When ‘Smart’ Means Stupid

(I refuse to write about this week’s elections. It’s to our country’s shame that any Democrats were elected at all.)

The religious divide between regular people and The World’s Smartest People can be seen clearly in the daily pretensions and hubris of liberals.

Remember “the Invisible Hand”? It was a metaphor for a free market—millions of people independently making decisions according to their personal interests, and the patterns that seem to arise out of it. Patterns of supply and demand, for instance: or fashions in clothing, architecture, or cars. The end result, we see: but the daily, incredibly complex operations that bring about that result, we don’t see.

Regular people are content to live with the Invisible Hand. In fact, most of them never even think about it. They see it as just “the way things are,” and if it’s not broken, they don’t want to fix it. And it’s usually not broken.

But The World’s Smartest People can never be content with that—all those grubby little peasants deciding what they want to wear, or have for supper, or where they want to live: who do they think they are! Obviously they’re unintelligent, or The World’s Smartest People would have known them from The World’s Great Colleges. And really, you can’t have unintelligent people making all those decisions. They’re bound to get it wrong!

No, no, no! No more Invisible Hand. Instead, conscious planning. By The World’s Smartest People. Take those decisions out of the hands of the peasants and put them into the hands of the true Citizens Of The World, who always know what’s best. Their professors told them they know what’s best.

And it’s so much more Scientific, to have everything planned out in advance by experts, rather than allow it to develop haphazardly. We all want to be Scientific, don’t we?

See, now: anything planned by The World’s Smartest People is, and has to be, “smart.” Like smart cars, smart growth, smart meters, smart phones, etc.

So there they were, up in Toronto, with a plan to turn it into “Smart City Toronto”—that is, in their words, “to create smarter, more efficient, environmentally friendly living spaces”. Look, you peasants! Here, we’ve got drawings! Can’t you recognize an earthly paradise when you see it?

But notice their use of the word “create.” No more Invisible Hand. They’re going to “create” your living spaces for you. And make it a “smart city.”

Be very afraid of anything that liberals pitch to you as “smart.” Most of it will be used to spy on you and administer attitude or cultural adjustments as needed. Really smart people will decide when you need them.

There was a hiccup in the plan when their top expert resigned recently, as a protest against the project erasing the residents’ privacy. That led immediately to another thing which The World’s Smartest People think themselves qualified to do. In Canada, it’s called “balancing rights.” Here, they had to balance residents’ privacy rights against their own rights to obtain and use the residents’ personal data to usher in Nirvana. Guess which way the see-saw tilted.

“Balancing rights” is Canada’s favorite euphemism. They use it to slide under the door the whole idea that your “rights” are whatever the government—that would be, again, The World’s Smartest People—decides they are on any given day. Not only what those rights are, but also their weight. And somehow they’re just never as heavy as the government’s urgent “need” to make all your decisions for you. It’s for your own good, you know.

It’s a religious divide because regular people rely on God’s Providence to sort things out, while liberals always scheme to set themselves up as gods—to be obeyed without question, to be given the power to “balance” your rights against their schemes, to wield the electric cow prods that herd us into Paradise.

It’s stupid to fall for hustles sold as “smart.”

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/. Stop in and enjoy it, before some smart gadget rats me out. A single click will take you there.

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net