>The Constitution used to prevent our stupidity from being dangerous.
“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
It is my firm belief that intelligence is in fact quite evenly distributed. The stupidest person in the world is not that much less intelligent than the smartest. My point is that intelligence is here not the point.
I hold that the main reason so many people know so little and are so wrong about what they think they do know is that they are amazingly lazy and so were their instructors (parents first, then the 'teachers' hired to babysit them through their teens). This laziness is directly due to the unnatural amount of national peacetime we have enjoyed. The left likes to preen about how many wars we've been involved in, but the really important fact is that none of those wars happened in any signficant way in the American homeland. We had the horrific Twin Tower catastrophe, to be sure, and that is the exception that tests the rule: name the second one of such importance that people did more than cluck their tongues in dismay or disapproval and then mildly clapped while the perpetrator was executed.
That kind of complacency is exaclty what leads to utterly lazy thinking, the kind that assumes that the way things are is the way they always have to be and there is no limit to the danger that can be courted socially, economically and politically because our way of life is so impervious to any real damage. In such an environment, people casually vote in an immature, naive Marxist simply so they can say they voted for the first (at least partly) black President.
Sure, that looks stupid on stilts, but people really aren't that stupid: they know what they have done and as some have pointed out, they expect to be well-paid for their efforts, however minimal in fact. They have bought the principle that Obama can rip off the Treasury for them and will do so on the backs of people these voters have always resented and always will want to cut down. They want to share in the rich spoils of the war on the rich and want to have to do nothing in particular to achieve it.
That's lazy, not stupid, IMHO.