There are 73 million American Twitiots

Excerpts from an article by Umair Haque.

"I don’t mean idiot in the way of an insult, by the way. To the Greeks, 'idiot' was the ultimate term of scorn. Idiots were the most contemptible people in classical society. Why? The term really means, in the classical context, 'people who are consumed only with self-interest.' And to the Greeks, the progenitors of democracy, nobody — nobody was more dangerous than an idiot.

"Their reasoning went like this. Should enough of a society be consumed solely with self-interest, a society would soon enough cease to be a democracy. People only concerned with themselves can’t look out for any kind of common wealth or shared interest. They can’t exercise any of the following virtues: courage, compassion, truth, beauty, grace, generosity, kindness, humility, all of which are allocentric, meaning 'other-focused,' not egocentric.

"So what will happen to such a society? [...] Soon enough, a demagogue would come along, who would prey on all those fears — conjuring up imaginary enemies, twisting rage into hatred — and democracy would flash out of existence. [...] You only have to look at America, the Land of the Idiots. This election does something remarkable — it gives us a comically exact headcount of American Idiots. There are 73 million of them. That’s how many people voted for Trump. Am I saying Trump voters are idiots? Of course I am, duh. Again, not as an insult, but as an observation. In the classical sense: people consumed with the narrowest definition of self-interest possible."