Utopian voters

An editorial by John W. Campbell Utopian voters

Judging from the general shape of historical trends, it looks as though Governments, like living things, are operational only so long as they are in dynamic equilibrium. That the first thing any group setting out to establish a new government must recognize is that government is a dynamic system, and that there can not ever be a secure, stable, dependable government, in the sense that all men, at all times, have always wanted —a government secure and stable in the sense that you can count on it to remain what it is.

The moment a government does become stable, dependable—something you can count on from generation to generation—it’s dead. It will henceforth and forever remain what it was ... but a new government moves in and takes over by revolution, conquest, or simple anarchy-disintegration.

Rome, which was one of the first large-scale true republics, showed the syndrome that has appeared in every century since; it started off with an oligarchy of wise citizens, the patricians. Citizenship was hereditary, of course. And genetics being what it is, that is unstable—but unstable in a random, not a dynamic, fashion. All the molecules in a mass of gas may be moving at ten miles per second—but it may be either an extremely hot gas standing still, with molecules moving at random, or a cold gas moving at high velocity. What government needs is not the instability of random effects, simple heat, but the instability of dynamic motion.

When genetics gets in its licks on an hereditary class, two things are happening: The Ins are, usually, a minority of unusually competent people, at the start. Random genetics will tend to level this group downward toward the norm. And, meanwhile, the larger group of Outs is continuing, by genetic statistics, to produce abnormally talented individuals who want, and deserve, position at the In level. Being abnormally talented, they're apt to work out ways and means of getting there, too.

Scanning Roman history—the Encyclopaedia Britannica does a good job of boiling the enormously complex picture down to a sort of cartoon outline, a caricature of the portrait, so to speak—you’ll find that mechanism at work through every stage of Roman development.

And you’ll find it at work in every other historical civilization, too. Specifically including modern history, in both the United States and the U.S.S.R.

No culture is going to work well if it seeks to suppress its individuals of high talent; it doesn’t pay to try to oppress men who are smarter than you are yourself. You can enslave someone who is stronger than you are, or more numerous—but things are going to get into extremely bad trouble if you try it with the individuals who are smarter than you.

A government can work, and work well, which denies the vote to 80% of its people—provided that 80% is simply strong, determined, courageous, numerous, but stupid. That is, in fact, the situation that has obtained in each of the world’s historical periods of great growth and accomplishment.

However, if the system pushes so much as 1% of the brilliant, competent and determined down into the ruled group, and out of the ruling— that 1% will destroy the system. The 80% are stupid; a few brilliant leaders can organize their stupidity into a revolt that benefits only the 1%— or, many times, not even that 1% is benefited, save in terms of the deep, glowing satisfaction of "Vengeance at last!" as the whole cultural structure tumbles down to destruction. Samson, after all, was overjoyed to bring the temple of his enemies tumbling down about them, suicide though it was.

The trouble is that those who are not ruling are very sure that they could do a much better job—-and that they "have a right to" the things they want, and know they can never earn. They will, inevitably, blame the system, not their own failure to earn what they want, no matter how many times they see individuals who start beside them wind up far above.

The fool exists always, and the prime characteristic is that while you can readily make a wise man feel uncertain of his wisdom, it is absolutely impossible to make a fool doubt his wisdom. His every failure is someone else’s fault, or the evil influence of sheer bad luck, or ... he always has some answer.

Therefore, we have as observational data: All men believe themselves competent to rule. And while the wise and competent believe they are competent to rule, the fools are unshakably convinced of the certainty of their competence.

This factor alone will assure the instability of any government men ever seek to erect. The very nature of men assures a power-source to keep dynamic action going.

That power-source can either produce random action—sheer destructive heat—or can be channeled into progressive dynamic stability.

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.

The tricky subtlety underlying it is one the fool can’t spot; it depends on the resolving power of the mind, not on how much is in the mind. A fool can be a learned man—the Mr. Memory type, for instance, who can recite endlessly, and quote a quotation any time. But while he can quote these words—he can’t use them properly. He will, typically, use the word "funny" excessively, almost never say "peculiar," and never use the word "odd" at all. And note carefully that it isn’t a matter of "big words"; "odd" is the smallest of the three above, and yet the rarest in modern usage.

It doesn’t do you any good to be able to quote definitions in a use-vocabulary test; you have to perceive the fine distinctions implied by the similar, nonsynonymous words. Take the group thief, robber, crook, bandit, et cetera, as an example; there is a definite distinction in their meanings. Or feminine, womanly, effeminate.

