"As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the lawgivers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end."  Adlai Stevenson (1956)

Bob Herbert’s OP-ED piece “Stop Being Stupid” in the December 27, 2008 New York Times makes the point that we have been behaving in ways that were “incredibly, astonishingly and embarrassingly stupid” and that have “wrecked the economy and mortgaged the future of generations yet unborn.”  

These acts of stupidity include believing (1) that Iraq would finance the war with its oil revenues, and when that failed that moving the costs off-budget would make it less painful; (2) that shipping jobs overseas would ultimately benefit everybody; (3) that mindless consumption would be good for the economy; (4) that decreasing government regulation would always improve the markets; (5) that house prices would always increase; (6) that all tax cuts would be beneficial; and (7) that our credit worthiness would continue to be measurable by the number of credit card offers coming in the mail. 

Herbert argues that we at least have the option of acting smarter going forward.  He advocates that we start making wiser long-term investments in our own country (such as in infrastructure, education, health care, environmental protection, and new domestic energy sources) and that we start living within our means. 

I agree with that, but the lessons we learn must extend beyond economics.   Our collective stupidity extended equally to the broader field of public policy.  We failed to think through the main issues there as well. 

We never analyzed the implications of going along with the concept of “the war on terror,” and got frightened into compromising our values and civil liberties and into spending billions of dollars without comparative cost/benefit analyses.  We were not willing to acknowledge the limits of military power and we dismissed diplomacy, only to let major crises such as North Korea and Iran deteriorate.  We deluded ourselves into believing that we were the only surviving superpower and therefore could do anything we wanted unilaterally.  We bought into the ideas of party loyalty at any cost and winning at any cost, and ended up torturing people.  We fell for ideology, making big decisions based on the strength of one-liners, and launched an unnecessary war.  The list goes on and on, and the results are just as staggering as our economic debacle.  The world has become much more dangerous, and we are less prepared to deal with it. 

The real lesson from all of this seems to be that a modern democratic nation for the most part will perform at the level of education and wisdom of its citizens.  As Thomas Jefferson said: "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but inform their discretion…." 

Unfortunately, we have adopted the approach of taking away the wholesome discretion and dumbing down our population.  Over the last eight years, our government has pursued a deliberate program of secrecy to avoid public debate.  This secrecy extended over a whole range of governmental activity, from energy policy to torture.  Even the caskets of returning war dead were hidden from public view.  Our President’s admonition after the September 11 attacks was to go shopping.  Our administration admittedly selected the selling point for the war in Iraq based on mass marketing considerations rather than intellectual rigor and honesty.  We regulate our mass media based principally on commercial considerations, resulting in an intellectual wasteland.  Our educational system leaves our children’s performance in science behind those of some third world countries. We are now paying the price for abandoning our responsibilities as citizens. 

Going back to Herbert’s article, we may be able to start solving our current economic crisis by printing money, but we cannot roll an educated citizenry off the printing presses.  We better get started at the hard tasks of educating ourselves and carrying out our responsibilities, or “ living within our means” may take on a whole new meaning.<!--EndFragment-->