Against Democracy Lesson #2: Based on Chapters 2 and 3

Essay Assignment

Support, refute, or complicate Jason Brennan’s argument that American democracy is too dominated by hooligans and trolls to achieve positive outcomes, and therefore democracy should be replaced by an epistocracy in which greater political powers are granted to the vulcan class. Be sure to include a counterargument section in your essay unless your essay conforms to a refutation structure, in which case your entire essay is a series of counterarguments. You must have a minimum of 3 credible sources for your Works Cited page.

One. What are the 3 levels of political knowledge?

Some know a lot; some know nothing; others know less than nothing, meaning they have wrong information.

35% of voters are “know-nothings.”

American voters are not stupid; they “just don’t care.” The issue is apathy or people are too busy making a living or too distracted by cat videos.

In fact, most of us engage in rational ignorance, not bothering with political information that has a direct effect on our lives. In other words, the expected costs of political information exceed the expected benefits.

If you’re poor, disenfranchised, and living on the margins, do you really feel there are high stakes in voting? Your life is a struggle regardless of the policies or who is in office.

If you are in the middle class or higher and you feel there are stakes, you may learn a modicum of politics.

There is knowledge stratification with infovores and political nerds hanging out with their own kind and the politically apathetic hanging out with theirs. With a shrinking middle class and with structural inequality, the stratification is going to get worse.

Also tribalistic stratification doesn’t create objective knowledge; rather, it creates bias.

In contrast, a vulcan is free of cognitive bias. The vulcan is free of “motivated reasoning,” developing thoughts to feel good about himself, to feel belonging, and to feel vindicated. These are not dispassionate thoughts.

Non-vulcans reason to win arguments, not to find the truth.

Two. What is political tribalism?

We are drawn to belong in groups, and we share our tribe’s biases and hostilities to outside tribes.

People don’t really study politics. They are more like fans rooting for their team.

Three. What is confirmation and disconfirmation bias?

We search for evidence (we cherry pick evidence) that supports our pre-existing views.

They will disconfirm or criticize views that don’t match their own.

Availability bias means we blow up shark attacks and other lurid sensations in news because their high ratings makes them visible. We ignore global warming because it’s not exciting and reported with same vigor as kidnapping or shark attack.

Four. Why do low levels of information matter in voting?

Studies show low-information voters support policies that impose prejudice, intolerance, and discrimination against those who are different than they are. They also want harsher legal penalties and a more aggressive foreign policy.

Chapter 2

Five. American academe is in love with John Stuart Mill’s education theory:

Citizens need a foundation of humanities, writing, literacy, logic, history, philosophy, and civics to develop a larger view of world, one that is bigger than their self-interests.

This education results in all of us fighting for a common good and makes us stick together. This will encourage civic and political involvement.

Civic and political involvement will increase virtue.

Brennan refutes the above. He argues that political engagement makes a hobbit into a hooligan or at best a fanboy, not a vulcan.

He argues we do not know how to make a society of vulcans. As proof, they remain a tiny minority.

What about marriage? Many say that most marriages are unhappy. Should we eliminate marriage? Only a tiny minority of marriages are healthy and happy.

According to Sturgeon’s Law, 90% of everything is ****. Should be ditch democracy because of Sturgeon’s Law? What if it’s the lesser of all available evils?

If Sturgeon is correct, then the education principle works 10% of the time.

If Sturgeon is correct, then only 10% of the epistocracy will be of high quality. Can we trust such a small percentage of the epistocracy to be gatekeepers of a healthy society?

Brennan is making a big deal that education and political engagement fail most of the time. He should also, then, consider that the making of an epistocracy, his claim for a better society, can be subject to the same rate of failure.

Six. How might Brennan’s opponents accuse his book of championing elitism?

Over and over Brennan rejects that education can be the cause of higher intelligence. Rather, he says explicitly in Chapter 3, that people of higher intelligence are drawn to education in the first place.

Going to college and being smarter is not a matter of causation but of correlation.

We can infer from his argument that only a very few people have the hard-wired smarts to be members of the epistocracy. The rest of society should be content being happy hobbits, shopping, online grazing, and the like, and leave government to the minority vulcans.

That, according to many, is elitism.

Elitism tends to be a dirty word, suggestive of autocracy, despotism, and other anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian forces.

We’ll have to see if Brennan addresses these concerns.

Seven. How might Brennan defend accusations of elitism?

Brennan makes the case that thoughtful political participation, “deliberative democracy,” does not happen because people’s egos and tribalistic self-interests turns them into competitive hooligans who don’t want the truth. They want to dominate the discussion and assert their dominance politically.

Brennan is arguing that whatever elitism he is pushing, it is preferable to giving hooligans power in the political marketplace.

Brennan seems to be saying: Either take my softened variation of elitism in the form of an epistocracy or take our current democracy in which hooligans exercise way too much power, to the detriment of society.

Look at the rise of Alex Jones and his fellow trolls and hooligans and ask yourself if this is the direction you’d like to see your society follow.

In other words, there is a breed of people who are passionate about politics. Their identity is built on their political passion and identity. Most of us are not like this. We cannot compete with the political fanboys. These fanboys become hooligans and compromise the democratic ideal.

The above is Brennan’s argument in a nutshell.

I think it is one of his strongest arguments. I’m not sure I buy his epistocracy, but I’ll give him credit of his hooligan theory of democracy.

“Are American Voters Actually Just Stupid?”

“We Must Weed Out Ignorant Voters from the Electorate”

Book Reviews of Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy:

“Bleeding Heart Bullshit” by Jonah Walters

Rosyln Fuller’s review in LA Review of Books

“Democracy Vs Epistocracy” by Ilya Somin

“The Case Against Democracy” in The New Yorker, writer Caleb Crain

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews article by Thomas Christiano

Dickie Bellringer review

Stumbling and Mumbling review