Why sophisticated people are often idiots

Reality is more crass than the sophisticated mind wants to admit. If you remove the back of a chair it comes a stool. If you lower the stool it becomes a step stool. If you widen the step stool it becomes a coffee table. If you raise the stool it becomes a bar stool. If you take a dining room table and shrink it and lower it it becomes a coffee table.

A social worker with a gun is a cop. A cop without a gun is a social worker in the field. Cop without a gun who is not in the field is a government office worker.

There are no magical third cases or categories. The "educated" mind is constantly searching for invisible categories in order to defeat hard problems, but that is not how you defeat hard problems. To actually defeat problems you brainstorm every possible configuration of a solution, you simulate every possible result, you realize that every solution will create one or more problems, that the solutions may create problems that are worse than the original problem, and you choose from all these possible configurations the configuration of all possible solutions that creates the fewest problems of smallest total magnitude. 

Or to put it in fewer words, you solve the problem by creating the least possible problem with your solution. 

Every problem demands a solution from the public, and every solution creates a problem. The goal is not to "solve"  problems but have the least bad configuration. Government solutions don't exist, only various configurations of problems.

Most of what politicians do is solve the problems created by their predecessors. For example, the corn subsidy and the interstate highway system have no doubt massively contributed to America's obesity epidemic by discouraging walking and giving everyone cheep soda to drink. Both were created as solutions to other problems. The United States needed an interstate highway system so it can move troops, and the court subsidy was created solve malnutrition. 

Well corn definitely solved malnutrition and created obesity, and cheap corn syrup is in everything. Having highways everywhere didn't help either since it encouraged auto-dependence, created the very auto lobby that then lobbied to have trams removed, and destroyed our walkable cities.

Or take Social Security, which disincentivizes people to have children (since having children used to be your retirement but now Social Security takes care of it), thus causing its own collapse in the long term, since children are needed to pay for Social Security.

Or the fact that the welfare state subsidizes the birth rates of the very degenerates and poor that is trying to solve. Obviously you cannot reduce the level of poverty if you are subsidizing the poor to have more children they cannot afford.

Every government and every society has a chain of causality like this, where innumerable government "solutions" are actually causing problems that other government "solutions" are trying to solve.

The temptation is to throw your hands up in the air and take a libertarian approach and say "well we will do nothing," but this is wrong because (a) midwits won't allow you to do nothing, and (b) there is probably a "solution" (by which I mean an optimum configuration of problems that reduces total entropy). And the government can probably achieve that optimum with a few very well crafted regulations. 

It is actually not that hard to govern and a sentient AI could probably do it better than humans. It is basically a search function followed by a vast number of simulations. First, you search for every possible configuration of a solution, meaning you brainstorm. Second, you simulate every possible  outcome of your solutions and the problems they create. Third, you choose the least problem creating solution from the range of all possible solutions. 

If you're really smart you killed two birds with one stone by having your small solutions that create as few problems as possible solve many different problems at the same time. All this requires a vast amount of thinking, far more than any human is prepared to do, and humans are an emotionally volatile species uniquely bad at this type of thinking because we get mired in our own emotional knee-jerk reactions. Any human in theory could do it, I sometimes do it, but it wears me out, and as far as I can tell I'm the only one who's done it, and the answer is I come up with are still not that great. 

There's a lot more to unpack here, a lot more work to do, we need a system that gets groups of people to somehow do this, to somehow go through the process of searching for every possible solution and critiquing their results. We need a system that gets people to operate at a level of IQ that is higher than they naturally do. That is more level-headed than they naturally are. I am working on this. But for now, to circle back to my original assertion, reality is a lot more crass than the educated want to believe, and that is why crass minds often do a better job at governing, specially when they listen to experts and simplify things before making a decision.