I’m working on painting the mugs and bowls my sister sells in her coffee shop. I like to use interesting quotes as well as the sayings I make up myself. I came across this:

It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.
— Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)

John G. Agno sent me a email that said in part: (the emphasis is mine)

The rules of thumb for assessing leadership illustrate the importance of taking the pulse of followers through interactive conversations in order to stay in attunement with them. If the critical mass of thinking within followers is more complex than proposed leadership, that leadership can only take control through intimidation or force. Once it grasps power, the more complex thinkers will go into hiding, exile or premature graves. Revolution will certainly be on the horizon.

However, if the leadership model is too far ahead of the followers’ developmental level, it will destabilize and overwhelm the group or leave them asking, ‘Where’s this idiot coming from? Does anybody know what he’s talking about?’ Many leaders have been drummed out of the corps or banished into oblivion when their thinking become too complex for the followers to understand.

Sorry, I can’t find the original post to share.

We know from educating the very young that simplicity is the best way to be sure young students “get it.” I admire the person with the ability to communicate the complex in simple terms. My husband’s friend Joe Snyder ate many meals at our dinner table in Mississippi. Whenever the engineers discussed some structural thing that I surely wouldn’t know about, Joe Snyder would stop and explain. It kept me in the conversation. I am forever grateful.

He was certainly not uneducated — I think he’s a college professor now.. (Lucky Students!) But he always took the time to explain. Perhaps the truly uneducated would have been glad to do the dishes and skip the conversation.

If the popular audiences are uneducated, then I suppose simplicity is best. But not everyone is uneducated. And some who are uneducated want to be educated. How else to learn what might be? Besides education does not supply common sense.

I suppose worse is the arrogance of the blissful uneducated. They need not be bothered with learning new things or considering options for what they know must be truth.

This only is certain, that there is nothing certain; and nothing more miserable and yet more arrogant than man.
— Pliny the Elder (23 AD – 79 AD)

And arrogance seems to beg a slap down.

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
— George Santayana (1863 – 1952)