If You Don't Agree with Me, You're Stupid, a scientific approach

The human brain evolved for a single purpose: not to make money, not to make angels, but to give mankind a shot at survival in a neutral environment that doesn't care about us one way or the other. The greatest asset we possess as a species, slugging it out against forces bent on our destruction (presently we have the most to fear from man-made dangers), is abstract reasoning, the ability to think about what will happen next using symbols and language. We don't need to position our senses in a present-time, critical moment to identify and react to a threat or an opportunity; instead, we have the ability to abstract our environment and work out problems in advance, the way a chessboard represents medieval war and a map represents some unknown country.

If you are with me so far, I know you don't need to be told the importance of having a brain. (Not that bodies aren't useful. Most bodies.) Clearly, a majority of humans develop abstract thinking at about the age of twelve, just in time to figure out how to get laid, a fact that we know intuitively but has also been confirmed scientifically by Piaget and a gazillion other psychologists. I am less certain everyone knows what Kohlberg discovered during his review and extension of Piaget's work: he estimated that 30% of people in the US never fully develop abstract reasoning (Kohlberg and Gilligan, 1971). This deficit has consequences more dire than the prospect of these folks going home alone from the Deer Park Tavern after last call. Smart people need to contemplate the mental fitness of the population as a whole, because our survival as a race means negotiating a complex global environment where mostly the danger isn't predators, meteors, or a plague of locusts; the dangerous obstruction is other, stupid people.

One hallmark of abstract thought is drawing conclusions based on authentic, empirical evidence as opposed to getting some cockamamie notion at 3 AM and sharpening the cutlery. In the essay form, it's standard practice for the writer to cite other scholars who gathered experimental evidence in advance of the writing. Prof. Boeree, do that evidence thing you do for the nice people.

It doesn't seem that the formal operations stage is something everyone actually gets to. Even those of us who do get there don't operate in it at all times. Even some cultures, it seems, don't develop it or value it like ours does. Abstract reasoning is simply not universal. (Boeree, 2009)

We have all these folks running around who literally can't do the math. I'm not talking about slack-jawed yokels bounding out of Dogpatch and the mind of Al Capp. I'm talking about accomplished people, college men and women, some of them with enormous power over the rest of us and chests of money! I'm talking about Al Capp, for instance, and others like him who don't have the ability to calculate their own best interest except in concrete, immediate terms. An absolutely telltale indicator of the inability to think abstractly is the failure to recognize that all human life, indeed all life on this planet, is interconnected.

I'm not arguing that calculating one's next move based on the best possible result is easy; I'm saying it is difficult, and many of your neighbors and countrymen lack cognitively the formal operations to do it. Because we can't actually see, taste, or touch the way our behaviors impact others and vice versa, many folks believe they are secret agents, acting alone, with no accountability to anyone. Capitalists prattle on and on without understanding about individual initiative and how we are in competition with others and that this is a good thing. Their view, while true in a limited and immediate way, lacks understanding of the long-term, the big picture, the ultimate goal of survival of the human species. Don't these libertarians or Ayn Rand objectivists watch Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946)? Well I do, every Christmas, and my favorite part is when George patiently explains to the radically individualist bankers their own self-interest in giving poor people a chance to get out of slums and poverty.

Here, you're all businessmen here. Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? You...you said...What'd you say just a minute ago?...They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait! Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken-down that they...Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about...they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community.

The whole concept of mass markets and entrepreneurial initiative to access mass markets relies on a large population with the resources to use goods and services. A financial situation like ours in the US, where wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very few, is actually bad for the economy and especially dangerous to those short-sighted few. Writing for Business Insider in an article called "Plutocracy Reborn," Gus Lubin remarks that the last time wealth was so concentrated in the hands of the top 1% of families was in 1928, just before the Great Depression, and conditions today are more dangerous for the superwealthy than they were then. (Lubin, 2010)

Resistance to my premise–that people with wealth and power very often are too stupid to understand what's good for them–is great in my country because we are obsessed with money and material things and harbor the false, untested attribution that people with vast sums are smarter and better than people without it. A recent study indicated that people with money, even if they understood that they received special breaks and advantages to get it, were most susceptible to the opinion that their wealth confers upon them a special, heavenly grace, and they were less likely to have consideration for others. (Szalavitz) My argument against the mistaken attribution of exceptionalism to the beneficiaries of monetary success is that someone with a very limited ability to apply abstract thought can, nevertheless, acquire a huge fortune. Intelligence is not the prerequisite for wealth.

