The Best and the Brightest

The ability to honestly and empirically test your assumptions against reality and your policies against their results — to think rationally — is one of the most important attributes a citizen can have in a democracy. However, as is human nature, we are often blinded or misguided by our ideology, which I think of as pre-conceived notions of how the world could and should works that do not always have a rational basis in reality. Often time, we cling to our ideology even when it directly clashes with empirical evidence that should discredit or disprove tenets of our ideology. In other words, ideology is often like a secular Faith, a way of seeing how the world works that transcends the rational and the emperical.

When we are blinded by political ideologies (like the government is always the problem, and the market is always right. Or tax breaks for the rich will make everyone rich AND increase government revenues) or superstitious religion (God will come soon and take us up to heaven, so don’t worry about global warming or causing another World War. Or God wants us to burn the oil, or he’d never have put it in the ground) that are so obviously discredited by rational, empirical evidence against it, then you end up with what passes for thinking by the right-wing in America. And you end up running your country into the ground, while other countries that value reason and non-ideological pragmatism and who believe the government has a constructive role to play (such as regulating the economy and helping people get their basic needs for eduction and health care met) end up leaving our mistake-repeating asses in the dust.

Here’s another result of America’s ideological blind belief in the supremacy of unregulated markets and disbelief in prudent government regulations : the EU is considering BANNING Wall Street banks from the lucrative government bond business in Europe and considering a ban on government debt speculation through Credit Default Swaps (CDS), which would mainly effect American and UK banks.

It’s a very rational regulatory decision to keep out American casino-style criminal capitalist practices from infecting the European financial sector. Yet many Americans are CONVINCED that government regulations are always bad, despite the bubbles that have repeatedly caused financial havoc in the States since Reagan started deregulation.

I’m also reminded of a study that came out recently showing a link between intelligence and having “liberal” points of view. This is probably no accident. It takes a certain intellectual mindset and rational thinking skills to understand certain scientific theories that are non-obvious to the casual observer, such as evolution and global warming.

But more importantly, it takes similar thinking skills to understand one’s inherent connection to and reliance on the interconnected “web of life:” how the suffering, indignities, or injustice of people on the other side of the tracks, the other side of the country, or even the other side of the world can and do affect you. Also, an intellectual and philosophical understanding of why all human beings should be accorded such Enlightenment values such as inherent worth and dignity, etc. allows a person to expand his “kinship circle,” which is an innate empathy we feel for those related to us and closest to us geographically.

Once a person understands intellectually how one is connected to groups of people we will never see, because of distances in space or time, a person’s empathy sphere and sense of community will greatly expand, changing his attitude and behavior toward those unseen people. This expansion might make a person more sympathetic to “liberal” causes that emphasize the relationship between individuals within a group, or social or community contracts and relationships.

Of course, such emphasis runs counter to the ideology of the primacy of the individual, much to the chagrin of right-wingers such as Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh. I would argue that a rational person must seek a dynamic balance between purely socialist impulses and policies, on one hand, and the Ayn Randian cult of the individual, on the other.