Miscellaneous

Redeye Rant

By Chris Stevenson

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you this Redeye Rant.

Generalist Ignorance

I'm going to coin a new phrase.  The phrase is "generalist ignorance."  Generalist ignorance occurs when someone knows nothing, or very little, of a subject yet speaks with authority on that subject or proclaims their uninformed opinion regarding the subject as if it should carry any weight whatsoever.  Example:  Anytime anyone talks about politics.  There is an arc of authority on any given subject that runs exactly parallel with the amount of knowledge a person has on that subject.  In order, they would be:  utter ignorance, generalist ignorance, somewhat informed, informed and expert.  If you derive your information on a subject from the press you have generalist ignorance on the subject with a twist of political bias thrown in distorting whatever nuggets of truth there ever were in the source.  Likewise with the internet - if your source of information on the subject is Wikipedia, you have generalist ignorance on the subject.

So, let me ask - what percentage of the population of the United States knows shit about how government actually works?  Government finance?  Bureaucracy?  Do you know what the CFR is?  What about politics?  Do you know the role of politics in lawmaking?  If you are struggling for an answer to these questions let me help you out - you don't.  But don't feel bad; neither do I and neither do 99.9% of the rest of the citizenry.

There are really two problems with this:  1) those people out there who insist on ignoring their ignorance are going to cause me to drive off a cliff, and 2) an uninformed electorate is the fatal flaw in democracy.  Actually, that's not true - the fatal flaw in democracy is the kayfabe political game that reduces the entire electoral decision into five or six hot-button issues where the only choices are red or blue.  That and the impossibility of the red or blue platform ever coming to fruition.  Or maybe that Democracy only extends as far as the voting booth, which is a loooooong way from where the decisions are actually made - House and Senate committees and bureaucrat offices being among the more important.

The health care reform debate is what set me off on this.  I can't tell you how many emails I've gotten and how many Facebook entries I've read (universally conservative; universally against the plan) that contain utterly ignorant, reactionary and ridiculous shit.  (Obama is going to euthanize old people!  We won't get to choose our doctors anymore!  The plan is going to bankrupt America!  Nancy Pelosi called me Unamerican and a Nazi!)  Well, first of all - no.  Second of all, even if these things were true, where did the people spouting them get this information?  Did they read the actual House Bill?  Did they have tea with their congressman and discuss the finer points of the plan?  Better yet, have they spoken with lobbyists for consumers of health care, insurers or health care providers?  Have they listened to and read any of these things objectively and without unbias to judge the issue on it's actual terms?  I can tell you the answers - NO, NO and FUCK NO.

People are just blindly, knee-jerkingly creating dissension and divisiveness without knowing any truth about the subject at all.  That really drives me crazy.

Instead of being one of those people that just bitches about something without offering a solution, I am going to tell people what they should do:

Do not adopt the opinion of (and hopefully don't even listen to) someone who makes a living by inciting people on political topics.  Do not express uninformed opinions openly.  Learn as much as you can on the subject from the best, most unbiased sources you can find.  Judge issues on their merits.  Do not blindly follow the stance of the crowd/party/group you identify with just because.  Resist the urge to express your opinions at all (you still don't know shit about it).  If you have done all of these things, then, and only then, engage in discourse on the topic if you must.  And then, hopefully, in the privacy of your own home.

Please.

** I am a moderate with no affiliation or loyalty to any political party or philosophy.  I'm all for lively informed debate on any and all political topics.  But I don't want to hear from anyone I know or Joe the Fucking Plumber or anyone other than someone who is an expert on the subject or whose job it is to know what's what.**

Full post as published by Cursed With Ambition on August 13, 2009 (boomark / email).