David Frum, once the White House speechwriter who coined the phrase “axis of evil” in President Bush's 2022 State of the Union address, now warns of a different kind of danger: politicized stupidity. This is the practiced art of pretending not to understand by people who plainly do. They deliberately “don’t get the point,” Frum says, because “the actual point is too big and too scary.”
When a president tears down norms, enriches his family, or pardons his cronies, useful idiots rush in to miss the point. Are you against renovations? Don’t presidents always pardon people? These are not genuine questions, but clever deflections.
This is not a pathology of our media age. History is full of moments when societies chose not to know what they knew full well. For instance, in the 1930s, many elites in Britain and the United States refused to “get the point” about fascism. They were not misinformed; they were deliberately incurious, because the truth was too frightening. As Churchill lamented in 1936: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided.” It was not ignorance but a psychological defense against reality.
The same reflex appears in fiction. In Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Dr. Stockmann discovers that the town’s famous baths are contaminated, and the townsfolk suddenly “fail to understand” his evidence. Their stupidity is politicized, because acknowledging truth would cost them income and status. They prefer self-deception to self-sacrifice. Ibsen’s play feels modern because the logic has not changed. When truth threatens prosperity or pride, people quickly forget how to think.
When the Chernobyl reactor exploded in 1986, Soviet officials were in denial. The May Day parade in Kyiv went ahead under a radioactive plume. Scientists who spoke the truth were silenced, and local authorities assured residents of Pripyat that everything was normal, even as graphite blocks from the reactor lay scattered in the streets. The truth was too vast, too terrifying, and too disruptive to the narrative the system had told about itself. “Every lie we tell,” said one of the scientists later, “incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
C. S. Lewis understood this human frailty better than most. “We can only take so much reality,” he wrote, an admission that our minds have their own defense mechanisms. In The Problem of Pain, he observed that suffering forces truth upon us, that “God whispers to us in our pleasures but shouts in our pains.” Yet most of the time we stuff our ears. We invent stories, ideologies, and distractions so that we do not have to listen.
Freud called this disavowal - the ability to know and not know at once. We acknowledge reality but refuse to accept its consequences. The mind splits in two, one part registering the truth, the other pretending it isn’t there. Political life often runs on the same circuitry. Citizens grasp the facts but keep them quarantined, as if awareness alone could absolve responsibility.
The danger is that if we keep refusing to get the point, the point will get us. As Orwell warned, when loyalty demands that people believe contradictions — when they can accept that two and two make five because the Party says so — stupidity hardens from a choice into a reflexive habit.
None of us is immune. Every day we choose what not to know, what news to scroll past, what warning to shrug off. We curate our ignorance just as others once did in darker times until the lies feel safe and the truth feels intrusive.
And yet, as Lewis reminds us, reality is the one thing we cannot escape. “The first duty of every soul,” he wrote, “is to find reality and submit to it.” The alternative is a kind of collective blindness, a people choosing not to see what is unfolding before them.
History has shown again and again how that story ends, and it ain't pretty.
