Utopian voters полностью

The thing that makes governmental systems explode is the accumulation of high-competence individuals in the Outs group. That’s far more important than the decrease of competence in the Ins group. No matter how incompetent a government may be, if there is no competent opposition, it will remain in power by simple inertia.

The New Testament tells of Herod’s effort to eliminate the threat of a high-competence individual among the Outs, by a technique that was popular during most of human history. Having heard that a new king was born, but not having any exact details on the matter, Herod ordered the slaughter of all boys who had been born in a certain period.

That approach to the problem had about the usual degree of success; Jesus had, of course, been moved out of the danger area as soon as the threat appeared. The generalization being, simply, that the really smart ones are always hard to stop.

The one sure way of guaranteeing that every high-competence individual will be brought into the Ins group is simple Universal Suffrage. The nice, simple, sure way of solving the whole problem ...

But it is, actually, a sure way to ruin the culture—again, because of genetics and statistics. No matter how you slice it, no matter how you define your terms, one half of the population must be rated as subnormal. You can establish a test so simple as "If it looks vaguely human, and is breathing, it votes," which anyone capable of protesting about things can pass—and still one half of the population is subnormal. You may pass all the laws you like—but man-made laws don’t affect the laws of Nature, and the statistical nature of genetics existed long before Mendel discovered the fact, and will exist no matter what laws are passed against the fact.

Any successful culture must be an oligarchy. The rulers must be a selected group. If a mass of solid propellant fuel is burned in free space, it produces an expanding gas-cloud that isn’t going anywhere. Only when it is confined, channeled, and directed will the energy available produce progress. A random system gets nowhere—and will, with perfectly predictable certainty, be taken over by a nonrandom progressive system.

Voters must be selected; the Ins must be selected.

But the method of selection must be one that is based on the individual’s own, individual, personal abilities and competences, and not on heredity ... save as heredity influences his individual abilities.

A while back, I proposed the test of pragmatic competence to earn an income in the top 20% as a test for the right to vote. This was hotly objected to—quite largely by individuals who did not realize that, in damning the "rich, greedy, selfish" people in the top 20% they were damning themselves.

Very well; let’s try another test procedure. We will, this time, make the test a simple use-vocabulary test. Any individual who can pass a use-vocabulary test showing a use-vocabulary greater than n-thousand words gets to vote, with no other requirement whatsoever, of age, sex, race, creed, financial standing, or police record.

Now the interesting gimmick on this test is that it is, flatly in contradiction to what it may appear to be, absolutely not an academic test. And many extensive studies of the subject by psychological testing groups has turned up the surprising-at-first fact that the magnitude of an individual’s use-vocabulary has no relationship whatever to his educational background. It doesn’t even have any marked correlation with his cultural background! It turns out to be not a linguistic test at all—but a mental-precision test in the purest sense. A brilliant German, Russian, Chinese, or Ghanian, coming to the United States and living here for a year may display a use-vocabulary approaching 40,000 words ... while a native born moron of thirty-five years residence here has a use-vocabulary of 4,000. Under the standards of our modern school system, moreover, the native-born moron may have a high school diploma—and the Russian may have grown up in a remote area of Siberia, and have no schooling whatever.

The whole test is a snide trick, a subtle gimmick, based on the very nature of the fool’s thinking. He knows—he knows beyond any possibility of question—that he is as competent as anyone. The breaks may have been against him, and They may have been against him, but he knows unalterably that he is smart. The use-vocabulary test is obviously simple—just a few hundred test words.