"...Hence the Iron Rule: Society never works. Along with its corollary: Everyone is stupid..." Yes, if you are 12, and you need some simplistic way of looking

"...Hence the Iron Rule: Society never works. Along with its corollary: Everyone is stupid..." Yes, if you are 12, and you need some simplistic way of looking at things. Since most entertainment is actually written for teenagers, if you had to paint with a super-broad brush this would be accurate. More accurate, however is "Institutions are always sub-optimized, people who are much smarter than you live and thrive in these institutions and do sub-optimal things for good reason, and it's the distributed, self-optimizing facile, and overly self-confident nature of the critical individual, which the author seems to deplore, that gives us increases in efficiencies and the re-factoring necessary to continue evolving." 100 guys think the system sucks, that they are smart and society is full of idiots. 99 are wrong. The other guy is still no smarter than the rest of us, but he just came up with the next thing we need to continue moving forward as a species. Western society has made a call on this: smart people in large groups do dumb things. It's our job to continue to be suspicious and point them out. In fact, the system depends on it.