“Wise in Secret”: Diderot, Goethe, and the New Age of Manufactured Ignorance

“Must one be senseless among the senseless? No; but one must be wise in secret.” — Denis Diderot
“Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Diderot’s admonition was not addressed to cowards. It was meant for those who see clearly yet find themselves surrounded by a world determined to walk blindfolded into disaster. Goethe, in turn, warned us what happens when ignorance rises from its armchair and takes command of the machinery of state. The danger is not the fool alone; it is the fool armed with authority.

Today, these warnings read less like philosophical reflections and more like field notes from our own time.
For the most striking feature of the present age is not a lack of information, but the confidence with which powerful people act in defiance of the simplest physical, economic, and mathematical realities. And in their zeal, they attack the very people whose knowledge keeps society functioning: the engineers, analysts, scientists, and level-headed citizens who, in healthier times, would have been indispensable.

It is becoming hazardous to be correct.
Diderot anticipated this: be wise — but be wise in secret, for wisdom is precisely what agitates the ruling madmen.

When Electricity Becomes a Fairy Tale

Nothing reveals the crisis more clearly than our age’s strange confusion about energy — a confusion not found in technical journals or power-plant control rooms, but in parliaments and ministries.

Consider the recurring modern fantasy that electricity is a source rather than a carrier. A notion so elementary it need not be taught twice — unless one’s career depends on ignoring it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 declared that with enough solar panels and windmills, society could simply “shut down” all fossil and nuclear plants immediately. When asked about grid stability, she dismissed the concern with “we’ll have batteries.” The remark did not merely betray misunderstanding; it revealed an indifference to understanding itself. To acknowledge the limits of intermittent generation would have required listening to engineers — the very people now treated as obstacles.

In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer celebrated the shutdown of the Palisades nuclear plant, the state’s only reliable carbon-free baseload source. Months later, facing the threat of grid instability, she reversed herself — not because she learned physics, but because reality refused to cooperate. That nuclear power counted as “clean energy” under her own law appeared to come as news to her.

Germany offered an even grander performance. After shutting down its last nuclear plants in 2023, officials announced a triumphant transition to renewables. The actual result? Burning record quantities of coal and importing nuclear electricity from France at premium prices. One might almost admire the consistency: prohibiting a thing at home while purchasing it eagerly from abroad. In the Harz base, such behavior would be a punchline. In Berlin, it is national strategy.

California completes the spectacle. Officials boast of “100% clean energy” moments while quietly importing a third of their electricity from out-of-state gas and coal plants. Citizens are then instructed not to charge their electric cars during evening hours because the grid might collapse. A civilization that discourages the use of electricity during its most basic daily activities has surrendered more than technical competence.

When Economics Is Replaced by Folklore

Energy is not the only domain where logic has been replaced by incantation. Monetary policy has drifted into a realm where language matters more than arithmetic, and where the simplest economic truths are treated as suspicious.

One does not need a doctorate to know that printing extraordinary amounts of money debases a currency. Yet public explanations for inflation increasingly resemble moral tales rather than analysis.

Elizabeth Warren insists that rising prices are caused not by monetary expansion but by “corporate greed,” as though corporations suddenly became greedy in 2020 after centuries of relative restraint. When shown the chart illustrating the enormous increase in dollar supply, she simply pivots away. To acknowledge the mechanics of inflation would require acknowledging the consequences of policy — a luxury modern politics rarely allows.

President Joe Biden offered a rotating list of culprits: inflation was “transitory,” then caused by “Putin,” then by “supply chains,” then by “greed.” Never by the trillions in new dollars created by his own administration. One wonders how millennia of economic history managed without this enlightened catalogue of excuses.

Argentina’s former president Alberto Fernández insisted that inflation — running at 140% — had “no relation” to monetary emission. Prices were rising, he said, because businessmen were raising them. His own finance minister visibly lost composure and later resigned. In a world ruled by magical thinking, there is no place for arithmetic.

When Folly Gains Power

Occasionally the absurdity becomes unmistakable.

French leadership announced a massive nuclear build-out after allowing its existing reactors to decay through years of deliberate neglect. Successive British governments dismantled their own energy security, closed coal plants, stalled nuclear expansion, banned fracking, and then appeared shocked when gas prices soared tenfold.

New York banned gas stoves and gas heating in new buildings despite lacking the grid capacity required for the resulting surge in electrical demand. The cold will answer where reasoning fails.

These are not fringe figures. These are heads of state, governors, ministers, and legislators. And they increasingly target the competent — those who ask the inconvenient questions, those who refuse to recite the approved fictions. Expertise becomes subversion; clarity becomes heresy.

Goethe warned that nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action. But here we see something darker: ignorance weaponized, ignorance celebrated, ignorance punishing knowledge.

Diderot’s Warning for the Present Age

The phrase “be wise in secret” is not an invitation to cowardice.
It is a recognition that wisdom has enemies.

In The Maier Files, the few who understand the deeper machinery of the world do not advertise themselves. They know that in certain times — including ours — truth provokes hostility, and understanding is treated as a threat.

We live in an era where the incompetent wield vast influence, where those who grasp the basic principles of physics and economics are scolded, censored, or dismissed as troublemakers. It is an inversion of values so thorough that only an older voice like Diderot’s can diagnose it: the wise must navigate a world ruled by the senseless.

But in such times, clarity becomes a duty, not a luxury — even if spoken quietly, even if preserved among a shrinking circle of the sane.

For it is not the loudness of folly that shapes history, but the precision of those who refuse to abandon understanding, even in the shadows.