You’re not stupid, you’re just lazy and arrogant

Why populists get things wrong

Populists often attack those they call the elites, claiming they look down on them and think they’re stupid. See for instance Leavers attacking Remainers, or now, anyone in Reform UK attacking anyone who disagrees with them, or, in the US, MAGAs attacking the liberal elites. But I don’t think these populists are necessarily stupid. Many of them are very intelligent.

It is true that a study found that people with lower cognitive ability “were more likely to vote for Brexit”, but that study was conducted by pointy-headed elites who probably voted remain and go to fancy dinner parties in Islington so we can ignore it.

The problem is that thinking in the way that elites supposedly think takes a lot of work whereas using your common sense is easy, and common sense is what populists are all about. These elites with their letters after their names and their book learning, they’ve got no common sense.

Common sense is easy for populists. They’re good at it, or so they think. The trouble is, the world often doesn’t work the way common sense says it should. Maybe God lacked common sense when he made it.

Official portrait of Michael Gove by Chris McAndrew

People have had enough of experts

There are certainly examples of academics getting things wrong, but that doesn’t mean all academics are wrong about everything and can simply be dismissed.

Populists often portray academics as a universally stupid monolith. Or a universally crooked monolith. No one with common sense could actually think the things they claim to think. They dismiss the years of study academics put in to become academics. A few Google searches and a bit of common sense can trump some pompous academic’s expert knowledge any day of the week.

Motivated scepticism

Climate denial is a good example. Climate deniers are often quite knowledgeable, but they use that knowledge more how a lawyer would than how a scientist would, to convince themselves and others of what they believe to be true, which just happens to be what they want to be true. They start with a conclusion and work backwards, finding evidence to support their conclusion and debunking any that undermines it. One paper looking at two studies on beliefs regarding climate change found that people’s political opinions were a strong predictor of their views on climate change.

In elitespeak, populists lack epistemic humility. They over-estimate how much they know, and under-estimate how much the so-called experts know. They’ve climbed to the summit of Mount Stupid and stayed there. Still, that doesn’t mean they themselves are stupid in that they lack intelligence. It’s a different kind of stupidity. It’s more a form of arrogance.

If you’re stupid and you know you’re stupid then you’re actually very clever. We’re all stupid about some things. About most things actually. But then most of us know that. Most of us go to doctors when we’re sick. We don’t think we know better than the medical experts. Some do though. The anti-vaxxers for instance. They think the medical establishment is either stupid or corrupt.

Joseph Heath likens populism to Daniel Kahneman’s System One thinking from his book “Thinking Fast and Slow”. System One thinking is the quick easy and intuitive thinking that we do most of the time, almost without thinking about it. Like if I ask you what’s two plus two you’ll (hopefully) straight off say four. That’s System One. System Two thinking however takes some effort and is much slow. If I asked you what’s 75 x 63 you’d might have to imagine yourself working that out with a pen and paper, or you’d at least have to go through several steps, like maybe 3 x 75 = 225 and 6 x 75 = 450 so 60 x 75 = 4,500 and 4,500 + 225 = 4,725. Bingo!

We generally avoid doing that kind of thing if we can help it though. It’s quite painful, and most of the time isn’t necessary.

The trick is knowing when you need to put in the work and do the System Two thinking, or at least when someone needs to have put in that kind of thinking. This is the kind of thinking that educational establishments generally teach students to do. It has to be learned. It doesn’t come naturally.

The overconfidence in common sense doesn’t just lead to bad beliefs. It also changes how populists treat disagreement: it becomes evidence of bad character. Once you’ve decided the truth is obvious, anyone disagreeing with you can’t just be mistaken; they must be biased or corrupt or lying.

Echo chambers and naïve realism

If you’re a naïve realist, you believe we perceive the world as it really is, that reality is self-evident, that how things are and how things work is just a case of common sense, then you’re not going to feel the need for much or any System Two thinking. Perhaps then it’s wrong to say that populists are lazy. If you don’t think something is worthwhile then you’re not lazy for failing to do it. Many though do accept that in certain fields System Two thinking is required, like when it comes to engineering. Just not when it comes to political matters.

But to dismiss expertise and data without a sound reason for doing so is lazy. That the experts or the data don’t tell you what you want to hear is not a sound reason. Take for instance the fall in crime in the UK (as in many other countries). Crime has fallen whilst the immigrant population has risen. This is somewhat inconvenient for populists such as Farage and his Reform UK party who want to claim that Britain is broken and crime is surging as a result of uncontrolled immigration. Rather than grappling with the data or rethinking his position Farage just dismisses the data, saying the Crime Survey for England & Wales is wrong.

Here’s a good example. In response to a post claiming a link between migration and crime in Britain I posted a link to Fraser Nelson’s “Reform UK’s crime fiction” which displayed this graph

comparing the immigrant population with data from the Crime Survey for England & Wales. I got this response:

I’m skeptical, for three main reasons:

Crime can seem lower per 100,000 for example when there’s a large increase in population in the reporting area. If that area is national, that’s cloudy.

The way crime is recorded in certain areas evolves, essentially massaging numbers down.

The lack of reporting of crime to begin with is huge. So many go unreported due to public perception that the police will do nothing. A crime ref. No. for a burglary for insurance etc.

If this person had read the linked Fraser Nelson article he would have seen that the data was not based on reported or recorded crime.

Perhaps many of us are guilty of not reading the articles people link to on social media, or not watching the videos or listening to the podcasts, before commenting, but this kind of jumping to conclusions does appear to me to be more prevalent among populists. Not just rightwing ones though. The leftwing populists do it too.

To believe that you perceive political reality as it really is and that others are either failing to perceive it accurately or they’re lying is quite arrogant. You have to believe that you and your fellow populists tell it like it is but everyone else is either stupid or a liar. The people are superior to the so-called elites.

There often seems to be a mistaken a view that virtually all ordinary people think the same, as expressed in this comment:

Labour and the university-trained, middle-class Left have abandoned the working class, constantly sneering at and deriding its beliefs and principles. What sad and depressing times.

That implies that the working class are of one mind and the the university-trained, middle-class Left are of another mind. Perhaps everyone you know thinks pretty much the same as you, and perhaps you and everyone you know is working class, but that doesn’t mean all working class people think like you and your friends.

Social media can exacerbate this kind of thinking. We may find ourselves in echo chambers with like-minded people, or we put ourselves into those echo chambers because we follow like minded people, and that can give us the impression that we are part of a huge majority. We are the working class or we are the people. Following and engaging with those we disagree with takes effort. It’s a lot easier to stick to your own side and get approval rather than push back.

“The people” keeps shrinking

Populism is often framed as being anti-elitist but it seems they’re only anti the current elite. They want to replace the current elite with themselves, the people, or “the people” because when they talk about the people they don’t mean everyone in society, they mean the true people, ordinary folk, people like them and, ultimately, people who look like them, sound like them and think like them. The rest, well they’re enemies of the people or they’re people who don’t belong in society at all, like say immigrants. Populism tends to keep shrinking the people until, ultimately, there’s just one person who speaks for the people. Anyone who opposes him is therefore an enemy of the people.