The trouble is the person next door, or down the road, is sitting there thinking exactly the same about you. Yes, the idiot is everyone else except you and me - and therein lays the problem. We have lost faith in our fellow citizen.
On that basis, the best thing that could happen, in some people's minds, would be for a benevolent dictator to take control and call off all future elections because, as a nation, we supposedly aren't smart enough to make intelligent decisions - least of all electing a government.
Oh, how the intellectuals and academics would love that - along with those devotees indoctrinated in party politics that think that all we need to do is elect their political party and all our problems will be solved.
Yes, as long as we have an election every three years, democracy has been served and we will get the government we deserve.
Enter Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), a British scientist and also an academic brimming with hubris, who set out to prove that full male suffrage should not be extended beyond the propertied classes.
But Galton was extremely surprised when he attended a country fair and studied the results of an ox-weighing competition.
His belief was that the uninformed and uneducated classes could not be trusted to make sensible decisions. He analysed the result from around 800 people who entered the ox-weighing competition - there were expert butchers who participated, but also many who knew nothing about animal weights but had paid their sixpence in the hope of winning.
The crowd guessed, on average, that the weight of the slaughtered ox would be 1197 pounds. The official result was 1198 pounds. Although he never offered the standard deviation figures, Galton later wrote: "The result seems more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected."
It is also often stated that voters are only ever self-interested and incapable of balancing short-term benefits with long-term costs. They cite the 1978 Californian Proposition (referendum) 13, which concerned the issue of ever-increasing property taxes, as a glowing example of voter selfishness which supposedly ruined the Californian economy.
Yet such critics conveniently overlook Californian Proposition 9 in 1980 which would have cut state income taxes by half - except that voters refused to accept it by a large margin.
The Swiss experience also contradicts the assumption that voters are only self-interested.
In a 1993 referendum, 54.5 per cent of voters approved an increase in the price of petrol and diesel of 21 Swiss cents per litre. Again in 1993, two-thirds of voters agreed to introduce national VAT and to use a future rise to benefit old-age pensions.
The conclusion I have come to over the years, having met countless numbers of university-educated people and politicians, is that I will always trust the collective wisdom of three million New Zealand voters over the collective wisdom of a dozen or so Cabinet ministers who run the country.
While educated people may be knowledgeable on certain subjects, they are not necessarily more knowledgeable about politics.
In fact, I would go as far to say that three humble plumbers together will make better decisions than one hubristic former lawyer.
Steve Baron is a Wanganui- based political scientist, co-editor of the book People Power and Founder of Better Democracy NZ.
