If you're like me - and you are - you probably pride yourself on your immunity to popular prejudices.  Of course, most of these idols were pre-smashed for you by some other, competing set of idol-makers.  Noam Chomsky taught you to distrust the media, but you trust him.  South Park makes fun of the sexually repressed, so you laugh at them for being so easily hoodwinked, and so on.  Ahem.

Whenever someone offers that they have "eclectic" taste in music, I know that this is going to exclude one or all of country music, opera, and hip-hop, and that if I played them a randomly-selected record from my collection, they would cry like a baby seal watching another baby seal being beaten to death by a Nazi wielding a crippled orphan as a club.  (Seriously - I can prove it.  And let me take this opportunity to say that baby seals are not cheap.)  The point is simply that people cherish many illusions about themselves - the self-styled hip, urbane, and enlightened most of all.

So - you think you think, and what's worse, you think you think for yourself, shmuck?  I could whip out some trusty classics left over from the days slinging philosophy to high school dropouts, I suppose.  Can you consider without prejudice the possibilites that life has no purpose, nothing is true, and nothing is morally wrong?  Can you do so without anxiety or internal resistance?  But really, even that is too easy, for a lot of reasons.  (Not the least of which being that people don't draw out the implication that if (as the saying goes) everything is permissible, this would include killing puppies for Satan.)  Never mind the proverbial man-on-the-street who shits himself at the mere suggestion that there is no God - I'm talking to you, and of course you're way too cool to be thrown off by the easy stuff.  So let's see where the real prejudices lie.

I've been having very strong misgivings about democracy lately.  It is remarkable to me how much internal stress is created by overcoming the very deeply-implanted taboo against questioning the value of this political dogma; it's got to be up there with incest and cannibalism, at least for Americans - this, despite our tendencies toward incest, cannibalism, and subverting democracy.  So:  prove that you're an intellectual tough guy, and hear me out.

People will do more or less what they are predisposed to do, and these predispositions generally float free of any rational constraint.  Sarah Palin is no doubt getting slight but non-negligible assistance in the polls on the basis of being better looking than Joe Biden, and vigorously pumping out "I am ordinary folks like you" vibes.  (This, despite being an obvious moron, and despite quoting favorably from the works of American reactionary writer Westbrook Pegler, a nutjob allegedly so far to the right that The National Review had to do some remrkable contortions to even discuss him).  Put plainly:  most people are on auto-pilot, and do what they do for reasons that are completely uncceptable to anyone to whom these reasons become clear.  As I have said before: People are not exactly robots; and they are not exactly not robots.

To put it bluntly, the people - ignorant, unschooled, prejudiced, mechanical in their behavior and thought, and, on balance, vicious, fear-driven, stupid and crazy - are not fit to govern.  And so, I am somewhat relieved to observe that, after all, they do not.