Über die Dummheit

written on October 17, 2026, read June 2026

When you sit in a doctor’s waiting room with a book, you almost feel like a snob already, while everyone around you stares into their phone, completely entangled in the net. If on top of that you’re reading a small Reclam book, it looks even a little “snobbier”. And if the title then happens to be “Über die Dummheit” (“On Stupidity”), you can practically hear the other patients thinking: “What an arrogant snob!”

And yet, for me, the essential insight from this book – a reprint of Robert Musil’s 1937 lecture “On Stupidity” – is how much we are all in this state ourselves, and how little stupidity sometimes differs from positive qualities, so that we wouldn’t even notice it. Musil puts it simply brilliantly: “If stupidity did not look deceptively like progress, talent, hope or improvement, no one would want to be stupid.”

Musil himself was aware of the problem: whoever talks about stupidity must consider themselves clever. But he also knew that this is not necessarily the case.

In the end, the book can be both: the Dunning–Kruger effect turned into paper, or the guide to modest self-restraint that Musil calls for in his lecture in order to escape the worst consequences of stupidity.