Thoughts about the intelligence of the public

This post, bee in the bonnet actually, was triggered by some comments milo made yesterday. 

milo

Ears of the other milo

 

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public. -- attributed to American author and social critic H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) but not found exactly verbatim in his published works, so the source and original form of this expression are not known with absolute certainty

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably untrue. It is the chief occupation of mankind. -- H.L. Mencken

Well, what about that? Right? Not right? Not sure? Don't understand the question?

Let's reframe the question, just for fun. The framing of the issue above is by people who think or do know they know how to fool lots of people. Yeah, Mencken thought he could see people. That was only partly true. There really are some people who make their living by deceiving and irrationally emotionally manipulating the public. That business sector that does that is called public relations. The biblical admonition thou shalt not lie is basically 100% irrelevant to those people and businesses. Their paychecks and return on investments depend on lying. If they are not good liars, they are out of jobs. But what if the Bible got it right about lying and it really is a deeply bad and immoral thing to do to people?

So, how about framing it like this: 

1. (social science:) “.... cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. .... the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”

2. (reasoning:) By evolution of what it is to be human, we are susceptible to some variable degree to liars, deceivers, emotional manipulators and crackpots who apply flawed, usually self-serving reasoning, lies and slanders to political issues, business, and religion, the goal usually being accumulation of wealth and/or power, usually at other people's and interest's expense.

3. (therefore:) The elites and people who know better who lie, crackpot and emotionally manipulate are more culpable of bad or evil than the people they have deceived, manipulated and betrayed.

Over the years I've posted my opinion about who is more to blame for false and irrational beliefs in politics, the deceivers or the deceived. Most recently for America's radical right, roughly Trump supporters, this feels about right:

~55% elite propagandist deceivers & politicians

~45% rank and file deceived 

But now on rethinking this yet again, I reassess the culpability analysis for America's radical right:

~60-65% elite propagandist deceivers & politicians

~35% rank and file deceived, 40% when they have the information to know better 

Why give less culpability to regular people? A couple of reasons. First, when Reagan was shot, his shooter was accorded some leniency because he was considered to be mentally impaired. After that, the laws were changed to make a mental impairment defense essentially impossible. But the underlying fact of the human condition did not change. Only the politics changed. Humans are still just as fallible, flawed or sometimes mentally ill. But changes in the law like that reinforce the idea of the primacy of human intelligence and reason, despite little or nothing having changed about the human condition in millennia.

Second, look at how deceitful and crackpot modern radical right and other politics has become. Average people cannot know truth when it is being hidden. The burden should be on people who know truth to speak truth. Americans can't handle truth very well because they have been shielded from it by much of the political left, right, and the business and religious communities.

I do not myself believe that many people do things because they think they are the right thing to do . . . . I do not think that knowledge of what is morally right is motivational in any serious sense for anyone except a handful of saints. Federal judge Richard Posner, referring to the power of social situations to compel behavior

I find it difficult now to identify the motives for many things I have done . . . . I do not have a good answer to the question of my own behavior . . . . My memory has a strange way of selecting its contents. George Stigler, Nobel laureate, regulatory capture theorist, commenting on how the human mind deals with and distorts reality and logic

I am now impressed with the role of power in economic life - and with the great if largely innocent service of the conventional economic instruction in concealing it . . . . [The modern business firm's] influence and power extend to politicians, Presidents and the Pentagon. This power would be much more remarked and resisted were it not for the social conditioning of economics and its instruction. The latter contends that all producers-all business firms and corporations, from the smallest to the largest, from the corner drugstore to Exxon and General Motors - are substantially subordinate to the impersonal authority of the market. So matters are presented in all reputable economic discussion . . . . Power is much enjoyed, and its economic and political exercise can also be pleasingly remunerative. Nothing serves it better than a theology that disguises its exercise. -- John Kenneth Galbraith, commenting on the amazing difficulty people have when trying to see how power subtly works in politics

So, is the American public unreasonably dumb, deceived, too lazy to get the information that is being withheld from them, just being normal, and/or some other thing(s)?

For context, NPR aired a segment yesterday about CPCs (crisis pregnancy centers). Those are places in poor neighborhoods staffed by religious Christian fanatics. They claim to provide medical and pregnancy-related services, but that is a gigantic lie. The whole point of the existence of CPCs is to con, cajole, scare, shame, pressure and/or lie to stop frightened poor women from getting an abortion. The entire CPC industry is built on lies and deceit. Worse, some of the funding (maybe ~5-10%?) for CPCs is stolen by corrupt politicians in state governments.* Those corrupt politicians siphon some federal tax dollars to CPCs. So, you and I get to help fund an industry built entirely on Christian liars and their immoral or evil lies. The CPC industry is now a major focus of the post-Roe v. Wade Christian nationalist attack on civil liberties that God disapproves of.

 * The rest of the money comes from private donors, some of whom anonymously donate large amounts of cash to keep Christian liar business operations going.