Are the Masses Dumb?

By Robert Wenzel

Some comments made at the post, Is the Government Behind the Social Media Blackout of the Hunter Biden Stories?, can serve as a teaching point.

I am referring to the following:

Here's the problem: There is no "intellectual struggle". The general masses are ignorant and apathetic, while the segment who consider themselves 'informed' will immediately go into cognitive dissonance mode when confronted with even simple problematic facts.

---

.I have referenced the Idiocracy impact numerous times for years here.

You truly cant debate with stupid. I fully expect socialism of some sort until little Jimmy and Jenny snowflake get their ass handed to them and then it will be simultaneously too late and too little.

Calling the masses ignorant misses the point.

All of us are ignorant about very many things where some small part of the masses on particular points are very knowledgeable.

This is the way of the world. This is why the division of labor works.

The world of political science and also economics are no different except in one key aspect. To most of us, we know, say, that it takes deep understanding to grasp the mathematical concepts embedded in multivariate calculus.

But the world of political science and of economics, in contrast, looks easy, when it is not.

Unfortunately, shallow thinking in these sciences leads most to support various central planning efforts.

As F.A. Hayek put it:

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

It is not that people are lazy. It is in the natural way of things that most can not be deep experts in all things. It is not that they are stupid. It is that political science and economics look deceptively easy to understand when in fact proper understanding requires deep and complex thought.

This is why we see so many support various types of socialism despite the obvious failures of these types of political and economic structures in the past. They fail to grasp the complexity of the failures of their way of thinking and then the emotional-defense part of the brain kicks-in to defend a weak position. On top of this, you have significant mass support (not surprising) to keep the improper thinking popular. Thomas Kuhn has taught us how difficult it is to change established paradigms.

So in the end, it is an intellectual struggle at various levels. It is a battle between top tier thinkers in support of freedom versus the central planners. And as Hayek pointed out, it must also be a battle of the second-hand dealers in ideas who ultimately influence the masses.

The masses are never going to be the deep thinkers. This is not the way of the world BUT it is the masses and their views that will guide the structure of politics and economy because the masses always have the final say. This is why politicians and dictators spend so much time on propaganda. They understand who has the power.

It is the role of the classical liberal intellectual to destroy the shallow thinking central planning supporting intellectuals so that the second-hand dealers in ideas get the message and deliver it in a simple form that the masses can grasp.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of. Problems With Modern Monetary Theory: A Comment on Stephanie Kelton’s "The Deficit Myth,"  also The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and  Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.