Striking a balance

A January 2015 survey conducted by agricultural economists at Oklahoma State found that 82% of Americans want their food labeled if it contains GMOs. The same survey found that 80% of Americans want their food labeled if it contains DNA.

Before getting too smug, let's stop and think about this. This is where majoritarianism leads when it is matched with a dumbed-down media and institutionalized ignorance fostered by an education system modeled on industry. De Tocqueville worried that egalitarian democracy harbored the seeds of its own destruction: "Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannize but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd," the resulting dysfunction revealed most nakedly in ballot initiatives.

Society needs to strike a balance between the romantic notion that everyone's ideas and beliefs are equally valid and respect for knowledge, expertise, and experience. The goal of egalitarianism should be to treat all people equally; the ambition of representative democracy should be to make the best practices and outcomes available to everyone.