Genuinely smart people have arranged society such that, in the US at least, survival doesn't require extremely difficult skills like tracking prey for food, finding water, and building shelter. Boy Scouting requires skill; one can achieve financial success with luck. Much of the empty sloganeering of the American Dream comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in Self-Reliance romanticizes the power and glory of the individual, self-made man. Emerson's creation inspires, but ought to include the caveat that everyone benefits immensely from the society in which he or she lives; other people matter.

A less quoted philosopher is Don Novello's stand-up character, Father Guido Sarducci. In a routine called "Five-Minute University," he tells us everything we need to know about business boils down to this: "You buy-a something and sell it for-a more." Bill Gates is intelligent enough to realize his enormous fortune came to him partly by accident (Borsook), and he's also sharp enough to know that spending huge sums of money to eliminate disease in Africa and putting computers in classrooms in the US benefits all people and himself.

The Koch brothers, Charles G. and David H., inherited the fortune of their father and the second largest privately held company in the United States. Dad was a chemist who invented a process essential to the refinement of oil into petroleum, which indicates intelligence, and he was also a founding member of the John Birch Society, which indicates an utter lapse in abstract reasoning. His sons continued his work of spending huge sums to promote libertarian ideas, free-market economics, deregulation, and eensy weensy government. They have vociferously opposed universal health care and raising the minimum wage, two ideas that sound economics predicts would save the nation billions of dollars and create wealth (Zieler, Krugman); they also deny the existence of man-made global warming against overwhelming scientific and fact-based opinion. (Mayer) Obviously, it is in their immediate and concretely understood self-interest to reduce their own taxes and block legislation that regulates the oil industry, but they are unbelievably stupid not to anticipate the future catastrophe of tens or hundreds of millions of the poor and uneducated and an even warmer planet, which is already experiencing historic weather extremes–heat, cold, rain, drought, and storms.

Especially when one is born with a monetary advantage, success doesn't require advanced cognitive skills. In fact, the pursuit of money for its own sake shows a pathological deficiency in abstract thought. Money is the ultimate abstraction. The paper it's printed on is nearly worthless; money is a symbol of something else, something with an ever-changing value. Amassing billions and billions of dollars without regard for the planet and one's fellows on it demonstrates an abject failure to distinguish substance from the representation of it. (Pause) "These go to eleven."

Nigel Tufnel in This is Spinal Tap is the best-known examplar of an utter confusion of a symbol for what it represents. This next one is from my experience teaching high school. One of my 16-year-olds was looking at two expensive pull-down maps, one of the United States and one of Pennsylvania. Her wide-eyed reaction was, "I never knew it before: they're the same size!"

A professor of sociology of my acquaintance was asked by a think tank to express what he expected in the future for America. He predicted doom and gloom. The biggest culprit in his mind was the rise of the belief that any government is intrinsically bad for the citizens and against their self-interest. The nitwits of the so-called Tea Party understand certain catchy slogans (No New Taxes! Big Government Off My Back!) but lack the mental acumen to apply them appropriately. (Incidentally, they got their own name wrong. Those early patriots were protesting the British failure to tax tea imported from Holland, not the opposite.) Government enacts laws that protect citizens from those with an excess of financial power, and the primary function of government is to redistribute the collective wealth of the nation.

When the stock market crashed in 2008, the Tea Party and its minions in Congress resisted higher taxes on the rich, the bailouts of threatened banks and industries, assistance to people whose mortgages were for more than their houses were worth and other government actions that are economically necessary when private investment dries up. They even shut the government down and refused to pay its debts unless these actions included spending cuts, ignoring the failure of similar austerity measures in Europe, and a lowering of the US credit rating that makes money more expensive. Since 2008, the people have profited from the payback on the loans it made to banks and business, but job creation remains stagnant. What we needed were huge investments in infrastructure and education that create taxpaying jobholders, improve services, and in the long run reduce deficits. Short-term thinking that flies in the face of evidence gutted support for the poorest working families, reduced public schools to rubble, endangered colleges, and the recession has dragged on for longer than it should have. Smart guys–help the dumb guys.

