We the Stupid

by Will Ogilvie Vega de Seoane

We are stupid. There, I said it. I feel much better now—like I’ve finally opened up in group therapy. PhDs won’t fix it, nor will subscriptions to all the best outlets. As individuals, we simply do not have the capacity to decide what is best in public life. As voters, we don’t usually care what our representatives are up to, nor do we have the faintest idea what the best policy on agriculture, artificial intelligence, or healthcare should look like—and that’s on a good day. But we do think we know. Deep down we think we are sovereign, that democracy is “all of us,” as though the government were some noble embodiment of “the people” rather than just another collection of organized persons with private agendas.

Plutarch tells a story that I have always found marvelous. It’s about Aristeides “the Just,” one of Athens’s heroes in the Persian Wars. The Athenians, weary of kings and tyrants, invented ostracism—a mechanism to expel for ten years any citizen who got too powerful. Each voter would scratch a name onto a shard of pottery, and if more than 6,000 shards had the same name on them, the man was politely asked to take a decade-long sabbatical. Today we’d probably call it “a career break for the common good.”

Anyway, one day a farmer approached Aristeides himself—without realizing who he was—and asked him to write the name “Aristeides” on his shard. Surprised, Aristeides asked if he had ever harmed him. “No,” said the farmer, “nor do I know him by sight. But I am tired of always hearing him called ‘the Just.’” Aristeides, being annoyingly noble, wrote down his own name and handed the shard back. Later, as he left the city in exile, he prayed the opposite prayer of Achilles: that no crisis should come which would force the Athenians to remember him. On LinkedIn, Aristeides might have written: “Currently on a ten-year sabbatical generously sponsored by the people of Athens. Seeking new challenges outside the Attic peninsula #OpenToWork.”

This, in miniature, is how people vote. Not with knowledge, or vision, or even vague coherence—but out of envy, spite, boredom, or some other glorious irrationality. The Athenians had shards; we have hashtags. Instead of ostracism by pottery, we have ostracism by X: one bad joke, one leaked email, and the digital mob sends you packing. Today in Britain, people can even be jailed for their comments on social media. So much for parrhêsia, that old Athenian virtue of speaking frankly to power. We’ve managed to turn it into a crime—and worse, the canceling mob thinks it’s “speaking truth to power” when in fact it is obedience dressed as rebellion.

Modern voters aren’t any better. Some vote because the candidate owns a cute dog. Others because the candidate is endorsed by Taylor Swift. Entire campaigns have been won on promises of free cable, or by a politician smiling the right way on TikTok. In Spain, we even coined a term for it: the Charo. A Charo is usually an old lady with pink hair who parrots whatever our president says. Charos cannot resist the presidential smile. Even when the president contradicts himself, as he normally does, doing the exact opposite of what he promised, they just blush and blink as if to say: “Oh, Pedro, always misbehaving—we love you all the more for it.” They pamper their charming president and dismiss any criticism as fascist slander. Welcome to the Charocracy.

And lest you think I’m putting myself above the mob—let me volunteer as tribute. I have a PhD in philosophy. Political philosophy, to be more exact. I can tell you many things about Plato, but ask me what our fishing policy should be, and I flop around like a sardine on a deck. I can quote Tocqueville on the tyranny of the majority, but I couldn’t design a competent healthcare system if you held a gun to my head. My values? Sure, I can say, “Less government is better than more,” but that still leaves me at the mercy of politicians who swear they’ll shrink the beast while quietly feeding it an extra doughnut.

And here’s where the Athenians had it easier. Their state was small. Did I say state? Oh no, they had city-states. No monstrous leviathans then. A few magistrates, some courts, a navy, yes, but nothing like our elephantine governments with ministries of culture, agriculture, space exploration, gender equality, digital innovation, national happiness, and—give it a few years—proper pillow arrangement. Athens’s citizens could (at least in principle) manage their own affairs, even if they were susceptible to demagogues. As democracy advanced, demagogues multiplied, and things got worse. But imagine transplanting that same Athenian farmer—the one who was tired of hearing Aristeides called “the Just”—into our world. Today, that same farmer can retreat into digital chambers where a dozen experts will confirm his every prejudice. Before the Internet, at least he had to grumble in the marketplace; now he can google himself into certainty that Aristeides must go. Ancient stupidity was local. Ours is stupidity on steroids, armed with nuclear weapons and central banks.

So what’s left? Tribal colors we wave to show which brand of ignorance we prefer. Democracy, in practice, is not the wisdom of the people but the arithmetic of our stupidity. And maybe, perversely, that’s the miracle: not that we get it right, but that somehow we haven’t yet burned the whole thing down.

In the end, maybe the best we can do is what Aristeides did: pray. Not that our rulers will be just (they won’t), not that voters will suddenly become informed (they can’t), but that no great crisis will come that forces us to know what we’re doing. Until then, we’ll keep scratching names onto our shards—out of envy, out of spite, out of sheer fatigue—and call it democracy. And maybe, since we are so stupid, the wisest course is to keep the government too small to turn stupidity into law. Private stupidity is tragic; institutional stupidity that has coercive power is catastrophic.

Will Ogilvie Vega de Seoane teaches political philosophy and international politics at Hesperides University, where he also directs the Bachelor’s Degree in PPE and the Conversations on the Great Books. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Universidad Francisco Marroquín.