When politicians want to be elected, they need the support of the majority, generally speaking. But what’s the average cognitive state of the majority? Are they all highly-diligent thinkers with enough time on their hands to vet all the facts?
No!
The majority are busy, distracted people who don’t spend much time in reflection or in problem solving. They are given to biases, memes, and hearsay as their method of gathering information. And when they use logic, it’s not always sound logic, because they don’t put much thought into that, either.
They are the lion’s share of the marketplace in which the candidates shop for votes. If a candidate is the pandering sort, we should not ever expect him or her to present a platform that requires deep reflection and research to understand. Rather, we should expect to see a platform aimed at exciting the mentally-not-so-sharp masses. He or she is looking for the low-hanging fruit, which is the most abundant, and the easiest and quickest to pick. So they do better when delivering messages that are high in emotion, and that appeal to the baser, less-intellectual, less-virtuous dispositions of their target voters. Tactics like promising them money from the public treasure are time-honored winners. Just think back to the Roman Empire’s “Bread and Circus” method of keeping the masses occupied with food and entertainment. And another popular tactic that appeals to the baser instincts of voters is the uniting of the voting base against a common enemy. Whether it’s a foreign foe, or a faction of a country’s own citizens, this, too, is a classic manipulation for winning the low-thinking masses. Think of Hitler rallying German animus against the Jews of his own country, and you’ll get the picture.
For as long as the non-thinkers outnumber the thinkers, there’s no reason to think all this will ever change. Cognitive scientists observe that humans generally tend to be cognitive misers, spending very little energy on their thinking unless they are forced to. And they recognize that we are moral misers, too, hesitant to invest much in high moral standards. Rather, we tend to adopt relaxed standards that are easier to maintain most of the time.
The real enemy, then, is not so much the pandering politician as it is the cognitively-compromised electorate. If they were to reform themselves substantially in this way, we would surely see the quality of candidate platforms rise. This doesn’t mean that those platforms would be sincere, mind you. But a lying candidate in a cognitively/morally-diligent society would quickly become damaged goods, whereas in America today, many such people become life-long incumbents, enjoying the faithful support of hordes of voters.
America is quite happy to re-elect almost everybody who’s in office!
Think about what that says about what kind of people we are!
