Their Imaginary World

What If Our Elites Are Really Just Stupid?

“The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.” - Wikipedia

“Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.” - Carlo Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

“It’s just my imagination…runnin’ away with me.” - The Temptations

For a number of years, I worked for a manager whose personality was extremely off-putting to many people who met him for the first time. Often, after some odd or quirky interaction, I would have to take someone aside and reassure them that he was ok. “He’s not evil”, I would tell them, “he’s just crazy.” That explanation, I soon discovered, offered rather limited comfort.

In a 9-0 ruling today, the United States Supreme Court declared that the states are not allowed to replace elections for federal office in 2024 with a legal free-for-all. The 9-0 ruling is instructive, since it provides solid evidence that the decision wasn’t even a close call. The absurdity of the legal tomfoolery in Colorado, a blatant effort to preclude anything resembling an actual democratic election in 2024, was obvious to any observer who wasn’t already rabid and frothing.

What interests me most about the ruling is how it has exposed so many elites, who are otherwise eager to present themselves as knowing sophisticates, as know-nothings instead. And I have wondered whether these people have been intentionally gas-lighting us and are therefore evil, or are they just crazy like my old boss?

But it occurs to me there’s another possibility that we ought to at least consider: it could be that a lot of these elites, whose perception of themselves is so lofty, are actually just really stupid. Perhaps they are so caught up in their own imaginations that they have made themselves dumb.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is an observable phenomenon that occurs when someone combines very limited actual knowledge with a wildly inflated self-regard. Such a person, though sorely limited in actual competence, nevertheless sees himself as superior in every way. Maybe this is what explains our elites more than anything else.

Much has been made about the delusional underpinnings of the current transgender mania. It has been interesting to contemplate just how a person can become so divorced from reality that they believe their own imaginings superintend all of reality. And the truly horrifying aspect of this mania is the extent to which so many people, who are not themselves transgender, have eagerly assented to the dumb idea that reality is determined by our fantasies.

Now what we see on the heels of the recent Supreme Court ruling is that maybe such stupidity is actually widespread and not confined merely to questions of body dysmorphia. Former somebody Keith Olbermann, who desperately wants to hear his own voice in the media microphone, has announced that the Supreme Court justices - every single one of them - have “betrayed democracy”. The liberal justices on the court, he says, are “inept at reading comprehension”. The entire court, on the basis of this decision, “is corrupt and illegitimate”. Not to put too fine a point on things, but though Olbermann’s expertise is in the field of sports journalism, he nevertheless conceives of himself as being far more expert in matters of constitutional jurisprudence than all the Supreme Court justices combined.

Whatever you want to say about Keith Olbermann, no one can say he is devoid of self-regard.

But Olbermann has, of course, been afflicted with diarrhea of the mouth for a very long time. We’ve all known that. One even suspects he may be the motivating force behind the cautionary Proverb:

“Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues.” - Proverbs 17:28

Like a transgender enthusiast, Olbermann seems to have taken up residence in an imaginary world in which his own personal preferences have become for him indistinguishable from objective reality.

But, alas, he’s not alone in there.

Ever since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, evangelical big shot Russell Moore has been mad that so many of his fellow evangelicals voted for the Donald. His reaction has been a head scratcher for anyone who isn’t obsessed with Trump in any particular way. But Moore seems to have reconstructed his entire career around his anti-Trump obsessions. It’s as if Moore observed Dan Rather’s journalistic self-immolation over George W. Bush and decided it represented some kind of how-to guide.

Moore’s public take on Colorado’s machinations is an embarrassing own goal to his credibility. He presents himself in public as knowledgeable about things he actually knows nothing about. He has begun to make a habit of this, having done the very same thing over Covid. If he still has any listeners or readers at this point, ones who are themselves anything other than completely credulous, they would be wise to start asking themselves what else Moore oozes confidence about, regarding which he actually knows nothing?

Right on schedule, Moore’s sometime partner on the Trump Derangement circuit, David French, decided to set fire to the remains of his own shredded credibility. Though French himself is actually in possession of a law degree - so he has less excuse than Moore - his retreat into the imaginary world of Trump derangement seems to have left him completely addled.

Here he is commenting on the Colorado court’s original decision to bar Trump from the 2024 primary ballot.

Of course, the Colorado court decision was never “absolutely correct”. It was always craven rather than courageous. That was obvious from the start to anyone who wasn’t consumed by the goal of defeating Donald Trump in the same way that Gollum was consumed by the ring of power.

As of this moment, French’s reaction to the supreme court ruling is to declare in the New York Times that they have “erased part of the constitution”.

The reader would be mistaken to take any of this as a thinly veiled endorsement of Trump. I have written before that I myself don’t believe that any political candidate is the answer to all of our problems. I think Trump did a lot of good while he was in office, and even in the face of enormous obstacles gratuitously thrown in his way. But I am not a devoted acolyte. There are others I would have preferred to win the Republican nomination this cycle.

Still, these events have left me with the impression that many of the smooth talkers and writers who speak so confidently on matters of public concern, and with such panache, are actually just idiots. Or, at least, their peculiar Trumpian obsessions have made them so.

And that’s a shame. Because what we don’t need right now is an increase in the sum total of stupidity in the world. We really don’t. But that seems to be what we’re getting.