Bonhoeffer on Power, Agency, and the Need to Be Needed

Reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer lately, I keep returning to his ideas about wisdom and folly, discernment, civil courage, agency, and what he called free responsibility. They carry particular weight because Bonhoeffer did not write from the safety of abstraction. One of eight children raised in an intellectually rigorous German family, he became a pastor and theologian who watched his country surrender to Hitler. He resisted the Nazification of the church, became involved in the German resistance, was imprisoned, and was ultimately executed in 1945, only weeks before the war ended.

When Bonhoeffer wrote about folly, he was not describing a lack of intelligence. He was describing something far more dangerous: the surrender of independent judgment. He had watched educated, capable people become absorbed into a collective reality in which power itself began to masquerade as truth.

Bonhoeffer refused that bargain.

He saw the enormous power of Hitler and the regime around him, yet he did not confuse power with moral authority. He retained the agency to look at what everyone else accepted and ask: But is it right? That may be one of the most important forms of courage.

Agency is not simply independence. It is not stubbornness, dominance, or getting one’s own way. Real agency requires stepping outside one’s ego, fear, appetite, and need for approval long enough to see reality clearly. It requires the courage to speak when silence is safer, to question what others have normalized, and, at times, to stand alone.

I think of a wealthy man I have known.

His money gave him influence, access, and the ability to make things happen. From the outside, he appeared powerful, but his power had an Achilles’ heel…he needed to be needed.

He had grown up without enough love or attention, always measuring himself against an older brother he believed was smarter and more admired. So he learned to prove himself. He worked harder, achieved more, and made more money. Somewhere along the way, accomplishment became evidence of worth.

And money became more than money; it became a means of belonging.

He would pay for dinners, offer trips, solve problems, rescue someone from financial difficulty, and talk the talk, all of which others mistook for brilliance. Yet he didn’t always practice what he preached. People gathered around him. Some genuinely loved him. Others learned what he needed and supplied it: admiration, dependence, gratitude, and reassurance that he mattered.

His money gave him power over circumstances, but his need to be needed gave others power over him.

That is where Bonhoeffer’s distinction between wisdom and folly proves useful. Wisdom requires discernment, the willingness to see reality as it is, even when it wounds us. Folly begins when our need for a particular version of reality outweighs our willingness to see the truth.

The wealthy man could fiercely defend himself yet struggled to step outside himself. When things did not go his way, anger often came first. Attack was easier than disappointment. Control was easier than collaboration. Blame was easier than asking what the situation might reveal about him. He knew how to stand up for himself, but rarely how to stand for something larger than himself.

Therein lies an important distinction between self-assertion and agency.

Power—whether political, social, or financial—works most effectively on those who have surrendered too much of their own judgment. They begin accommodating the powerful because it is easier, safer, or more rewarding than challenging them. Access is mistaken for substance. Wealth is mistaken for wisdom. The emperor keeps walking because everyone around him has something to gain by pretending to admire the clothes.

But remove the money, the position, the access—and what remains?

Bonhoeffer’s moral courage points in the opposite direction. His authority did not come from wealth or position. It came from his willingness to think independently, remain answerable to conscience, and ultimately accept the consequences of acting on what he believed was right.

That is what his idea of free responsibility asks of us.

Our childhood may explain our wounds. Our parents may explain our hunger. Other people may indeed exploit those vulnerabilities. But eventually we become responsible for recognizing the pattern – and deciding whether we will continue participating in it.

Perhaps wisdom begins there.

Not with having enough power to make people listen, but with possessing enough inner freedom to listen to what is true.

Not with gathering followers, but with knowing when the crowd is wrong.

Not with being needed by enough people, but with becoming secure enough in oneself to ask who would remain if there were nothing left to buy, fix, fund, rescue, or prove.

And having the moral courage to hear the answer.