Einstein's Superior Understanding In His Essay On Racism 1946

I read this blog post by Trent Gillis this morning, most of it a short essay written by Einstein.  It is tempting to note that even as the great physicist was pointing out the injustice and irrationality of racism, many - though certainly not all - of the leading figures in biology were still supporting such ideas.  Scientific racism didn't die with the defeat of the Nazis, it took a short sabbatical and has been making a gradual comeback ever since.  Less than five years after the crimes of the Nazis started to be made public R. A. Fisher felt comfortable enough to assert, as part of a UNESCO study group that races were not equal and that it was futile to attempt to try to achieve political and economic equality due to that, even though he admitted that his declaration would defeat the entire purpose of trying to achieve equality.  Not too long after that the widespread private racism of many in biology, especially in genetics, would start being expressed openly and even, in evolutionary psychology, presented as science.  Even including some of the most basic of anti-Semitic assumptions which Nazism took as science.

Ah, but it said that going there was a temptation right now.   What I wanted to point out was this insightful passage.

What soon makes the new arrival devoted to this country is the democratic trait among the people. I am not thinking here so much of the democratic political constitution of this country, however highly it must be praised. I am thinking of the relationship between individual people and of the attitude they maintain toward one another.

Einstein was entirely right to elevate the "attitude" of democracy as it is expressed in daily relationships among people as more important and essential than the constitutional and legal apparatus. Without that attitude being common among The People, the words in those documents are just words.   That is something that the academics, the lawyers, the politicians and the professors and, worst of all, the mass media and what passes as the arts in media don't get or have lost sight of.  The People and their ideas, beliefs and practices are the only basis on which democracy can rest, not the legal doctrines and dogmas emanating from Ivy and Ivy equivalent law faculties and graduates.

Those so often derided, disdained, mocked "masses", The People are what all of it depends on first, middle and end.  You can hardly go a day in hearing and reading the news, of reading people online where someone doesn't mock the ignorant masses on their ignorance.  Newspapers and networks do stories on that theme with a remarkable regularity, it is clearly a point, AN ATTITUDE, they want to promote in the general public, that "the masses are asses".  As an aside, that the mass media does so, heedless of the fact that it is they who have taken up so much of the thinking time of said "masses" with mindless, false, misleading crap instead of information, never seems to enter into their self-regarded superior minds.

The collapse of confidence in public institutions in the United States, in our political institutions, is a direct result of a conscious campaign by snobs and elites to both dumb down the American People and to then, glorying in their own self-asserted superiority, mock the great unwashed, ignorant masses of humanity.  Democracy couldn't help but be destroyed in that process.  We won't get democracy back in even its highly imperfect form until both that dumbing down for profit and the conceited vainglorious attitude of elites is ended.  The People aren't so stupid that they don't realize they don't have to put up with those elites.  If there is one thing the past fifty years have shown, it is that they know when they're being insulted and they won't play along with the people who are doing that insulting.  The results aren't good.  Donald Trump is just one result of that.