People are smart but there's a problem with smarts - it's surprisingly easy to talk yourself into something you can't talk yourself out of. High intelligence makes this worse, if anything. Some ideas need to be quarantined because by the time you start doing the "are we the baddies" skit, you've already built Dachau.

So the smart people or the dumb people need to make the determination as to what are the bad ideas? Or the REALLY SMART PEOPLE like you make that determination? Face it, you're never going to get away from the "benevolent" overseer who figures the truth out for everyone else.

The fundamental flaw is that you're always trying to put everyone on different levels of intellectual responsibility and whenever you do that you fall into an elitist model of governance, which is what the first amendment was specifically designed to prevent.

You have a point. I once talked myself into a pretty racist view and have been struggling ever since to get out. :(