized in a sealed room.
Stupid Is As Evil Does reveals that true stupidity is an active discipline: the unshakeable commitment to a self-made logic, even as reality begs you to reconsider. It’s the CEO ignoring the data, the revolutionary purifying their movement into oblivion, the leader moving pins on a map while the ceiling dust sifts down—all certain they are right.
This book is your training in "The Watchmaker's Empathy." You will learn to open the case of any destructive mind—from history's tyrants to the echo chambers of modern media—not to sympathize, but to diagnose the gearwork of their certainty. You will tour the "Factory" that mass-produces this sealed thinking and learn to build "Clinics" for resilient, reality-updating thought.
This is not a book about why they are stupid. It is a manual for ensuring you never become the person in the bunker, defending a dying map of the world. The stakes are not just intellectual; they are survival.
Learn the architecture of closed minds. So you can choose to keep yours open.
Stupid Is As Evil Does redefines stupidity not as low intelligence, but as the brilliant defense of a sealed logic against all contrary evidence. Using powerful historical parallels—like Hitler in his bunker versus Lincoln in the telegraph office—it reveals how this "functional stupidity" is the root of both personal failure and historical evil. The book provides a diagnostic toolkit to identify this pattern in the world and in yourself, teaching the critical discipline of staying unsealed, adaptable, and in faithful contact with reality. It is an essential guide for thinking clearly in an age of overwhelming confusion.