They say ignorance is bliss. But if that’s true, why are so many dumb people so unhappy?
Case in point: Brexit. A day after Britons voted to leave the European Union, the top Google search in the country was: “What is the European Union?”
Second case in point: Donald Trump. Upon arriving in Scotland on the morning after the Brexit vote, Trump said the result was a victory for the United Kingdom, which includes “the Scotch,” as Trump has referred to the Scots. Never mind that Scotland voted overwhelmingly against leaving the E.U. Also, never mind that Trump apparently confuses a people with a strong whiskey or a transparent adhesive tape.
In both cases — Brexit and the surprising and depressing support in this country for Trump — ignorant but angry people are lashing out at what they perceive to be the establishment. They either don’t know basic and relevant facts or they know them, but don’t care. What’s important to them is that they make an angry statement and the consequences be damned.
Now, antipathy toward an elite that has left them behind and seems oblivious or even callous to their plight isn’t misplaced. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, when you’re working hard, playing by the rules and still not getting ahead, you start to question the entire system, and then otherwise dormant resentments toward groups that you feel have an unfair competitive advantage get aired out in public. And all of it becomes very ugly.
But it seems to me that the best, quickest way to reverse the alarming increase in blatant racism and xenophobia is to address the underlying dislocation that happens when the richest 1% of us grab all the new wealth created since the recovery from the Great Recession.
That’s why I voted for Bernie Sanders. Sanders recently wrote a brilliant piece in The New York Times taking his concentration-of-wealth argument global. He points out that the richest 62 people in the world control as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s entire population. That’s right. Sixty-two individuals have as much as 3.6 billion individuals. Therein lies your problem. Fix that and a lot of other things fall into place.
People who have more and who feel more secure about the future tend to take fewer risks. They stay put. They provide stable environments for their kids. They’re less likely to support radical leaders. War — both the organized kind and the terrorist kind — seems like a terrible option because it disrupts and destroys a good life as opposed to offering change for a horrible one.
So, it’s not so much that the Brexit or Trump voters don’t have an inchoate sense of the problem; it’s that they’re falling for solutions proffered by cranks.
Simply put, we need a fairer distribution of the world’s wealth. With that would come a vast reduction in conflict, a vast reduction in human suffering and a much healthier, safer, saner world. The masses seem to be correctly identifying the disease while insisting on quack treatments that only make the sickness worse.
