What a tired idea.
Open your eyes.
How about the masses smarten up themselves?!? Just another wild pipe-dream, huh?
I'll never understand how so many people like to turn "better yourself" into "you're not the boss of me."
Ugh.
Wait, you're criticizing people who build cities in a desert while... Living--
by choice--in a city in a desert?
The issue with all of what you're saying here is that you assume that "we" as a society should always make smart collective choices, while not realizing that "we" as individuals make our own choices according to our own needs, whims, and preferences. That's why you live in Phoenix. For whatever reason, it made sense for you individually to move there and work, despite the fact that building a dense population center in a place without enough water to support it is collectively dumb.
To a large extent, the "masses" can often be smart about the things that matter while being stupid about things that don't or only slightly affect them. That, by the way, is true whether they're dumb as a box of rocks, or smart as hell. Because even smart people, let's use doctors as an example, don't have to be smart about city planning to be successful in life. But that doctor may opine and vote based on uninformed and very wrong ideas about city planning--or even just selfish ideas like NIMBYism.
As it is, I think you're a pretty smart guy, OAM... With a lot of dumb, uninformed, opinions. Opinions that you have an outsized sense of confidence in, to boot.
