No, I do not have to be smarter than this...whatever "this" is? I seek no pat on the back of approval nor seek grounds with the majority on many things. I can be as dumb as many if I want...it is a free world!
Just a sampling from a pool of many written decades ago by H L Mencken...
"My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes without having a single original thought."
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office."
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right."
"The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!"
"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."