If the people are too dumb to be trusted with an unrestricted marketplace of ideas, the they’re too dumb to be allowed to vote for their own government.
If you believe in democracy, you have to also believe that the majority of people can be trusted with the information necessary to make informed political choices.
If the people can’t be trusted to act in their best interests in an informed manner, then we might as well just adopt Plato’s philosopher-kings system instead, and make all of the peoples’ decisions for them.
This is why the GOP has been working hard for decades to destroy public education in the US. They want to make sure that only the rich are educated because the uneducated can be easily tricked into voting against their own interests. Unfortunately it’s working.
It’s mandatory in a functioning democracy for the public to be educated and well informed or it doesn’t work. Unfortunately it’s highly debatable whether the US still qualifies as educated, and the likes of Fox News and Sinclair are hard at work destroying the informed part.
All that said the ease with which misinformation spreads these days does need some kind of counter, otherwise we open ourselves up to Soviet style disinformation campaigns where the goal isn’t so much to drive a particular narrative as it is to sow confusion and make people distrust all information. They drown the signal in noise, so everyone just makes decisions based on their gut instead of facts. Social media has given a false equivalence where any random person on Facebook is treated as just as reliable a source of news and information as actual reporters are. This is incredibly dangerous.
If the people are too dumb to be trusted with an unrestricted marketplace of ideas, the they’re too dumb to be allowed to vote for their own government.
If you believe in democracy, you have to also believe that the majority of people can be trusted with the information necessary to make informed political choices.
If the people can’t be trusted to act in their best interests in an informed manner, then we might as well just adopt Plato’s philosopher-kings system instead, and make all of the peoples’ decisions for them.
This is why the GOP has been working hard for decades to destroy public education in the US. They want to make sure that only the rich are educated because the uneducated can be easily tricked into voting against their own interests. Unfortunately it’s working.
It’s mandatory in a functioning democracy for the public to be educated and well informed or it doesn’t work. Unfortunately it’s highly debatable whether the US still qualifies as educated, and the likes of Fox News and Sinclair are hard at work destroying the informed part.
All that said the ease with which misinformation spreads these days does need some kind of counter, otherwise we open ourselves up to Soviet style disinformation campaigns where the goal isn’t so much to drive a particular narrative as it is to sow confusion and make people distrust all information. They drown the signal in noise, so everyone just makes decisions based on their gut instead of facts. Social media has given a false equivalence where any random person on Facebook is treated as just as reliable a source of news and information as actual reporters are. This is incredibly dangerous.