It's not only the wealthy elite who lack "moral development" (Kohlburg) that we should fear, but also the millions of voters whose understanding is stunted by deficiencies in dealing with the abstract, for our powerful nemesis distracts and misleads the huddled masses who ought to be its natural enemy. An insistence that every word in the Bible is literally true redirects working-class anger towards narrow "family value" issues, when they ought to be railing against warmongers and environment defilers. Belief in the imminent return of Son-O'-God leads to an ignorant disregard for long-term, scientifically demonstrated damage to our planet. Rampant global warming denial is based on a misplaced faith that God won't let his people be remembered only from the fossil record when insects take over the archeology and museum-building.

The Word takes on a magical significance that symbolic language does not have, resulting in misunderstanding and harm. If the purpose of the Bible is to give us consolation against a cruel world and show us the best way to get along with our fellow man, why can't it be understood metaphorically, and why insist that every word means exactly what it says (which is impossible)? The answer must be that many people are completely uncomfortable with symbolism; they must have everything in concrete terms. Ironically, they cease to believe that nature is governed by dependable scientific forces. "Magical thinking" describes a phase of cognition in which objects appear to have no physical continuity and where their behavior isn't fully covered by the Laws of Physics, and, generally, the human brain outgrows it in infancy.

Other than insisting that a virgin can have a baby, or a man can walk on water, or that a burning bush can talk, evidence of an utter discomfort with the tricky subtleties of language surfaces every time one of Obama's enemies tries to compare his actions to something else. Conservatives demonstrate an utter clumsiness with figures of speech. Thus, on 10/13/13, conservative spokesman Dr. Ben Carson called Obamacare the "worst thing that has happened in this country since slavery," North Carolina state senator Bob Rucho, on 12/15/13, tweets that "Obamacare has done more damage to the USA then (sic) the swords of the Nazis, Soviets & terrorists combined," (yeah, three groups renowned for their swordplay), and an Idaho state senator, Sherly Nuxoll, emailed to supporters this month (January, 2014) that "insurance companies are creating their own tombs...[m]uch like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps."

These analogies are reckless, unfeeling, and pitifully clumsy, English language fails that are worst disasters than, um, the Titanic and New Coke combined! As a Pennsylvanian, I'm always rooting for two-term (!) US senator and erstwhile Presidential candidate Rick Santorum to top everyone in spastic word play, and the sweater-vested little chowderhead never disappoints. "Gay marriage is an issue just like 9-11," he said, in February, 2004, and outstandingly, when Nelson Mandela died, he said on The O'Reilly Factor (12/5/13)

Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that's the reason he is mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed. ...And I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people's lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that.

Sometimes people who are weary with politics like to claim that the guys and gals who say and do ridiculous, mind-boggling things like shutting down the government for two weeks to make a quixotic, extremist point about government services, or hand the regulation of our environment over to the worst polluters of it, or compare health care to Apartheid must be accepting bribes from some lobby or corporation. I've always been opposed to conspiracy theories and their flimsy speculations. For one thing, I don't think the Far-Right is skilled enough (abstract wordplay coming) to organize a pack of gum let alone a vast extremist conspiracy. Thinking about the deficiencies of the conservative brain that ignores science, facts, and complex reasoning for the sake of immediate concrete satisfaction is plenty scary all by itself, but disagree with me and I won't think you're evil. Just stupid.
(2014)

Boeree, C. George. "Jean Piaget and Cognitive Development." Shippensburg University, 2009.

Borsook, Paulina. "The Accidental Zillionaire." Wired. 2003. n. pag. Web. 19 Jan 2014.

Gilligan, C. and Lawrence Kohlberg. "The adolescent as a philosopher: The discovery of the self in a post-conventional world." Daedalus 100(4)(1971): 1054-1087. Print.

Krugman, Paul. "Obamacare's Secret Success." The New York Times. 29 Nov. 2013.

Lubin, Gus. "Plutocracy Reborn." Business Insider. 1 Sep. 2010. n pag. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.

Mayer, Jane. "Covert Operations." The New Yorker. 30 Aug. 2010. n pag. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.

Szalavitz, Maia. "Why the rich are less ethical: They see greed as good." Time. 28 Feb. 2012. n. pag. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.

Zeiler, David. "The surprising benefits of raising the minimum wage." Money Morning. 20 Dec. 2013. n. pag. Web. 19 Jan. 20.