Quote of the day
The real problem is that our culture worships at the altar of democratic governance. Power to the people, and all that. Not enough stop and think that maybe the people, when they act collectively through voting, are actually pretty collectively stupid.
April 9th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Remember – intelligence is a left-bounded gaussian distribution, so more than half the population has below average intelligence.
April 9th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
As the despair.com poster puts it, “None of us is as dumb as all of us.”
April 9th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Can we declare public education a failure then, or must we declare it a smashing success for the Left?
April 9th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
I remember the good old days, when we liberals were the ones in the ivory towers looking down scornfully upon the masses…
In many ways, I’m inclined to agree, though: look at the popularity of NASCAR and “pro” wrestling…
April 9th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Unfortunately very true. In conversations I have I find that many people just parrot what they hear in the mainstream media, much of which is either incorrect or at least misleading. Check out the product of our media & education system by listening to some of these college kids saying that only the Police should have guns on campus.
April 9th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Yup, I don’t buy that lie. The people of the US are the most productive the planet has ever seen and the most generous. Our medical industry creates miracles on almost a daily basis, and the standard of living for the average American is higher than kings two hundred years ago which commanded millions of people and billions of dollars of wealth. The American people have done more for humanity than any other.
We do have our flaws, the greatest being worship of the state. There are many ways people go about it, and many motivations too, but all feel fear of retribution from it. A literal big-brother effect. In arenas where there is freedom, we excel, and the places where freedom is choked by government, there is treachery, favoritism and a disregard for others. Wherever government goes, pain follows. We must realize that liberty is the answer to our problems – not government. They know how to exploit our weaknesses to keep us inline, which doesn’t make us stupid, but careless and ignorant.
There are those of us who are in the know, and it is our responsibility to inform others.
April 9th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
I’m rather far from convinced.
I’ve run into more than my share of stupid, idiotic individuals who I’m not sure I’d trust with a sharp knife, but were not exactly an issue on a social level. I’ve run into people who were far further into the whole democratic process than I would be, even though they understood the difference between direct democracy and modern republican democracy, yet weren’t a particular risk.
Just on the other side, there are more than a fair share of people who I’d lose an IQ test to, and I sure as hell wouldn’t vote like. There are individualists who I would not want involved in any type of government.
It’s believing the government can do good. Not knowing that it could happen, if perhaps by accident. Not accepting that government actions might be necessary. Not even liking government action. Not the elevation of democracy and groupthink, although those are inefficient. The basic assumption that We must Do Something, and by There Must Be a Law.
Past that point, it doesn’t matter how smart or how individualistic you are.
April 10th, 2008 at 5:55 am
I beg you to consider a reading:
“What is the specifically American sense of life?
A sense of life is so complex an integration that the best way to identify it is by means of concrete examples and by contrast with the manifestations of a different sense of life.
The emotional keynote of most Europeans is the feeling that man belongs to the State, as a property to be used and disposed of, in compliance with his natural, metaphysically determined fate. A typical European may disapprove of a given State and may rebel, seeking to establish what he regards as a better one, like a slave who might seek a better master to serve – but the idea that he is the sovereign and the government is his servant, has no emotional reality in his consciousness. He regards service to the State as an ultimate moral sanction, as an honor, and if you told him that his life is an end in itself, he would feel insulted or rejected or lost. Generations brought up on statist philosophy and acting accordingly, have implanted this in his mind from the earliest, formative years of his childhood.
A typical American can never grasp that kind of feeling. An American is an independent entity. The popular expression of protest against “being pushed around” is emotionally unintelligible to Europeans, who believe that to be pushed around is their natural condition. Emotionally, an American has no concept of service (or of servitude) to anyone. Even if he enlists in the army and hears it called ‘service to country,’ his feeling is that of a generous aristocrat who chose to do a dangerous task. A European soldier feels that he is doing his duty.
A European, on any social level, lives in a world made by others (he never knows clearly by whom), and seeks or accepts his place in it. The American attitude is best expressed by a line from a poem: ‘The world began when I was born and the world is mine to win.’ (“The Westerner” by Badger Clark.)
A European is disarmed in the face of a dictatorship: he may hate it, but he feels that he is wrong and, metaphysically, the State is right. An American rebels to the bottom of his soul.
Only one thing is certain: dictatorship cannot take hold in America today. This country, as yet, cannot be ruled – but it can explode. It can blow up into the helpless rage and blind violence of a civil war. It cannot be cowed into submission, passivity, malevolence, resignation. It cannot be ‘pushed around.’ Defiance, not obedience, is the American’s answer to overbearing authority. The nation that ran an underground railroad to help human beings escape from slavery, or began drinking on principle in the face of Prohibition, will not say ‘Yes, sir’ to the enforcers of ration coupons and cereal prices. Not yet.”
It’s been thirty-seven years since Ayn Rand wrote that. At this point, I think the final two words in that excerpt are prophetic.
It is democracy that is killing us. The concept of freedom just doesn’t occur to people as a political touchstone, anymore. It’s all about the herd, now, and that’s because the people that we’re living with are not “Americans” anymore. I, for one, refuse to disgrace the commitment of their ancient forebears by calling these Eloi of our time by that name. And submitting anything having to do with my rights to their votes is the most foolish thing I could think of.
Join the voters’ boycott, ladies and gentlemen. Do it for moral reasons, and say so, every chance you get.
Or; go get pushed around at the polls. It’s your life: you can burn it down any way you want to, but you ought to know what you’re doing while you’re at it.