Am I the only one who disagrees with the OPs basic premise that people are of good will and honorable?
People are not honorable they are self-interested. That doesn’t mean they are cruel, if they can avoid cruelty often they will, but studies have shown that people will take a reduction in wealth if someone else takes an even greater proportionally reduction in wealth. We do not care about our well-being, we care about our well-being in relation to others.
People are self-interested, honor and good conscience has nothing to do with it.
This is true, but at the same time self-interest generally runs into some level of goodwill. As a community we are stronger than as individuals, and as such I get more out of being in a community than being apart from it. That is, where “community” is defined as being a group who aid one another to some extent.
Americans can comprehend sports. Republican and Democrat are the teams. Which team do you like? Never mind that the Republicans have too many strikes and the Democrats not enough balls, just pick one already and support it.
Pick one and root for it. No matter what kind of evil things the individual players do, support your team! Forget that the fiscal conservatives have been spending like drunken sailors and the socially liberal can’t get behind their leader and push a health care bill into law.
What? So-and-so scandal bribed and adultery who? It doesn’t matter, the team is still good! Support the team! Yeah! Buddy! Woof Woof Woof!
Education? I sure know a lot more about economics, geography, and science than 90% of the public. There are more than one side of any complex issue. For example, let’s look at the stimulus package. Smart people will disagree on whether spending money to create jobs is worth increasing the deficit. But the public debate comes down to “taxes are bad” and “Obama is a socialist”. That is no basis on which to make a decision. I bet that most Americans don’t know where the US is in terms of taxes vs the rest of the world, or how our current tax rates compare to the past, or how marginal tax rates work, or the difference between gross and net income. Frickin Joe the Plumber became a hero even though he is an uniformed moron, or maybe because he is a moron. My son was more informed at age 12 than most people are as adults. It would be one thing if people were aware of their ignorance and wanted to learn more, but it seems as though people revel in their stupidity. They wear it as a badge of honor.
The “Common Man” is going to vote for the person they think agrees with them. This person puts across this idea of commonality through massive amounts of advertising, which is paid for by large corporations, and supported by the media which is owned by large corporations.
The fake “Joe Everybody” with massive amounts of support will trump the real “Joe Everybody” almost every damn time, which, by the way, is something all you supporters of no-name third party candidates will never learn.
When they were trying to paint Obama as an out of touch intellectual I remember Bill Maher saying “I want my president and the people advising him to be smarter than me.”
There’s nothing wrong with groups looking out for their own interests if they can see their connection to the whole. The ongoing problem seems to be that we can’t see that connection clearly enough.
I don’t necessarily disagree that people (as a plural of person) are of good will and honorable. However, I think it’s a basic fact that none of us are as cruel as all of us. At least with a Republic if a part goes bad you can cut it off and replace it, and that since he’s just one person he can think for himself and isn’t swayed by groupthink of every occasion. If you go down to a straight Democracy it’s led by mob mentality and if you thought the fear mongering was bad NOW…
Having a handful of people in charge can be the difference between “he should be fined” and feeding off each other’s malice and lynching everyone who so much as steals a candy bar.
I suspect that the people you hang out with are non-representative of a random sample of the US. What percentage of people would you say don’t believe in Darwinian evolution? What percentage of people would you say think that Iraq had WMD?
But that’s not the claim. The claim was that Joe Sixpack “deems himself infinitely wise, & an expert in all fields, while taking pride in his own lack of education” and I just don’t see that. There’s ignorance out there (otherwise Cecil would have nothing do to) but for the most part IMO it’s not that prideful ignorance that you’re ascribing to the teeming masses.
