Please consider that this ostensible stupidity is not actual, medical, clinical, cognitive incapacity "stupidity".
Consider that it might be pernicious, deliberate, fully conscious, fully self-aware, fully sanctimonious, fully pretentious, fully willful costly signaling or conspicuous consumption of a costly (stupid) belief to other members of the tribe as a form of banner, heraldry, sigil. People cannot be this stupid. People are not actually this stupid. People can be pretentious sanctimonious pricks who impose their superiority on others by displaying how costly their belief is. People >are< pretentious sanctimonious pricks who impose their superiority on others by displaying how costly their belief is. They don't have to believe anything. They have to demonstrate what the belief requires, if they believed it, and the conspicuous display of that stupidity is the key to answering a challenge/authentication protocol, among the tribe, that basically says, "Are you still with me? Are you still against them?" Consider. Clinical stupidity cannot explain what JWs do. Stockholm syndrome alone does not either. Letting JW rank and file get away with being stupid is letting them off the hook. They are not stupid. They are weak. They have failed themselves and they have failed their children to act on their well-founded doubts. They are weak because they have chosen, and continue actively to choose, to not find the strength to do what they know is right. If they are chained in bondage to family members, yeah, fine, I lost my entire family. All of it.
