This is really the main problem, IMO.
“” The idea that calling someone stupid (if you yourself are smart) is the worst thing you can do is an exceedingly bad idea to disseminate throughout a culture. The result is that stupid people can do stupid things with impunity; that they can basically skate through life daring people to call them stupid, knowing that if smart people take the bait and do so, an even bigger reproach will be leveled at them by the rest of society. This creates a win-win situation for stupid people. In an argument, the dumber person always has the advantage of being able to present the smarter person with the Smarter-Than-Me Paradox, as follows:
“Either you’re not claiming to be smarter than I am, in which case I should not listen to you, since there’s no point in changing my mind to agree with someone who is no smarter than I am, or you are claiming to be smarter than I am, in which case I should not listen to you, since on principle I shouldn’t listen to someone who is so exceedingly conceited and cruel as to claim to be smarter than other people.”
As a result of this, the smarter person’s only recourse is to argue the position that they are both equally smart, but have had different experiences, and that this is why they disagree. The P.C. movement was largely based on this idea—so much so that its proponents began to actually accept as fact the idea that no-one is any smarter than anyone else. But this was a huge mistake. The result was the mainstream acceptance of the idea that all disagreement is based on experience, and no disagreement based on inequity of intellect, and because of this, it became impossible to ever get anyone to change their mind about anything. After all, why should they? An experience cannot be “right” or “wrong,” and so political and philosophical belief was demoted to the level of taste, no different from preferring one style of music over another. Many in our society are operating on the principle that calling someone stupid is a moral failing, but that being stupid is not one. This is extremely dangerous, considering the fact that all of history’s great evils—from the Crusades to the Salem Witch Trials to the Nazi Holocaust —have been perpetrated by stupid people who were basing their actions on ideas that smart people could easily have disproved.”
The only way Blumenthal, or Obama, etc. can be the smartest person in the room, is by being THE ONLY PERSON IN THE ROOM.
I love it, bhf, dead on the money!