If We’re So Stupid…

by Erik W. Matson

A fine article published here last month by Will Ogilvie Vega de Seoane foregrounds two disjointed aspects of modern democratic politics. The first is that most of us know next to nothing about political affairs. We know little of the specifics of the public policies and regulations to which we are subject. We have little sense of what, exactly, desirable policy reforms might entail in our contexts. (“Less government” is not a policy recommendation.) Most of us lack even a basic knowledge of the facts of civic life. Many American citizens would be hard-pressed to name their congressional representatives. Similar ignorance, I venture, exists in other countries.

The second aspect is that despite our limited knowledge, we often have strong opinions about political outcomes. We are quick to voice and defend our opinions with whatever loose facts, speculations, and assertions we find at hand. Our quickness to defend our political opinions in the face of our ignorance reflects the reality that they are mainly a function of peer-group influence and moral–psychological disposition. We don’t reason our way to our political views; we reason our way from them.

The curious combination of ignorance and zeal explains much of the turbulence and derangement of democratic politics. It is this combination, it seems, that motivates the striking title of Will’s essay: “We the Stupid.” We are not stupid simply because we lack insight and intelligence into public affairs. We are stupid because we pretend to know what we do not, and we despise—and even attempt to “cancel,” silence, or kill—those with whom we disagree.

To succeed in the modern democratic landscape, politicians must cater to the unreasoned ideological convictions of the masses. Virtuous political candidates who take sober, reasoned approaches generally lack sufficiently broad appeal. By selection, then, successful candidates are often spotty characters. In office, they can be expected to pursue a mixed bag of policies that advance their personal interests and appeal to their specific electoral base, irrespective of the total effect on the nation. And the total effect is very often negative. Our modern democratic politics has yielded ballooning welfare states, fiscal profligacy and public debt, unwieldy and unaccountable regulatory leviathans, a constant debasement of money, and perpetual foreign interventions and conflicts.

The logic of our politics is a disturbing thing to behold. The dysfunction and the perverse incentives run so deep that it is a wonder our societies hold together at all. But there is a greater wonder still: there is much to celebrate for those of us fortunate enough to live in the democratic societies of the Western world. We enjoy relative peace and security in our property; relative freedom of expression and association; access to broadly functional legal systems; historically high life expectancy; plentiful food supplies; and much more. How long our civilizational order will last is an open question. Past performance does not guarantee future results. That our civilizational order exists at all and has lasted as long as it has, however, is nothing short of a miracle.

How did “we the stupid” stumble into this miraculous state of affairs? If humans are so stupid, how did we paint the Mona Lisa, discover calculus, construct the Empire State Building, and fly to outer space? How did we manage to expand the number of our bumbling members to over 8 billion?

The first answer is that we are not as stupid as our politics makes us seem. Large-scale democratic politics selects for and encourages behavior that brings out the worst in us. Our political engagement makes us appear stupid when viewed from a certain perspective, but the appearance changes upon closer inspection.

Since we are hopelessly ignorant about the real substance of our political choices—i.e., the actual implications of our selected candidates and policy preferences—we tend to focus more on what our political preferences express or signal to our peer groups. Our participation in national, state, and even local democratic elections is much less a matter of reasoned deliberation about policy options than an opportunity for us to forge and reforge communal bonds.

Our leaning towards expressive political engagement appears stupid in the sense that it results in destructive patterns of public policy and dumbed-down political discourse. But in another sense, it is entirely reasonable. We know very little about politics, and there is much to be known, and we each independently have no impact on political outcomes—our individual vote counts for nothing in terms of influencing election outcomes. It is sensible considering these facts for us to use our political activity as an opportunity to gain local standing and community for ourselves. The widespread consequence of such behavior is often negative. But that is not a mark against human intelligence per se. It is simply an inevitable possibility in democratic politics given the kind of intelligent creatures we are.

The same kind of intelligence that problematizes large-scale democratic politics and makes us appear so stupid manifests differently in non-political spheres. Our situational awareness and our sensitivity to group dynamics lead us towards expressive large-scale political engagement, but in the ordinary spheres of private life, the same awareness and sensitivity facilitate commercial engagement and voluntary association. Our instincts for solidarity and relationships within a broader community encourage us to form clubs and churches and charities and businesses. The outcomes of such voluntary arrangements tend to be more beneficial than the outcomes of politics, partly because our efforts focus on local matters within the realm of daily experience. Judgment in matters of daily experience is naturally superior to our judgment in distant political matters because we have more observations and experiences to work with. The outcomes also tend to be more beneficial because they are voluntary—the exit option is a powerful check on waywardness.

When we understand the productive potential of human intelligence in private life, and the distorting effects of politics given our intelligence, we appreciate a second reason for the success of our civilization. Liberal societies discovered or stumbled upon ways of organizing themselves that limited the influence of politics, institutionally and culturally. Classical liberals often foreground the institutional variables—checks and balances, the division and separation of power, and written, formal constitutional rules protecting life, liberty, and property. But the role of cultural sensibilities has been as important as the formal institutional structures. The institutional structures of the US Constitution do not and cannot solve the information and incentive problems of large-scale democratic politics. Those problems have been avoided to some extent—or at least mitigated—because the majority of American citizens have often been animated by the same spirit that animated the American founders: a liberal spirit that commits to viewing all as moral equals under the law; a spirit that valorizes cooperation and exertion in the spheres of ordinary life; a spirit that downgrades the glamor of the courts of politics.

Clawing back our polities from the absurdities of modern democratic politics does not require that we become less stupid—stupidity has in fact never been our fundamental problem. Our problem, rather, is that we are gradually losing the spiritual and cultural moorings that understand politics as a handmaiden to the ordinary, peaceable activities of private citizens. These moorings account for much of our civilizational success. Losing them encourages a worldview that prioritizes the political. Such a worldview does not make us stupid, but it orients our native intelligence in harmful directions.

Erik Matson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center and Deputy Director of the Adam Smith Program at George Mason University. He additionally serves as a lecturer in political economy in the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America.