How The Way We Think About the World Failed

umair haque:

The people-are-stupid fallacy. Listen. If, as an intellectual, your only response to social upheavals is “people are stupid!”, then you have failed utterly at your job. You are like a doctor who cannot diagnose a disease, gets angry, and begins calling the patient names. You might feel better, but he’s not going to get better. Let us be wiser than this and ask, instead, why people feel worse off today than yesterday.

My aunt lives near a mega-church. Do people go there because they are stupid? After all, they could easily go to the many smaller churches that dot the town. They go, I’d wager, because the mega-church, to which is attached a school, a little clinic, and an elderly home, provides them with exactly what society no longer does: some modicum of healthcare, childcare, community, counseling, advice, education, support, belonging, and so on. In this way, there is a reason for their behaviour.

People might be dumb, but they are not often stupid. In my tiny example, mega-churches are a new institution that arose because a social contract broke, and they provide many services that societies no longer are willing to, but people desperately need, especially the worse inequality gets. Dumb: no information. Stupid: no reason. People aren’t stupid: their behaviour might not always be rational, but it is usually eminently reasonable. And through my little example, one can begin to see why people feel worse off now — they are being failed by societies so badly they turn to parallel institutions. Still, though, our answer is incomplete.