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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Because many of those men were flat-out geniuses. They penned a fine constitution and outlined ideals we should strive to achieve. That doesn't mean they knew the best way to legislate modern issues though , like the internet. That brings us back to their genius. They outlined a process to revise, or amend if you will, the laws of the land. The biggest problem that they didn't foresee is that America would regress into fervent tribalism, completely unwilling to amend anything that might benefit another tribe. So we're stuck, locked in the year 1992 when the last amendment was written. Actually that's not completely true. Many of them did foresee the dangers of a bicameral partisan system, and issued abundant warnings about it. Unfortunately they really didn't anticipate just how insulated and shameless many of our politicians would become, probably because tar and feathers in the public square was still a possibility back then.
Thing is, yesterday's geniuses are today's average person, average intelligence is going up and there's tons more people on the planet today vs back then, that's a whole lot of geniuses that could create a much better constitution but that are unable to because some people at the other end of the spectrum act like some dude 250 years ago could predict the world we would live in today (when they in fact predicted that the Constitution would need to be amended in the future).
Yeah you said it yourself, the constitution is meant to be amended. We haven't seen a new amendment in 31 years because our politicians are thoroughly dedicated to blocking each other.
That's not a problem with the constitution, though. That's a problem with the backstabbing nature of politics/culture wars in the USA.
The idea is supposed to be that we only update the structure of our government as needed when there's broad support for it. That should be easy when we're considering a change that's obviously in the public interest.
But right now, if someone from the "wrong" party says that the sky is blue, the other party will come up with all sorts of reasons why They Are Wrong And Evil. You can't cooperate when the only rule is to badmouth the other guy.
Exactly.
Nope, the political leaders that founded the USA were extremely well educated and would probably put the average modern person to shame on any topic or skill that wasn't invented after their death. Motherfuckers these days can barely read and write.
The average dumbass knows how to Google stuff now, and feels like they are smart because they can operate a touch screen device and access information.
But if you take that same "smart" average modern dumbass back to colonial USA times and they would not know how to survive at all. They would be like "where's my cheeseburger? Where's my shower?" and just fucking die of bacterial infection from stubbing their toe probably. Those old dudes were building their own houses, farming their own food, writing long political essays and shit. They were out there inventing all the stuff we take for granted now.
And today there's more and more very well educated people around. Heck, compare the number of women that had access to university back then vs today.
Take the founding fathers and send them to today's world and they'll end up homeless.
My point is that they might have been very smart and educated back then, people like them exist today and there's much more of them, we just don't listen to them.
Not anymore. Average intelligence in Western countries plateaud and started dropping around 10 years ago.
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-online-iq-scores-century.html
That's still how many years of it going up since the US founding fathers?
~~Take the founding fathers and send them to today's world and they'll end up homeless.~~ wrong comment chain
My point still stands.
Only because they lack knowledge, not because they lack intelligence. They were extremely intelligent men.
Oh sorry, that seconds part (added as an edit) should have went in my reply to the other comment that mentioned sending someone from today back in time to the days of the founding fathers!