Andre Melhado Araujo Lima

PO409 – Shauna Shames

10/06/2022 – Paper 1

Did you perceive he did solicit you in free contempt

When he did need your loves, and do you think

That his contempt shall not be bruising to you

When he hath power to crush? Why, had your bodies

No heart among you? Or had you tongues to cry

Against the rectorship of judgment? – (Coriolanus, 225)

The everyday cynic and Shakespeare would both agree that a significant

majority of people in a democracy aren’t terribly intelligent. In fact, a casual glance at a

a few of election polls could very well scare you into that belief. But are most people

terribly stupid? Can we trust that people have accurate judgements about current affairs

to make informed decisions? And, should the answer to the former question be a

resounding “no” can democracy still be saved from that knowledge? I will attempt in

the next few pages to prove that yes, in some sense most people are stupid; that utter

stupidity does not discriminate between levels of education, income or zip code; and,

that this fact alone matters little to the right models of democracy.

So, how stupid are the most stupider people, and how many of them are there? In

the YouTube video titled 4th of July Zombies - Americans Don't Know Why We

Celebrate Fourth of July! Mark Dice interviews the average American in San Diego,

asking them few piercing questions such as: “Today we celebrate our independence

from…?”; “What year the Declaration of Independence was signed?” and “Who’s your

favorite founding father: Jesse Ventura or John Wilkes Booth?” Among perhaps the
most unintentionally insightful answers are: The US celebrates its independence from

China, the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1875, Someone’s favorite

founding father is Jeremiah. That, and a vast compilation of “I don’t know” to questions

any sixth grader could tell in a heartbeat, would have you believe the average American

would lose a chess match against Homer Simpson.

The implication in Mark Dice’s video is that not only are some people unaware

of the most basic facts regarding the origin of American democracy, but that these fools

are even more numerous than you’d like them to be. The implications of the video are

quite evident, as one commentor summed up “I can't stop laughing (sic.) then I realize

(sic.) these people can actually cast a ballot.”

How worried should we be? Are the 4th of July Zombies out to cannibalize our

democracy from within? Have they already taken over? Though conceivable, that’s

probably not the case. Firstly, because Mark’s video isn’t really intended to be read as

an accurate cross-section of the American people. It’s an edited video and we don’t

know what percentage people who Mark Dice interviewed answered to his questions

correctly or flagged the mistakes he planted in his questions. And even if we’re to give

Mark the benefit of the doubt and say that all people he interviewed are featured in the

video, which is highly unlikely, we still can’t have any idea how much of the average

American shares the level of intellectual poverty as those interviewed by Dice. And that

can be proven with statistical data.

In How to Lie with Statistics, Darrell Huff presents various compelling points

that may help soothe the anxiety of Mark Dice’s viewer. In explaining various fallacies

committed by advertisers and magazine surveyors, Huff presents a fundamental point to

be considered when watching Dice’s video: for a sample to be truly representative of the

whole population, every subject in the sample must be chosen randomly. What defines a

random sample is that every subject in total population share an equal chance to be

included in the sample. Reframing this to Mark Dice’s video: if Dice is representing a

cross-section of the United States, does every living American have an equal chance of

being approached by Mark Dice in the boardwalk of Mission Beach in San Diego, CA

in the afternoon of 07/04/2016? The answer is no.

Mark Dice would most likely state that his video shouldn’t be regarded with

such statistic scrutiny. However, the fact we don’t know how many people were

interviewed in total summed with the fact that his sample was as far from random as

possible either dismisses or greatly diminishes any overlying implications his video

might have had.

More refined and developed than Mark Dice’s video, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

provides a more compelling argument for the poor intellect of the masses. The 3rd scene

of the play’s 2nd act pivots the titular character dressed in a gown of humility, forced by

custom to ask of the commons for their support of his consulship. Portrayed as a “multi-

headed monster” without sense or direction, the common people are scorned by

Coriolanus: as a seasoned veteran, Coriolanus has as borne witness to acts of cowardice

by the common people in his military campaigns

I cannot bring my tongue to such a pace.

“Look, sir, my wounds!

I got them in my country’s service when

 Some certain of your brethren roared and ran

From th’ noise of our own drums.” (Coriolanus, 55)

Despite being unable to totally restrain his contempt, Coriolanus still manages to

persuade the people to support his consulship. The popular tribunes however are greatly

disturbed by this attitude. They had previously arranged with the populace to pressure

Coriolanus while he was still destitute of power and to promise to be kinder and more

sympathetic towards their causes, which they have not done. The tribunes quickly

convince the subjects that Coriolanus does not have their best interest in mind swaying

them once again to, this time to oppose his rise to consulship (see 225, cited at the top

of the essay).

Is Shakespeare portrayal of the common people accurate? Joseph A. Schumpeter

would agree. People seem much more irrational and childlike in the public sphere than

at the individual sphere, an assumption that Shakespeare would firmly agree with.

[…] The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as

soon as he enters the political field. […] He becomes primitive again. His

thinking becomes associative and affective. (Capitalism, Socialism and

Democracy, 262)

Schumpeter justifies that claim by identifying that people in group feel a diminished

sense of responsibility, therefore dropping their usual level of awareness and critical

faculties. This makes them fall prey easily to “groups with an ax to grind.”

(Schumpeter, 262) With their rhetorical shields down, the people become more

vunerable to repeated blows of political propaganda and therefore easily swayed and

manipulated, much like Coriolanus’ populace.

 But it seems well enough to sit in our hypothetical armchairs and complain about

how the masses are uneducated and foolish, but it would be even foolisher would be to

criticize “the people” while simultaneously abstaining oneself from it. Honestly, how

smarter are you and me from most people? How likely are we to commit the same

mistakes as them? If you ask Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow we

are all unintelligent in a myriad of ways. One of these is that we all own a large

Machine for Jumping to Conclusions in our minds. Kahneman argues that our minds

involuntarily take the path of least effort. Our brains have a default way of effortlessly

processing complex information. This process occurs involuntarily and in a fraction of

seconds. Kahneman calls this process System 1. Out of System 1’s many flaws the most

relevant for is that it will answer an easier question instead of the thought question

that’s being asked. People who were asked “List 6 times where you have been assertive.

Are you an assertive person?” Are more likely to consider themselves assertive than

people who were asked “List 12 times where you have been assertive. Are you an

assertive person?” System 1 will replace the difficult question “am I assertive?” with the

easy question “how many occasion where I have been assertive can I remember?” This

type of error is as natural to humans as having thumbs and a prefrontal cortex. It’s

unavoidable and neither you, Mark Dice, myself, Shakespeare or the late Queen

Elizabeth II are safe from it.

How could we ever salvage democracy from such a hard-hitting blow to the

wisdom of the masses? Schumpeter might have an answer. Further in Capitalism,

Socialism and Democracy he argues for a conception of democracy that acts in the

model of a constitutional monarchy, replacing the monarch for the people. This way, the

people are left to their follies and only being burdened with the occasional judgment of

whether the ones in power are doing their job well or not. This removes the heavy
burden of being a perpetually well-informed rational animal from the whole population

into the few of these in power, who will hopefully know in what year the Declaration of

Independence was signed and from which country the United States declared its

independence from. In this model, the experts above compete for leadership and are

responsible for doing the people’s bidding in politics, instead of having to always

appeal for the masses to guide and determine their judgement. Are the people in power

still prone to error? Absolutely. Can the people choose the wrong candidates? You bet.

However, the people in power have an incentive not to make that many mistakes, and if

they do make grave errors they can just as easily be removed by the electorate as they

have ascended.