Democracy Needs Ignorance

This quote is from an article I found on the website: lo9.com. It was titled “Democracy needs ignorant people, says science.” It goes on to say, “You might think that democracies work best when people care and know about the key issues. But a new study argues that for a democracy to function at all, you need lots of ignorant people blindly siding with the majority.

That's the argument put forward by Princeton researcher Iain Couzin and his team, who make the argument that a fully informed electorate would collapse into an unworkable hodgepodge of minority factions or risk being dominated by a single forceful minority group. But if most voters don't really think about the issues, they will just tend to side with whoever is popular, allowing majority rule to continue and democracy to keep functioning. Yeah, you might want to check your last shreds of political idealism at the door for this one.”

I found this item interesting in view of the many columns I’ve written about the resonating echo chambers at the political poles. This completes the picture for me. What picture you might ask? The picture of how so many people can be convinced to support politicians and positions that are clearly against their own best interests. Namely the middle class who continue to vote Republican when the “party of no” is not representing their interests.

For instance, most recently the Republicans voted to allow the payroll tax cut to expire until they changed their minds at the last minute. This would have increased taxes on the working person by as much as $1000 per year. What about their no-tax pledge to Grover Nordquist you ask? Grover said its okay as long as they don’t increase taxes on the wealthy. I’m not making this up. Check it out for yourself.

You see, the pledge-master, Mr. Nordquist and the Republicans represent the wealthy with money from the wealthy. Let me anticipate the negative responses like, “you want to redistribute their wealth” of “you want a welfare state for lazy people” or “socialism is killing the American way” or “rich people create jobs when taxes are low”. If you believe this, read the title of this column again.

Now please understand me: ignorance is not necessarily a pejorative term. All of us are ignorant of many areas of knowledge. When we walk into a physician’s office, we are ignorant of the knowledge necessary to diagnose what's wrong with us. There's nothing wrong with that. And I can understand how the average working person would be ignorant of the functions of government or the political system. Most are busy working and raising children. Who has time to do anything else?

But there is another form of ignorance; arrogant ignorance. I’ve written about it before. It’s a form of non-reflecting egotism. In simpler terms, it’s the attitude of “I already know what I believe and am not interested in asking any questions.” This would be like telling the physician, “I already know what's causing that pain in my side because most of friends have had the same pain, I just want some pain relief. And no, I don’t want to learn how to prevent it in the future.”

In this case, we can just get our prescription filled and not be affected by our lack of knowledge or our disinterest in finding out more. Not so in politics. But for some reason most people are satisfied to “side with whoever is popular, allowing majority rule to continue and democracy to keep functioning” exactly as it is while complaining about how it doesn't work for them.

Most of the people I know are dissatisfied with Congress and the president. Yet very few who I know can make a cogent statement about why. Until we can articulate what our politicians are doing wrong, we will continue to get the government we deserve.

Robert DeFilippis