That's not bragging. Some people are born rich. Some are born good looking. Some are born smart. Some are born with absolutely nothing to distinguish them from the next guy. It's just the way things are. If you don't like it, tough. That's still how things are.
A lot of people are of above average intellect. By definition, half are above the median. If you are on the smarter side of the spectrum, it's pretty easy to look at someone who is struggling through a problem and think you can improve their lives by dictating how they should live. Sadly, people who are on the dimmer side of the scale seem at least as able to imagine that someone smarter than them should be telling them what to do.
It doesn't work that way for a couple reasons. I'd like to set the stage for those reasons by examining what motivates most people to try and tell others how to live. There are really two basic reasons:
- To help others by improving the quality of their decisions.
- To help one's self by tweaking the decisions of others in favor of one's own interests.
It doesn't really matter how many people are driven by one of those forces or the other or even how many people have a foot in each camp. One of those motives is not even worth considering as valid: the latter. If you want to improve your lot in life, do it by making your decisions better, not by making others' decisions better for you. So we can safely disregard the self-enrichment motive and focus on the do-gooder impulse.
Why does the motivation matter? Because dictating how other people live is observably contradictory to the goal of improving their lives. Ironically, people who have a lot of influence in my life told me this a long time ago and it took me nearly a decade to internalize it. You'll see why that's ironic in a moment.
The reason why making decisions for other people runs contrary to their interests is that there are more forces involved in making a quality decision than just how smart the decision-maker is. I wouldn't even pretend to guess at how many favors there are in making a good decision but two that are always present are intimacy and context.
Everyone has a very intimate relationship with themselves. Few people, if any, truly know you better than you know yourself. Really, it's not very likely that anyone - even your wife of twenty years or your husband of forty - knows you even half as well as you know yourself.
Why does that matter? Because there are too many variables in the universe for anyone - no matter their intellect - to pay attention to all of them when making a decision. We all have an innate sense of what is important to us and that helps us focus on the factors that we think will drive the outcome we desire. Even a terrible assessment of what matters that based on one's true desires yields a better outcome than decisions made by some ivory tower intellectual who has never met or even heard of you.
Another important factor is context. It doesn't matter how smart you are, you cannot plan the future. You cannot even have perfect knowledge of the present. It's outside the current scope of human intellect to do either of those things. Because you cannot predict all of the contexts in which someone will face a problem, you cannot know the forces involved in solving that problem.
It turns out that people who are terrible at problem solving but know what the actual problem they are solving is are way better at solving that problem than someone with great problem solving skills but no idea what the actual problem being solved is. Don't believe me? Maybe you should run an experiment with someone you consider to be your intellectual peer. You make up a set of rules to deal with a category of problems and have your friend try to find contingency in which the rules set doesn't work. Repeat that process until one of you gives up and see who wins.
There is yet another reason why telling people how they should live does not work. Compliance is not the same thing as agreement. If you make rules for someone that they don't understand or agree with, then they will either ignore the rules or comply with the letter of the law rather than the spirit. So, even if you are right and do really know what should be done, getting someone to do those things in a way that will help them by way of mandate is extremely ineffective.
This by the way is the source of irony to which I earlier alluded. Someone told me not to tell people what to do and to let them figure things out for themselves and I ignored that advice until I figured it out for myself.
So what should you do? Well, if you're the sort of person who wants to make other people do things in order to improve your own life... well... go fuck yourself then jump off a cliff, I guess? If you are in the other camp, I'm not going to tell you what to do. I will tell you that improving people's lives - truly improving their circumstances appears to stem from helping people change how they think, not telling them what to do.
If you can persuade someone to understand why you want them to do a certain thing for their own benefit and believe that it benefits them, they will start making the right choices on their own. If not, all the regulation and coercion in the world will only make the tiniest and most fleeting of impacts before backfiring to make things worse than they already were.
But most importantly, I must reiterate: If you want to make rules for the simple purpose of enriching one group of people at the expense of another, fuck off and die.
