Richard Dawkins: No, Not All Opinions Are Equal—Elitism, Lies, and the Limits of Democracy

[Music] 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 favouring Brexit, Michael Gove, said to the British people, "You are the experts. You don't trust experts; you are the experts now." So, ordinary people, who have absolutely no knowledge of economics, or politics, or history, decided on a 50% majority to vote Britain out of the European market, which was a very complicated, detailed, ramified structure that had been built up over decades.

And so, at one stroke, the British people, who had no knowledge, no expertise, were allowed—well, given the opportunity by a reckless David Cameron—to vote us out, and they did, by a very narrow margin. This count 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, I mean, when you're about to have an operation, you want an elite surgeon to do the cut you open. You want an elite anesthetist to put you under. When you're about to fly, what 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, a woman in the street.

I have pronounced myself profoundly ill-equipped to vote on the referendum about Brexit. I was ill-equipped. So were the vast majority of the British people. I look 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, etc.

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

Now, that was an admitted lie; that was simply quite simply false. Many people were probably swayed by that consideration to vote to leave the European Union. So, no, I do—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 where we don't actually vote 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, you know, people with PhDs should get to vote in anything like that. I mean, I don't want it to be elitist to quite that extent.

So let's go for representative democracy, but not referendum democracy. And 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 sixty 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; we already see gross inequality, 760-fold inequalities in the weight in the Senate. Of course, this is very important because the Senate does not only take hugely important decisions, but also ratifies presidential nominees for the Supreme Court. That could be the most important single thing that a president ever does: appoint members to the Supreme Court, because they go on and on for decades—in some cases, after the president has gone. [Music]