Knowing your people

Subject: Knowing your people

There is much talk about the value of democracy when the democratic will of the people get it wrong. The view comes from the section of society that believes it knows what is best for society as a whole, the intellectual, the middle and upper class, the bourgeois.
Is it right that an uneducated man or woman has the same power, when it comes to voting as an intelligent university trained individual, trained in the art of evaluation and the skill in researching source material on which to base their decision. Is it "right" that reason can be cancelled out by emotion. Can ignorance sit at the same table as intellect.
The Referendum on Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are examples of "popularism",  a circumstance where the "unwashed" have won a victory over reason by the sheer weight of their emotional discharge, fuelled by the distortion of messages made up to appeal to the more basic element of our psych.
People are a complex amalgam of needs and desires. Society is a mechanism for guiding those desires, subverting some and amplifying others. Society is in effect a controlling mechanism for promoting what is defined by some as worthy, a manipulating process to ensure its, "business as usual".
Occasionally the plan goes astray and a dissatisfied section of society, probably the section which had been taken for granted and bypassed by mainstream thinking, all of a sudden get a chance through the ballot box to invade the calm of the chicken roost and cause havoc.
The question now arises should we curb democracy. Should we ensure that the direction of travel is insulated from these "hicks" who know nothing of our plans and see only their own plight,  amplifying their needs out of all proportion to ours.
Democracy has, along with liberalism appealed to the philosophical, altruistic mindset but does it have a place in our open communicative world where influence is now so much easier. Even the President of the United States rules his people from a "twitter account", priming them with tit bits of popular tittle-tattle, keeping them agitated for the next pronouncement irrespective of content.
It's a phenomenon of the modern world that people want information in shorter bits and bytes easier to consume, easier to construe what you want to read into it, like the headline in the popular newspaper which contrives to create a story in three, eye catching words. The contribution that the detail makes is irrelevant and unwelcome.
The attention span of a newt used to be a derogatory phrase but now-a-days even the newt would get a C.
Can we be sure that all men and women have equal rights. Yes.
We know that this is a misnomer but never the less we believe in it as a founding civilising principle.
If one of those rights is freedom of speech and a right to be heard, then every opinion no matter how ill informed has equal prominence and if the powers that be find this uncomfortable then they had better make it their business to educate us better so that we too are informed. If we still make decisions that go against the grain then perhaps the fault lies in the Establishment for not understand the issues and the "peoples" needs better.