First off because “IQ tests” don’t test for brainworms. There’s plenty of people who possess the mental capacity to pass a test like that, but who use that brainpower to come up with creative ways to defend wrong ideas rather than thinking critically. This is a large part of why IQ tests are meaningless, because even if they were capable of accurately assessing raw brainpower, they’re certainly not capable of assessing how you choose to use that brainpower.
If you make a test that does test for brainworms then you have the question of who or what body decides what’s a brainworm, and at that point you might as well just give that body dictatorial control. There’s no possible way to do that in a remotely objective fashion, the body could easily just say, “Capitalism is obviously right so anyone who doesn’t agree with it should be barred from voting.” Or, if it were me, I might decide that anyone who thinks that people having low IQs is the problem with our political systems is, themself, obviously unqualified.
Really, it’s not that different from the Catholic Church gathering together a bunch of highly educated scholars behind closed doors to debate what they thought made sense and then trying to enforce that on everyone. At least way back then, they had the justification that most of the population was fully illiterate.
First off because “IQ tests” don’t test for brainworms. There’s plenty of people who possess the mental capacity to pass a test like that, but who use that brainpower to come up with creative ways to defend wrong ideas rather than thinking critically. This is a large part of why IQ tests are meaningless, because even if they were capable of accurately assessing raw brainpower, they’re certainly not capable of assessing how you choose to use that brainpower.
If you make a test that does test for brainworms then you have the question of who or what body decides what’s a brainworm, and at that point you might as well just give that body dictatorial control. There’s no possible way to do that in a remotely objective fashion, the body could easily just say, “Capitalism is obviously right so anyone who doesn’t agree with it should be barred from voting.” Or, if it were me, I might decide that anyone who thinks that people having low IQs is the problem with our political systems is, themself, obviously unqualified.
Really, it’s not that different from the Catholic Church gathering together a bunch of highly educated scholars behind closed doors to debate what they thought made sense and then trying to enforce that on everyone. At least way back then, they had the justification that most of the population was fully illiterate.