Jefferson Review

"Your Liberty is Our Interest"

Home /  Archives / Search / Links / Quotes / Book Reviews / Advertise /Contact us / Subscribe / Calendar

How Our Intelligence Got Smarter – And A Christmas Offer

By Theresa Fritz Camoriano

One interesting bit of information that came out of the capture of Saddam Hussein was that, beginning in mid-summer, the U.S. intelligence folks began seeking information in a new way – from the ground up.  Instead of just questioning a few high level people in Saddam’s administration, they began questioning many very low level people, and, at that point, their intelligence began to improve dramatically.  One low-level aide might not know very much individually, but the leads obtained from a large number of low-level people gradually produced a very useful collection of information.  This should not surprise anyone.  We should all know by now that the collective knowledge and wisdom of the individual, regular old folks is far greater than the knowledge and wisdom of any elite person or group. 

We see evidence of the superiority of the collective wisdom of the people every day.  For example, as individuals freely go about their lives, working, buying and selling, they make decisions that transmit information about their  preferences and about scarcities, creating Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, which makes a free-market economy work so well  – far better than any top-down “five-year plan” ever established by even the best-educated and most powerful elites. 

Regular folks usually get the basics right in their lives – knowing that hard work and persistence pay off, that it is important to save some money for a rainy day, and that whining and complaining are not the keys to success, for example.  Over the ages, various people have tried various approaches to life.  When they succeed, they serve as a good example, which others tend to follow, and, when they make a mess of their lives, reality has a tendency to whack them over the head and have a corrective impact on them or at least makes them serve as an example for others of what not to do. 

We not only benefit from the collective wisdom of the people who are currently alive; we also benefit from the collective wisdom that has been passed on to us from previous generations, through the lessons they taught their children, through their religious beliefs and practices, through their writings, and through the culture they helped form.  While we certainly would want to defer to well-educated specialists in some areas, such as deferring to a brain surgeon when we need brain surgery or deferring to a nuclear scientist if we are trying to build a nuclear bomb, we should always have great respect for the collective wisdom of the regular people when it comes to basic cultural issues.  There simply is no living human who could possibly know on his own even a small fraction of the wisdom that is reflected in the culture and institutions that have evolved through the collective wisdom of the people.

At this time of year, we are celebrating Christmas, the birth of a person who made a huge impact on the world’s culture not by using force but by using persuasion.  Jesus was called a king, and he certainly was a great threat to the existing political powers of his time (and continues to be a threat to existing political powers today), but he did not take on the trappings or power of a king and did not impose his will by force.  Instead, he promoted the idea of free will – of people being free to live their lives as they choose and to be responsible for their own actions.  Jesus did not arrogantly try to force his views on anyone.  Instead, he humbly spoke, taught, and used his own life to serve as a persuasive example to others.  During his short life, he added immeasurably to the collective wisdom, and, as others accepted his views, he succeeded in transforming society for the better.

It is a pity that so many powerful elites today, who think they know best how a society should function, are too impatient to rely on persuasion and the bottom-up evolution of a society and instead want to re-make society from the top down through force.  Instead of humbly offering their views on a voluntary basis, allowing their own lives to serve as examples for others, and allowing the trials and errors of regular folks gradually to be added to the collective wisdom through an evolutionary process, the elites arrogantly take political control of the institutions that reflect and perpetuate the collective wisdom and are use that political control to make rapid, wholesale changes by force.  In particular, by taking control of education and forcing us to pay for an education system in which our children are indoctrinated into their worldviews, they are succeeding in destroying much of the collective wisdom of our culture that reflects the experience of millions of people over thousands of years. 

Many of the concepts that today’s elites claim to support come directly from Jesus’ teachings – concepts such as defending the weakest members of society and respecting every human being.  However, by using arrogance and coercion rather than humility and persuasion to try to achieve their goals, the politically powerful elites are having exactly the opposite effect of what they claim they want.  Arrogantly forcing people to do things your way certainly is not treating them with respect! 

While it is always healthy to question and challenge the collective wisdom and to allow that collective wisdom to evolve naturally, as Jesus did, it is not healthy to destroy the collective wisdom by force, as is currently occurring. 

We regular folks need to remember that we are this generation’s repositories of the collective wisdom, and we have the responsibility and the power to pass that wisdom on to the next generation.  We may be forced to give the politically powerful much of our money to be used for their purposes (as Jesus said, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s), but, so far, we are not forced to give them our children. 

So this Christmas, I’d like to make a special offer.  Consider that the most valuable gift we can give our own children and other people’s children is to help pass on to them the collective wisdom that has evolved over thousands of years of human experience.  Instead of buying a toy that will soon get lost or broken, we might consider paying part of a child’s tuition to a private school that teaches our cultural values or contributing to a scholarship fund to help children from low-income families obtain a good education in such a school.  And no gift wrapping is required!

Merry Christmas!

Weather (Louisville) / Mapquest / Search / White Pages / Business Search / CNN / Dictionary / E-card / MSN