Are your voters stupid?

I was checking tokenized stocks today and stumbled upon a small note what EU resident have to fill a test before they can trade anything. Yeah, and the horrible thing is that if they fail, they have to wait a month. Haha. Wait a month to manage your own money. Because for some reason you could get lost in buy and sell buttons.

What makes me thinking, if you are not allowed to manage your own money, how can you be allowed to vote?
If you are too stupid to choose a stock, you are too stupid to choose a government.

For something like a driver’s license – you are being tested because operating machinery poses a public danger. You can hurt people, and the task is to prove that you understand how it works. There is a clear public benefit to doing that.

But to trade stocks, to buy a hundred bucks of something? What is the purpose of that test? The only danger is your own wallet.

And yet voting is treated as a fundamental right. No test. No IQ test. No test to check whether you are drunk when you vote. Even though voting is a much more important decision, considering the potential stakes each person can suffer from those same politicians.

They lock you out of your own money, but they do not question whether you are competent to choose the people who can control everything else about your life.

If you consider your voters stupid and unable to think for themselves, then on what authority can they vote for you, or for anyone?
What is the result of stupid voters?

If you have the notion that the public is stupid, that they are not autonomous individuals thinking for themselves, then when we vote, our votes count for nothing. The assumption is that we cannot think, cannot decide, and cannot take responsibility for ourselves.

Therefore, whoever we elected is also not fit to rule, because it was a decision made by idiots. Your authority comes from the judgment of people you have already declared incapable of judgment.

How could those people be fit to rule if they came to power through someone who has no idea what they are doing, huh? Where do they draw their legitimacy from?

If they consider you incapable of independent thought, of thinking for yourself and all that, they basically consider you mentally handicapped.
Then how the hell can a mentally handicapped person vote for anyone, making a rational decision about their future?

That would mean that whoever we voted for and elected is in no position to be there, because they were elected by handicapped people.
Like, imagine a mental hospital run by the patients, haha.

How could those people be fit to rule if they came to power through someone who has no idea what they are doing, huh? Where do they draw their legitimacy from?

Oh, they thought it was a good idea to lock people out of their money, but they don’t think about voting, which is also a very fucking important decision. Even more so when you consider the stakes – the potential consequences each person can suffer from those same politicians.

Yet voting is a fundamental right. You can always vote, and all that.

They will say that for voting, you have to keep yourself informed. You have to do your own research. The parties are debating, the parties are talking about everything. It is the party’s job to deliver the message and all that.
So suddenly you are perfectly capable of doing anything, huh?

Suddenly, when those politicians need your vote to get into office, everyone is smart and making a very important rational decision, thinking for themselves, huh?
Oh, yeah? You can vote however you want, for free. However, everything else about your life, they will tell you how to do stuff.
Very convenient for them.

Oh yeah, they may even have some law saying that they have to keep you informed, explain all that, and yeah, yeah. Do we have a voter test then? Do I have an IQ test beforehand? Have they even checked if you’re not drunk when you vote? Haha.
You may immediately feel outraged, and rightly so – why the hell would I be gate-kept from something that is my constitutional right? But suddenly voting is sacred, while everything else is not.

Or it is even worse. They consider you stupid and just sit there managing you, managing you like a flock of rats. Then you ask yourself: what is the point of voting even?

So you have either a full authoritarian state, with the ruling class deciding who is smart enough to think, or you have a democracy that is compromised because of the consideration that you are stupid to vote in the first place.

Either the ruling class does not believe its own paternalism, or it believes that democracy can be built on people it considers incapable of judgment.

Think about it. How "they" treat you, how they make assumptions about your agency and intelligence.
Once paternalism becomes normal, the state no longer treats people as autonomous individuals. It manages them.
But if they think you are dumb, what makes them any better?