Big Think 2017 Top Ten: #6. Richard Dawkins on Why Not All Opinions Are Equal, and Elitism

Among the reasons that I heard for people wanting to vote for Brexit were, "Well, it’s nice to have a change," and, "Well, I preferred the old blue passport to the European purple passport." These are the kinds of reasons people were giving for voting for Brexit. The day after the referendum, the most Googled question in Britain was: What is the European Union?

During the Brexit campaign, one of the leading politicians favoring Brexit, Michael Gove, said to the British people, “You are the experts. Don’t trust experts, you are the expert now.” So ordinary people who have absolutely no knowledge of economics or politics or history decided on a 50 percent majority to vote to take Britain out of the European market, out of the European community, which was a very, very complicated, detailed, ramified structure that has been built up over decades.

And so, in one stroke, the British people, who had no knowledge, no expertise, were given the opportunity by a reckless David Cameron to vote us out, and they did, by a very narrow margin. This cult of everybody being an expert, all opinions being equally valid is, I think, dangerous and most unfortunate. Of course, I have been accused of being an elitist because of this.

And yes, when you’re about to have an operation, you want an elite surgeon to cut you open; you want an elite anesthetist to put you under. When you’re about to fly, you want an elite pilot to fly you. When you’re about to leave a federation of states, which has been built up over decades, you want an elite economist or politician or historian to advise you on it. You don’t want to take the view of just any old man in the street or woman in the street.

I pronounce myself profoundly ill-equipped to vote on the referendum about Brexit. I was ill-equipped, and so was the vast majority of the British people ill-equipped. In that sense, I think that elitist should stop being a dirty word and we should start to respect elites in whatever field we’re talking about. We want elite musicians to play in our orchestras, et cetera.

I think it’s bad enough to ask non-experts like me to vote in direct referendums, but when we are also being fed false information, or it’s deliberately false information. The Trump administration is actually lying every day and more or less proud of it. In Britain, the Brexit campaign had a bus—you may have read about this—they had a bus which had a great big slogan on the side, which said that every day, or every week, I think it was, some gigantic sum was being paid to the European Union, which if we left Europe would be available for the national health.

Now that was an admitted lie, that’s quite simply false, and many people were probably swayed by that consideration to vote to leave the European Union. So no, I do think we need to stick to democracy as it is, but I think it’s a representative democracy that we have. In Britain, we have a parliamentary democracy; normally we don’t vote on actual issues; we vote members of Parliament. Members of Parliament then go to the House of Commons and then they vote on our behalf.

And we have cabinet government where the cabinet gets advice from civil servants who are experts. So no, I’m not advocating that people with PhDs should get two votes or anything like that; I don’t want to be elitist to quite that extent. So let’s go for representative democracy but not referendum democracy.

I think it’s worth adding that the precedent for not everybody having the same weighted vote is already well-established in the United States. When you think about voting for the United States Senate, where every state gets two senators. What that means is that a citizen of Wyoming has, I think, the equivalent of 60 votes compared to a citizen of California, because if you look at the actual relative population sizes of Wyoming and California.

So in a way, that pass has already been sold, that we already see gross inequality. I mean sixtyfold inequalities, and the Senate, of course, is very important because the Senate does not only take hugely important decisions...