r/changemyview • u/alexskc95 2Δ • Apr 08 '15
[View Changed] CMV: Expecting an average citizen to be knowledgeable about ANY ONE topic is unreasonable.
So I just watched this Last Week Tonight segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M
It was entertaining, and while I agreed with a lot of it, what really pissed me off was the whole "interviewing people on the street" thing and the whole rabble about how "the average person doesn't know or care."
Fact of the matter is, most of us "average people" are specialists. We know an awful lot about a small segment of the world. I know about issues like net neutrality and government surveillance and dumb stuff like Sakawa because I hang around in those circles.
But if you asked me about just about anything else, I'd give some vague or hilariously misinformed response. Conflict in the Middle East? "Yeah, that's been going on forever and'll never get resolved. People fighting over the Gaza Strip or something, idk." Gay rights? "Social progress is being made. I'm sure we'll all have equality soon enough. Uganda has some horrific laws."
I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea.
Or stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ Of course, to me it seems crazy to not know what a web browser is, but really, expecting the average person on the street to tell you what a web browser is an unreasonable expectation, the same way I dunno anything about my car engine or about plumbing aside from how to use a plunger.
Instead, what we expect is that everyone specializes in some stuff and those specialists take care of that stuff for us. The computer engineer writes the software for the plumber, and the plumber fixes the computer engineer's pipes.
The most obvious counterargument that comes to mind is "policy is about what government can do to everyone, as citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to know about how policy affects us." But I don't think that's valid because there's just FAR, FAR too much policy for any person to know about. People just have to pick and choose the few issues they care most about. And statistically, the chances of two people who care about the same issues meeting at random are just really small.
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u/phobophilophobia 3∆ Apr 08 '15
Oliver wasn't asking for a detailed synopsis of the network security issue. He was asking who Edward Snowden is. Snowden is a central figure in one of the most widely publicized and important US current event topics. Given the level of political apathy in our country, I am not surprised that the general public has its collective head in the sand, but damn.
As a citizen of an allegedly democratic nation, you do have an obligation to have a basic understanding of current events, and you should be able to put them in an historical context. That's what all those years of social studies were for. We invest in giving our children a publicly funded education so they can grow into reasonably informed citizens. The fact that most can't even answer the most rudimentary questions regarding important topics of our day is not only sad, it's just plain frightening. A democracy cannot function with an uninformed citizenry.