This has echoes of mass formation.

Why Stupidity Is More Dangerous Than Evil:

In a letter to his friends, family, and followers written while he awaited execution at Flossenbürg concentration camp for his role in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Adolph Hitler, [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer detailed his thoughts on the root cause of the moral and intellectual infection that resulted in the Third Reich. His conclusion: It’s the stupidity, stupid.

Stupidity, according to Bonhoeffer, is a sociological problem. “It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions.” Bonhoeffer identified the cause of societal stupidity like this: “Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law.”

People almost never see themselves as evil or as supporting evil things, but we’re generally too stupid to know the difference—further evidence of the supremacy of stupidity in causing human suffering, and the necessity to fight stupidity instead of evil.

According Bonhoeffer, you can’t fight stupidity with reason, facts, protests, or your fists, because, to the stupid, “Reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed… and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”

A few years after Bonhoeffer’s hanging and the fall of the Third Reich, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, eminent psychiatrist and president of the American Psychiatric Association, was enlisted to interview war criminals at Nuremberg to try to make sense of Nazi atrocities and ensure that nothing like the Holocaust ever happened again.

Shaken by the horror of Nazi Germany and by the potential for civilization-ending nuclear war, Cameron devoted his professional and intellectual life to fighting societal evil using the tools of psychiatry instead of religion.

Employing pioneering techniques at the cutting edge of the medical field, Cameron set out to break the lifelong thought patterns of his patients, who were mostly suffering from relatively minor mental health issues. At his research center at McGill University, Cameron drugged patients with powerful tranquilizers and paralytics that kept them either asleep or wide-awake-but-paralyzed for weeks straight. He performed “electric lobotomies” by zapping patients’ brains with nearly deadly jolts of electricity, over and over again. He fed them heroic doses of LSD and locked helmets on their heads equipped with speakers that played the same 10-second tape loop of their own voice at a deafening volume for weeks straight.

Whether he knew it or not is an open question, but Cameron’s work was funded by the CIA, who used the results of this program (and others like it) to “design a scientifically based system for extracting information from ‘resistant sources.’ In other words, torture.” Remember Abu Graib? That was rooted in Cameron’s ideas.

Was Cameron evil? He sure didn’t think so.

Cameron wasn’t “stupid” either, at least not in the way we usually think of the word. He didn’t develop his ideas about human behavior by passively accepting propaganda like some damn Nazi. He applied the academic rigors he’d developed at the most prestigious universities and medical schools in the free world to conclude that the solution to depression was strapping vulnerable people into torture helmets for weeks straight.