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educated just like we do now, and rightly so, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.
    Russians who didn’t think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads.
    We must acknowledge that persuasive guessers, even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in the Soviet Union, have sometimes given us the courage to endure extraordinary ordeals which we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead—the guessers often gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we all might have surrendered long ago.
    But the guessers, in fact, knew no more than the common people and sometimes less, even when, or especially when, they gave us the illusion that we were in control of our destinies.
    Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long, for all of human experience so far, that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on. It is now their turn to guess and guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.
    Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.
    That’s correct.
    Millions spent on public health are inflationary.
    That’s correct.
    Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.
    That’s correct.
    Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.
    That’s correct.
    The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment’s notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit.
    That’s correct.
    Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.
    That’s correct.
    Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: Bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.
    That’s correct.
    That’s free enterprise.
    And that’s correct.
    The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.
    That’s correct.
    The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.
    That’s correct.
    The free market will do that.
    That’s correct.
    The free market is an automatic system of justice.
    That’s correct.
    I’m kidding.
    And if you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington, D.C. Do you remember those doctors a few months back who got together and announced that it was a simple, clear medical fact that we could not survive even a moderate attack by hydrogen bombs? They were not welcome in Washington, D.C.
    Even if we fired the first salvo of hydrogen weapons and the enemy never fired back, the poisons released would probably kill the whole planet by and by.
    What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge—the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations.
    If they didn’t do that, there is no way their