And this ability to distinguish between concepts is not a matter of linguistics or education; the individuals who have the ability, develop and use it automatically, no matter where they may start. A German coming to the United States, or an American going to Germany will, if he has a high-resolution mind, learn the local precise-definition terms because he needs them and knows he needs them. The early scientists insisted that Science could be carried on only in Latin and/or Greek—not in English, French, or any of the then-living languages. Why? Very simply because the then-living languages simply did not have the rich, and subtly differentiated terms needed for precision thinking.

Now, of course, we have more terms in modern languages than the Romans or Greeks ever had—but it took massive borrowing, and a lot of word-inventions to do it.

Because it depends on the innate resolving power of the mind of the individual, no matter how much formal education he may be given, he will not learn a large use-vocabulary, if he does not have that ability. It does you no good to stare at a book, if your eyes have such low resolving power they cannot distinguish the letters—and it does you no good to look at words, if your mind lacks the resolving power necessary to distinguish the concepts those words symbolize.

Psychological testing groups have found, again and again, that the one measurable quantity that correlates at near unity level with practical success in the real world is use-vocabulary. The president of a firm may not have graduated from grammar school, while his second assistant secretary has a Ph.D. in English Literature— but the use-vocabulary of the president somehow turns out to be about 175,000 words, while the secretary’s use-vocabulary seems to be about 22,000. Oh, the secretary can recognize, and quote passages, with 70,000 words... but he can’t apply those words himself ...

Every indication is that a man who has the high-resolution mind will learn the vocabulary he needs, whether he ever gets formal schooling or not. And that no amount of coaching can make a man learn the meanings of words when his mind can’t perceive the difference in concepts.

In other words, the vocabulary test is not:

1. Culturally based.

2. A matter of formal education.

3. A linguistic test—save for the first year or two.

4. A test of family background

and the vocabulary test is:

1. A test of that specific individual’s personal mental resolving power.

2. That correlates very highly with pragmatic success in the real-world.

3. And looks to any fool like a snap that anybody can pass by just studying the words.

It is, in other words, a real test of real competence that would almost 100% eliminate the effects of cultural, educational and family background—would pass any competent individual, no matter what his previous history—yet which will reject the mentally ill-equipped. And looks so easy that the unshakably self-assured fool would be willing to vote for it!

The reason the use-vocabulary test is of real importance is quite readily understandable; anyone with a high-resolution mind automatically does a job of semantic analysis on propaganda, and on viewpoint-statements, that the low-resolution mind neither can, nor ever does. For instance, consider the statement "Russia is a highly aggressive nation," and recognize that the usual usage of the statement is intended to imply that "aggressive" and "belligerent" are the same thing. To the low-resolution mind they are; he can’t distinguish between an aggressive salesman and a belligerent salesman, either, probably.

A nation whose national policies are controlled by voters who cannot clearly distinguish between ''aggressive" and "belligerent" is almost certain to make serious errors. Most American voters today cannot distinguish between conservative, reactionary, and intransigent, nor between liberal, communist and fascist actually, save on the basis "Well ... liberal is good, and communist and fascist are bad." Now that’s a real help! Is the proposition "All major industries should be taken over and operated by the State," a Communist, Fascist, or Liberal doctrine?

What do those words they throw around—and can’t use!—actually mean? And on what basis are the American voters deciding the national policy?

And ... what would be the result in a society which did apply that use-vocabulary test? What sort of economic, political, and class structures would result? What would happen to educational systems?

There’s no use installing more courses in Semantics and Linguistics, either! If a man has poor eyesight, we can help him with lenses—but if he has poor color vision, courses in Art and Aesthetics won’t help a bit.

I never knew how poor my color vision was, until I discovered that my wife could travel twelve hundred miles from home, see a piece of silk material of an extremely complex gray-blue tone, recognize that it matched a piece of wool she had at home, and buy it. Despite the very different textures of the two fabrics, and some two weeks of time-lapse— she was perfectly correct.

Now her level of color-memory and color-discrimination is abnormally high. The point is simple; it would be utterly futile for me to seek to train a talent I simply don’t have. I’d never be able to match that performance.

But if you’ve got that talent ... training comes so automatically you never notice it.

So with use-vocabulary, which is simply an objective expression of semantic-discrimination ability.

What would happen, in educational philosophy, with such a factor recognized, and made directly, personally important to every citizen?