DEAR WINERS: ARE PEOPLE STUPID?

We haven’t left in our motorhome yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do some human geography exploration. Enter Bob, not his real name.

I haven’t seen Bob very much in the last fifty years, but I was in his town the other day so I looked him up. He’s not exactly a stranger, but, like everybody, he’s probably changed some in half a century.

In his youth, Bob was a wild man in the classic sense. Imagine all the wild men you have known or seen on the silver screen, put them all together, and that was Bob. Has he changed much? I’d say he doesn’t drive as fast or drink as much, but where politics and economics are concerned, he has more fire in his belly, not less than when he was young. I imagine Che Guevara was like that. Or Karl Marx.

Bob is Bernie Sanders on roids, with more furious indignation and fewer constraints. Or no constraints. Like Bernie, he has the flying white hair and intense eyes. Unlike Bernie, he doesn’t have to pander to anybody. And he’s funnier than Bernie by a long way.

In two hours, I picked up two main strands in Bob’s thinking: first, political and economic structures are corrupt and oppressive. Second, most people are not smart, at least where politics and economics are concerned. They are like sheep. Ill informed, apathetic, compliant. Maybe even stupid.

As far as oppressive and corrupt systems are concerned, I can only remember some of what Bob had to say. That’s because he reads so much about that stuff that he is flying above my head a lot, and also because his thoughts are delivered with conviction, let us say. With force and vigor and unparliamentary language. The conversational equivalent of being in the ring with Mike Tyson.

Capitalism, says Bob, is horrible. Corrupt, oppressive, rapacious. Baby boomers, among whom are we, have royally f***ed things up. We don’t produce anything; we just get land rich because of systemic injustice, and then we live idle, self- indulgent lives at the expense of the environment and poor countries. We ride around in motorhomes and such. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and Bob is indignant about all of it.

His villains? Capitalism. Evangelicals, 81% of whom voted for Trump in 2016. Conservatives in general. Ill informed citizens. Just to check his bona fides, I asked him if he had his Jordan Petersen tickets yet, which elicited a blast of vituperation.

That’s only some of what he said, but you get the picture. It was an entertaining couple of hours, but because I don’t read as much as he does about all that, I mostly just listened. Didn’t argue much.

But I did push back a bit on his second point, mainly that most people are ill-informed, kinda stupid, like sheep. Not only that, if I heard him right, he said that the vast majority of people, himself among them, are boring.

Here I contested him a bit. “You are not boring,” I said, and I am right. Bob is engaged, opinionated, a life-of-the-party type of guy. When he was young, he was always where the action was. He made the action. He was always good with the ladies, always good for a laugh. He still is. “You are not boring,” said I, “and neither is anybody else. Everybody has a story; you just have to be able (or willing) to draw it out.”

“No,” said Bob, “most of us are boring, most of us are just mindless consumers.” I started to tell him he’s full of shit, but right then my phone rang and it was cold, so we adjourned.

On this point, I believe that I am right and he is wrong. Or at least I want to believe that. I don’t like the t-shirt that says, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.” I don’t want to think of people as vermin, like Mr. Nye Bevan did. Or sheep, like Orwell did. Don’t wanna go there.

Nor, I think, does Bob. He is gregarious, people smart, not a misanthrope. But I think he takes too dark a view of his fellow citizens. I think they think more and feel more than he gives them credit for. They all have stories to tell.

Are most people-- let us put it charitably--less than fully aware, or do most people think thoughts that would astonish us if we had the capacity to listen and they had the capacity to articulate? Are people stupid or not? What’s the verdict?