Useful Innocents

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In January, Campus Reform — which bills itself “a watchdog to the nation's higher education system” — asked college students in New York for their reaction to quotes from Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.

The students gave heartfelt responses that universally rejected Trump’s ideas. Some went into detailed explanations of how his ideas, as expressed in the quotes, would lead to war and the subjugation of women. Their answers were passionate and sounded well considered. There was only one problem: It was one week before Mr. Trump gave his first SOTU address, and all the quotes were from Barack Obama’s 2016 SOTU speech.

Complete ignorance on the part of these students did nothing to stop them from forming opinions, and being certain of those opinions. It’s easy too criticize the students, but their education has been based in orthodoxy rather than facts. They have been taught to have the right opinions, not to arrive at their ideas through thought and study. At the same time, the comfort of groupthink makes them happily certain of themselves. This sort of education makes them ideal, faithful voters but robs them of any ability to develop ideas that will move culture forward.

In 1999, Scientists David Dunning and Justin Kruger demonstrated that “illusory superiority,” a form of cognitive bias, was higher in people of low ability. Their study was titled, “Unskilled and Unaware of It.” Describing what is now known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, they showed less competent and lesser-informed people were more likely to over value their skills and have high confidence in their opinions. In 2003 and 2006, other studies confirmed their research. In short, the poorly informed are so blind to interrupting facts that they hold the few things they know more dearly. Charles Darwin observed this long before Dunning and Kruger were born. He wrote, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

There are people in our culture who absolutely fear the free dispensation of opinion and information. They want their followers narrowly informed. President Obama regularly discouraged listening to “talk radio” and Fox News. Opposition wasn’t tolerated. Facebook has launched a massive effort to remove “fake news.” Rather than trust his subscribers to sort out and evaluate various postings, Mark Zuckerberg only wants voices on Facebook that support his worldview. Zuckerberg’s concern about the news communicated on his platform is ironic; Facebook is a terrible news platform, favoring hashtags and memes over even moderate depth of reporting. 

Our poorly informed citizens are the victims of political oversimplification. In her eight- hour filibuster on the house floor, Nancy Pelosi said, “As members of Congress, we have a moral responsibility to act now to protect DREAMers, who are the “pride of our nation.” Pelosi is talking about adults dragged here as children by parents in the commission of a crime.  Pelosi’s comment is an ideal example of using language to keep people dumb.

These “children” now have a median age of 24, and they are nothing to be proud of. According to Harvard researcher Roberto G. Gonzalez, 21 percent of the adult children of illegal aliens have dropped out of school, more than three times the national average of 6 percent. More importantly, there is no specific definition of Dreamer — that designation is a pole-tested name for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act. The bill, first introduced in 2001, has failed countless times. Democrats are so enamored with the clever turn of phrase that they have taken a failed policy and beaten it into the heads of their supports, using it to stereotype a group of people. It’s a non-specific label with a feel-good title, perfect for their “useful innocent”1 supporters. Pelosi has never clarified about what they are dreaming.

This cloudy thinking has led us down some destructive paths.  It is now accepted in popular culture that sex is a social construct. There is a mostly successful effort to rename the sex of a child as “the sex assigned at birth,” as if there is no biological, factual basis for sex assignment. To make a small group of confused people feel better about themselves, academics and drivers of social norms are trying to convince us that sex is determined by choice.

Their efforts will ultimately run up against the brick wall of reality. There are objective facts that cannot be changed with clever words. If a self-assigned man, who is biologically a woman, goes to the doctor and is treated as a man, he will never be examined for ovarian cancer. Certain medications will be improperly prescribed. Who is a transwoman, born a man, going to blame for undiagnosed testicular cancer? Women don’t get that screening. When a trans-gender person goes to an animal rescue to adopt a new pet, does he, she, or ze ask, “With what sex does this dog identify?” Or does the shelter assistant lift up the dogs tail and check out the hardware? 

People trying to silence any voice are hiding behind their reliance on ignorance among their followers. Politicians, leaders, and teachers must welcome all voices and allow arguments to live or die on their merits, not on whether or not they are offensive to any group or fit the political narrative. If your opponent disagrees, welcome the debate or admit defeat. An attempt to silence opposition from any source is a concession that your case is weak, that your position cannot endure the bright light of truth.  

Thomas Kachadurian is a photographer, designer, and author. He lives on Old Mission with his wife and two children. He is a member and past president of the Traverse Area District Library Board of Trustees. 

Note: The label “useful innocents” appears in Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises’ 1947 book, "Planned Chaos." Von Mises wrote that the term was used by communists for liberals, whom he describes as ‘confused and misguided sympathizers.’”

 

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