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Are Ordinary People Too Stupid To Be Trusted With Voting?
34 Answers
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The Left and elite think that most of us are unqualified simpletons who shouldn't take on the responsibility for making decisions of great complexity and sophistication.
/// In the Left-wing New Statesman magazine, Professor Richard Dawkins, the leading evolutionary biologist and renowned humanist was unable to suppress his true feelings that the large slice of humanity who voted Leave were ‘stupid, ignorant people’. He protested that ‘it is unfair to thrust on to unqualified simpletons the responsibility to take historic decisions of great complexity and sophistication’. ///
The Left and elite think that most of us are unqualified simpletons who shouldn't take on the responsibility for making decisions of great complexity and sophistication.
/// In the Left-wing New Statesman magazine, Professor Richard Dawkins, the leading evolutionary biologist and renowned humanist was unable to suppress his true feelings that the large slice of humanity who voted Leave were ‘stupid, ignorant people’. He protested that ‘it is unfair to thrust on to unqualified simpletons the responsibility to take historic decisions of great complexity and sophistication’. ///
Answers
But the greatest difficulty is that the alternative is to leave such decisions to "experts". And we all know how good many of them are at getting it right. This is a strange (but not unsurprising
11:45 Sat 25th Feb 2017
Wasn't it that great leftie Churchill who said something along the lines of 'the worst thing about democracy is that people are allowed to vote ' : no doubt spoken in jest. And a US president of around that time said something similar . Maybe the recent at the time rise to power through elections of far right leaders like Hitler had something to do with that I don't know (cue the on-form Peter :-) )
"Ordinary people" may not be best qualified to deal with complex and historic issues but they would stand a better chance of doing the right thing if they weren't lied to by politicians, right and left, and partisan press barons who have serious issues with their own importance.
Still, we are where we are and can only, I suppose, wait for some benevolent snipers with their hearts in the right places, to even the odds.
Still, we are where we are and can only, I suppose, wait for some benevolent snipers with their hearts in the right places, to even the odds.
Here is the article by Dawkins quoted in the piece which one may or may not agree with, it at least it's a firmer ground for debate than the skewed rant by Mr Hume
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But the greatest difficulty is that the alternative is to leave such decisions to "experts". And we all know how good many of them are at getting it right.
This is a strange (but not unsurprising) attitude taken by the Good Professor. The idea of democracy is that the people hold sway. A decent definition of that state that I can immediately find says this:
“Government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.”
It doesn’t say that the people should exercise that power only if they are intelligent enough. On the particular issue of the EU, successive governments have betrayed the electorate by signing away their rights to democratic freedom. It is quite true that these governments (or at least the MPs that formed them) were duly elected under a democratic system. But many of the rights they signed away were never specifically mentioned in their manifestos. As with everything that the EU does, its current powers were achieved by stealth or “mission creep”, with each step being just a little different to the previous status so “not really such a big deal”.
These governments (of all persuasions) have only themselves to blame for the current situation. They succumbed to the charms of the EU without the electorate’s specific consent. UK citizens were deceived or ignored when successive Treaties were signed which stripped the UK Parliament of its powers of control over UK affairs. The last thing the EU wanted was for anybody to find out what they were actually up to. Well they did in the end and Prof. Dawkins should ask himself why it is that unintelligent knuckle-draggers felt the need to extract the country from the clutches of the EU at the first opportunity they were given. It was quite rightly a decision for them because it addressed the threat to their supreme power as citizens of a democracy.
This is a strange (but not unsurprising) attitude taken by the Good Professor. The idea of democracy is that the people hold sway. A decent definition of that state that I can immediately find says this:
“Government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.”
It doesn’t say that the people should exercise that power only if they are intelligent enough. On the particular issue of the EU, successive governments have betrayed the electorate by signing away their rights to democratic freedom. It is quite true that these governments (or at least the MPs that formed them) were duly elected under a democratic system. But many of the rights they signed away were never specifically mentioned in their manifestos. As with everything that the EU does, its current powers were achieved by stealth or “mission creep”, with each step being just a little different to the previous status so “not really such a big deal”.
These governments (of all persuasions) have only themselves to blame for the current situation. They succumbed to the charms of the EU without the electorate’s specific consent. UK citizens were deceived or ignored when successive Treaties were signed which stripped the UK Parliament of its powers of control over UK affairs. The last thing the EU wanted was for anybody to find out what they were actually up to. Well they did in the end and Prof. Dawkins should ask himself why it is that unintelligent knuckle-draggers felt the need to extract the country from the clutches of the EU at the first opportunity they were given. It was quite rightly a decision for them because it addressed the threat to their supreme power as citizens of a democracy.
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