The Immorality of Pretending To Know Something You Don't

Our leaders pretend like they know what they are doing, when they do not. This is immoral and reprehensible, not visionary leadership. It is *wrong*

The fact is, no one really knows how to resolve the challenges of 21st century technology and globalization.

Seriously. No one understands it well enough to resolve it. In fact, we don't even know if the social programs we enforce at the point of a gun are making things better, or making them worse, or both, in different ways. We have opinions, but very little data and understanding.

More importantly, we don't even demand real understanding and data, only that our leaders claim to understand. That is the problem.

If people claim to understand the issues, they should be able to make a sustained case in the face of critical challenges. If they refuse or retreat into political smears against those who dare question them, they should be held to account and chastised.

That said, here are some things we do know:

- It is a moral outrage that 1) they pretend to understand the effects their causes generate, when 2) in reality they don't personally know, and are mostly blindly trusting people who don't know either. It is depraved behavior, and ought to be identified as such and publicly challenged.

- Anyone who claims that they know how to solve these problems is lying through their teeth. When someone says that they know what the problem is, and are going to intervene in the economy to... (improve our health care system, solve the financial crisis, create affordable housing, etc.) - they should be called to the carpet and made to show their evidence, their logic, and the reason for their certainty. Then, when they can't back up their claims (beyond mouthing the standard platitudes and hopes), they should be publicly shamed for misleading people, if not outright fraud.

- Each person has a unique understanding of what is important to them. They have own values, their own perspective, and their own biases. They weigh the cost and benefits of the choices they perceive according to their own sense of good and bad, right and wrong. They are also inherit and are responsible for the effects of the choices they make, good or bad. That is the nature of reality. When we overrule their personal choices (as long as they are not harming or defrauding others) with our own in the name of government, we are violating that person's integrity. AND, since we really don't know how to WholeSumly control another person, it is also an examples of reprehensible moral arrogance.