This problem of ignorance in the mass movement of low information voters is troublesoe because they are fertile ground for the rise of tyranny and the age of charlatan megalomaniacs.
An essay on the low level of intellectual inquiry that characterizes even 1st world societies.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/01/the_reign_of_collective_stupidity.html
Everything is right in this essay, but the author mistakenly says that Aristotle advocates that Democracy is the best form of government. Artistotle, being no fool, advocated for constitutional commonwealth self government and considered democracy one of the most potentially destructive forms of government. After all his laboratory was Athens.
We formed a constitutional representative republic of limited government powers by consent of the governed. Most people on the left in the low information herd want pure democracy, since they think tyranny of the majority is the goal of good government. Wrong.
Aristotle asserted in his books on politics that the most important things a political leader can do is teach the populace the morality and good attitudes essential for good self governance and the dangers of envy and class conflict.
He wrote the books on politics after the books on ethics and he did understand human nature and how societies form.
We are in deep trouble–the current intellectual climate is extreme and influenced by group think and political/social censorship.
This is an easily predicted side-effect of the fully enfranchised democracy. It’s an inescapable mathematical fact that those with above average intelligence will always be outnumbered by those without. The representative form is especially flawed due to the common man’s willingness to “set it and forget it” when it comes to governance. Unfortunately, the worse things are for individuals, the less they prioritize leisurely study of politics and history. The people do not want an intelligent person to educate them about the highly complicated sources of their problems and why a long, often painful solution is required. They want a charismatic person to tell them a quick fix will work and that they don’t have to think about it too much.
The question is “how would you place restrictions on the right to vote?” The potential for even worse corruption has been proven time and again in that area. If we were to test for “intelligence” would belief in CAGW be part of the definition?
One thing history is very consistent about is that government success is inversely proportional to the size of the population governed. It may be that the USA is simply too large to be effectively governed by centralized power. Fortunately we have fifty state governments ready and capable of taking over much of the decision making. We just need to prize the fed’s fingers off of the power.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”—Winston Churchill
To clarify, the ideas and practice of democracy contemporaneous with Aristotle (give or take a couple centuries) were all derived from an unshakable understanding that all humans are liable to corruption.
To curtail the effects of corruption, the successful democracies used limited terms in public offices, a combination of election by vote, drafting, and rotation to fulfil these offices, and universal public supervision of all presently employed officials. These methods guaranteed that public duties were evenly distributed among the citizens, that there was no political elite (unless you consider citizens to be “elite”, for there were also slaves and other non-citizens), and that good people did not have enough time to become corrupt and the already corrupt ones could not inflict unlimited damage on the population. Back in the day, it was easy to judge which political systems were successful: those that withstood attacks by hostile neighbours or by Persians, employed all these anti-corruption measures.
Now, the modern Western political system is often compared to the classical Greek democracy. But if you do a point-by-point comparison, how much of it were we able to preserve? We do elect people, but we do not rotate them or draft them (except for military service in some countries). We have a significantly expanded version of the limited term. And we can only dream of public supervision (a.k.a. transparency).
Of all forms of ignorance, “educated” ignorance is the most dangerous, the most unreasonable and the hardest to overcome.
And the real dilema is that the “underinformed” pay little, if any taxes so voting for huge federal or state programs ($$$$$$) seems like a “good thing” to them. Politicians all learn this after 15 minutes in office. Democracy in its pure form relies on educated and informed voters and we have nothing like that now.
Yeah, well we’ve got our schools to fall back on: http://www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2014/01/Remedial-English-copy.jpg
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Low Info Voters are a Mass Movement
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