People Are Smart
Fall 2024 Blog Entry
Maybe those are the three most controversial words I could think to say right now. It is, after all, an election cycle in the U.S., and this is the last blog entry I’ll have time to write between now and when the votes start getting tallied. This seems like the season when it’s so temptingly easy for so many people to believe the opposite. Surely a bright line can be drawn between those who are Smart Like You and those who are Dumb Like Them, right? Undoubtedly “those people” must just be dupes or fools or whatever sandbox insults the various partisans have adopted this week…right? The human beings you criticize or even despise are more like you than different. Yes, I said that.
I don’t want to write about the candidates or the horse race or even the issues—I have made my decision that way and you probably have too. But I’m not using this blog to tell anyone who to vote for or even whether to vote. To me, politicians running for office are interviewing for a job and we’re all the hiring managers. If you think the red candidate and the blue candidate are both terrible, or another candidate seems better to you, I shouldn’t have to say that it’s ok to vote for the green one or the yellow one or a different one. And if no one is worth hiring, staying home is making a decision too—in the immortal words of Rush, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. Because if one person can save or doom the United States, then the United States is already lost.
Neither democracy nor rule of law long survive in a population that thinks it’s the responsibility (or even within the ability) of elected politicians to “save” them. Let’s abandon the tropes while we’re at it. “We’ve never been more divided.” Really? Less than a century ago people in the south were made to live separately and unequally because of the color of their skin. Just a few decades before that women weren’t even allowed to vote. Half a century before that people literally owned other people. That, of course, was after decades of one group of people stealing lands and resources from another group of people, often at gunpoint. Never more divided? Give me a break.
But I digress. Why assume people are smart? And why does that matter? It’s a starting point for just about everything else I do as a sociologist. I learned people are smart by spending over a decade of my life studying what they do and why they do it (and a lot longer than that interacting with them). What I mean is that people have reasons for doing what they’re doing that are as complicated and well thought out as the reasons you have for doing what you’re doing. Because I am a pragmatist, this wouldn’t matter if there wasn’t some benefit to assuming people are smart, so I offer three rules, things to gain from assuming that People are Smart, and not the opposite, based on all this.
Rule 1 of People Are Smart: you don’t know what you don’t know, and neither do other people.
It’s easy to dismiss or make fun of people because we don’t understand what they’re doing. I don’t mean that people always do smart things. Yeah, I’m an academic now but I am sure at least one person reading this knew me in my twenties. I have done an above average level of dumb stuff, mostly because it was fun, and I was reckless and nihilistic back then. I don’t repeat the dumb stuff I used to do because I have a lot more to live for and a lot more to lose. I also don’t repeat some of the dumb stuff because it caused me or someone else pain. I don’t like to hurt, and I don’t like to know I’ve caused others pain either. We’re all learning different things at different rates at any given moment in our lives, throughout our lives. People aren’t dumb because they haven’t had the experiences it took for you to learn a lesson. They’re learning too. And maybe, to paraphrase an immortal line from the film Full Metal Jacket, their malfunction is that their parents really didn’t give them enough attention as a child. Is that their fault?
Rule 2 of People Are Smart: knowing stuff is hard, but assuming people are smart is a much better start than the alternative.
Knowing is only possible when you start figuring out how to know things in the first place. Philosophers call that epistemology, or theory of knowledge—how we know what we know. Smart people with flawed or inconsistent epistemologies make less than ideal choices, even choices that aren’t really in their best interest. It doesn’t make them dumb—it’s a bit like running software that’s full of bugs on an otherwise functional computer. Because believing People Are Dumb Except People Like Me flatters my vanity but doesn’t really track with reality, if I adopt that, it becomes harder for me to tell the difference between what’s true and what makes me feel good. As someone with a historically above-average level of vanity, I learned this the hard way too.
Believing that People Are Dumb Except People Like Me is bad epistemology, not just because it is self-deluded, but because it makes you vulnerable. That’s because, to paraphrase the late great James Randi, the first thing a successful con man has to do is convince you that everyone else is lying. If you’re already running the People Are Dumb Except People Like Me software in your head, you’ve done a lot of their work for them already, because all they then have to do is convince you that they, like you, are part of the Smart Like Us group. Don’t believe me? Find your favorite quack medical remedy or conspiracy theory or pseudoscience or partisan misinformation website and read it carefully. Somewhere in their messaging, every single time, you’ll see some version of this happening—don’t be Dumb Like Them, be Smart Like Us. Now, Smart Person, be Smart and Buy!
If I instead start by assuming that everyone else is smart, I become willing to learn from other people, to try imperfectly to understand lots of different perspectives and motivations. I’ll get it wrong sometimes, and I’ll have to learn to live with a lot of less-than-black-and-white views about the world, but nobody will be able to hijack my loyalty for long. Maybe it will help me listen to those people I disagree with and learn why they’re doing what they’re doing instead of impotently trading insults or worse.
Which brings me to Rule 3 of People Are Smart: when I say People Are Smart, people aren’t really that smart. None of us. And definitely not all the time. Because we are motivated by things other than reason to think what we think and do what we do.
There’s also this naivete that I want to address, a naivete maybe widely shared by people who work in jobs like mine. The widespread belief that if people know what is true or what makes the most sense, they will automatically change their minds, and their worlds, based on this new, more accurate information. Again, I study people, so I know that’s just not how it works (though I don’t think it takes social science to notice this). People have self-serving biases that structure their identities, as any social psychologist will tell you. We are made up of a bunch of beliefs, and some of those beliefs strongly shape how we see ourselves. We don’t want to give up beliefs that shape who we are because it’s uncomfortable and scary and even traumatic. Even if those beliefs are factually wrong or motivate us to do dumb stuff.
And there’s power, which can make us all dumb, and powerlessness, which can make all this talk of reason seem like just that—talk. Politics often isn’t about finding the “ideal speech situation” where the best reasoning wins and everyone has equal power to agree or disagree (even if it would be nice if it was); it’s more like “taking a practical stand” where politicians have to continue down a path set when they run for office if they want to get and stay in power (I credit Jurgen Habermas for the first example and Max Weber for the second—both sociologists). Everyone believes, or at least entertains beliefs, that other people think are weird. Smart people (crediting Michael Shermer) are better at defending weird beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons, avoiding Rule 2 and maybe their own good advice. But a population of Smart People who assume Other People Are Also Smart is better positioned to question authority; and to have a broad tolerance for suspending judgement, exploring weird beliefs, and avoiding hasty action based on beliefs that have been arrived at for non-smart reasons. Again, it's not perfect, but it’s a start.
Now that you’ve read my blog entry, and are one of the Smart People, stand apart from the herd and don’t submit to the mainstream: all I need is your email account so I can tell you what to think, and your credit card number so I can show you what to buy! (sarcasm intensifies)
Books:
Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis
James Randi, Flim Flam!
Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things
Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (essay)
