The original, ancient, meaning of the word "idiot" was "private person", i.e. a selfish, narrow-minded, ignoramus unconcerned with (and unsuited for) public life. Not "stupid person".
We tend to conflate this first type of "idiot" (selfish person, unsuited to hold power) with "constitutionally stupid" and it gets us into all kinds of trouble. The people in power are idiots in the first sense of the word (unsuited to hold power, narrow-minded, provincial, etc.) but they are not unintelligent. In fact, they're quite cunning and adept when it comes to holding power (those who aren't, don't last) and taking it from them is much harder than we expect it to be. They turn out to be just as smart as we are, but their intelligence is applied to getting and keeping power rather than whatever we claim to value (e.g. making the world better). This makes them formidable opponents, and we underestimate them at our peril. To crib from Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular", they spent all their energies on becoming popular while we spent ours on being smart and getting right answers. (Where Graham is wrong: "the adult world" is far more like high school than he admits. You have to be rich to get out of high-school-esque drama and into the utopia he mistakes for the whole adult world.)
All that said, we're right (in technology, and in the arts) when we point out that society is corrupt and run by people who are generally out of their depth and unconcerned with general social advancement, aesthetics, or doing the right thing. It's not that they lack the genetic ability or "IQ"-- they're plenty bright enough, hardware-wise-- but that they're lazy and self-interested. We're wrong when we (as technologists) assert some tribal superiority, like we wouldn't make the same mistakes, just because we have higher IQs. History doesn't support this claim; it refutes it. Venture capital is a feudalistic, relationship-based business. Most of the companies we've built in the past 20 years have god-awful cultures. Silicon Valley (the physical place) is an overpriced lack-of-taste writ large. We mock "the paper belt" while failing to realize that we've created a worse one. We've mindlessly chased "efficiency" while failing to answer the most important question: what should we do with the value thus created? Hence, instead of curing cancer or coming up with an environmentally sound energy alternative, we're stuck helping businessmen unemploy people.
We tend to conflate this first type of "idiot" (selfish person, unsuited to hold power) with "constitutionally stupid" and it gets us into all kinds of trouble. The people in power are idiots in the first sense of the word (unsuited to hold power, narrow-minded, provincial, etc.) but they are not unintelligent. In fact, they're quite cunning and adept when it comes to holding power (those who aren't, don't last) and taking it from them is much harder than we expect it to be. They turn out to be just as smart as we are, but their intelligence is applied to getting and keeping power rather than whatever we claim to value (e.g. making the world better). This makes them formidable opponents, and we underestimate them at our peril. To crib from Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular", they spent all their energies on becoming popular while we spent ours on being smart and getting right answers. (Where Graham is wrong: "the adult world" is far more like high school than he admits. You have to be rich to get out of high-school-esque drama and into the utopia he mistakes for the whole adult world.)
All that said, we're right (in technology, and in the arts) when we point out that society is corrupt and run by people who are generally out of their depth and unconcerned with general social advancement, aesthetics, or doing the right thing. It's not that they lack the genetic ability or "IQ"-- they're plenty bright enough, hardware-wise-- but that they're lazy and self-interested. We're wrong when we (as technologists) assert some tribal superiority, like we wouldn't make the same mistakes, just because we have higher IQs. History doesn't support this claim; it refutes it. Venture capital is a feudalistic, relationship-based business. Most of the companies we've built in the past 20 years have god-awful cultures. Silicon Valley (the physical place) is an overpriced lack-of-taste writ large. We mock "the paper belt" while failing to realize that we've created a worse one. We've mindlessly chased "efficiency" while failing to answer the most important question: what should we do with the value thus created? Hence, instead of curing cancer or coming up with an environmentally sound energy alternative, we're stuck helping businessmen unemploy people.