Nothing left to lose = ‘truth’
I love it when respected people start telling it like it is (or at least as they truly see it) at the end of their careers. It’s usually a big surprise that causes half the people in the room to nod in agreement and the other half to scowl and walk out, like when Bill Cosby told African Americans that they were responsible for their own socio-economic status.
Such is the polarizing nature of honesty.
Walter Cronkite recently told students at USC that Americans were simply not educated well enough to cast their votes wisely. Story.
This notion provides an interesting hypothetical relationship: because education is controlled by the state, if an elected group receives more votes from an undereducated population, it has absolutely no incentive to improve education; it instead has incentive to [i]reduce[/i] the quality of education so its claims are less likely to be challenged, thus securing its role as the source of ‘truth’.