Why Do We Choose Fools to Lead Us?

Let’s face it, most of us aren’t all that bright. Or all that wise. Today we live in a quite remarkable hi-tech society. We can communicate instantaneously with someone on the other side of the globe. We can fly to the moon. But it took us 200,000 years or so to get here. A truly intelligent and imaginative species would have made the journey much more quickly. Obviously we didn’t get here because of the intrinsic intelligence of Homo sapiens. We got here because a tiny minority of us are much brighter than the mass of us. We got here because of Einstein, Darwin, Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Archimedes and other exceptional and rare members of our species. Without such rarities we would still be hunching around campfires gnawing on bones, terrified of the darkness.

And what have we, the unwashed masses, done with what our best and brightest have allowed us to achieve? Have we managed it wisely? Well ... not exactly. While developing a hi-tech society, we have at the same time put the whole thing in jeopardy.

We have put our futures under threat of annihilation by our own weapons; we are heating up our planet to the point where it threatens civilization itself; we are systematically exterminating our fellow species; and we are exhausting our planet's resources. In summary, we are fouling our own nest. Even birds, with their tiny brains, know that you don't do that.

A major reason for our various stupidities is that we place the responsibility for managing our societies in the hands of fools. Think Trump, Morrison, Bolsonaro, Maduro, etc., and these are just a sampling of leaders we chose personally through the democratic process. We mutely allow a far worse batch to assume power without even bothering to ask our permission. Would an intelligent or wise species place their future in the hands of fools?

We often fail to even recognize our brightest and best, or worse, reject them. Copernicus delayed announcing his theory of heliocentricity until he was on his death bed for fear of how his benighted fellow citizens would react to hearing they weren't at the centre of the world. Galileo was censured by the Church and might have suffered worse if he hadn't had friends in high places. Darwin was mocked for simply telling his fellow men and women the truth, that they had evolved out of pond scum. And today all too many of us and our leaders reject the knowledge of our wise men and women when it comes to climate science. We choose instead to listen to fools and rush on toward Armageddon.

There is no point in feeling blue about all this. It is what it is, or to paraphrase Popeye, "we are what we are and that's all that we are." Except for a gifted few we are a very limited species. If we don't survive our assault on the planet, it will be no more than evolution dispensing with a species that has run its course. We will join millions of others. For the dinosaurs, it took a comet; for us ... well, we are doing it all by ourselves. Nonetheless, as a billion innocent animals burn alive in Australia, in large part due to our folly, I can't help feeling sorry for all the other species that got stuck with us.