"90% of the people in the world are idiots."
This is a fundamental common sense in the financial industry.
The person who put forward this idea is the financial tycoon George Soros.
Soros proposed this theory because there are several phenomena in the financial market.
One is that if 90% of people reach a consensus and believe that the price of a financial product will soar in the future, then that product will definitely plummet. Just like Bitcoin a few years ago. When almost the entire society thought it was valuable and everyone was chasing after it, it plummeted.
Another phenomenon is that in the financial market, 90% of people lose money, and 10% of people make money. The 10% are the players, and the 90% are the leeks. The players can cut the leeks however they want, and the leeks have no ability to resist, nor will they resist. Even if the players cut the leeks to the point of bankruptcy, the leeks will only commit suicide, not反抗 the players.
Official media always propagates that one cannot get rich overnight in the financial industry. In fact, this statement is not accurate. There are indeed people who get rich overnight in the financial industry, but it's just the 10% who get rich overnight, while the 90% go bankrupt. The money of the 90% who go bankrupt is transferred to the accounts of the 10%, and naturally, the 10% become rich overnight.
Moreover, Soros often deals with people who make money in the financial market. He found that these 10% of people differ from ordinary people in terms of behavior patterns, ways of thinking, and even moral values.
Soros simply summarized and generalized this phenomenon based on his experience in finance without delving into the reasons. I will try to analyze the reasons for this phenomenon below.
The reasons for this phenomenon are not due to low intelligence but due to two more important reasons:
First, a lack of professional knowledge, and second, herd mentality or the "sheep effect."
Lack of professional knowledge means that people specialize in different fields. With the development of technology, the total amount of knowledge in modern society far exceeds what one person can learn in a lifetime, so modern academia can only study by dividing disciplines, with different people learning knowledge in different fields. This results in everyone's knowledge being limited to specific areas, and they become almost ignorant outside their areas of expertise. For example, a basketball player may not be able to play soccer, many famous scientists may not be able to take care of themselves in daily life, and many university professors may be scammed by fraudsters using very clumsy methods, because their knowledge is limited to specific areas, and their intelligence is close to that of an idiot in other areas. Fraudsters can use interdisciplinary knowledge to defraud these university professors.
Herd mentality or the "sheep effect" refers to a person's tendency to follow the crowd when they lack professional knowledge or have intellectual deficiencies and cannot think independently about something. This behavior pattern is rational to some extent because if one doesn't understand, following others is not wrong. But the premise is that others understand. If the crowd one follows is made up of idiots, it will lead to everyone engaging in idiotic behavior.
In fact, almost all group-living animals have the instinct to follow the crowd. Humans can domesticate these group-living animals by using this instinct. For example, sheep also have the instinct to follow the crowd; they will follow the shepherd, even if the shepherd leads them to the slaughterhouse. Humans can also be domesticated in the same way, and many fraudsters are well aware of this. This is why rumors always spread faster than truth; rumors can spread by using the sheep effect, while truth is incomprehensible to those who lack professional knowledge and the ability to think independently.
In fact, some other bad things also stem from the herd instinct. For example, people form groups based on certain cultural values or ideologies, which are actually a variant of the sheep effect. For instance, online groups like Huanghan, Ming fans, Manchu remnants, Mongolian remnants, environmentalists, animal rights activists, white leftists, feminists, etc., are mostly of this type. Anyone with a bit of social experience knows that humans form groups based on common economic interests, not ideologies, and it is easy to manipulate, incite, or divide and disintegrate these groups using economic means.
Soros' theory can be used to refute the Western political and judicial systems.
The essence of Western political and judicial systems is democracy, which makes decisions based on consensus.
However, since 90% of people are idiots, consensus is not only not fact but also seriously deviates from the truth.
Take the Western judicial system as an example.
The Western judicial system equates jury consensus with fact. Moreover, in cases with insufficient evidence, the jury can engage in "mental evidence," meaning the inner conviction of the jury can serve as evidence. Furthermore, the jury cannot be questioned; questioning the jury is considered contempt of court, and the judge can directly find you guilty.
The issue is that lawyers all know that to turn an ironclad case around, it's best to sway the jury. Because judges are difficult to fool, while juries are easily swayed.
Although lawyers dare not openly question the jury, deep down, they really do regard the jury as a bunch of idiots.
It's evident that the Western democratic system is like a group of mentally challenged individuals in a psychiatric hospital, where suddenly one person declares, "The sun rises from the west." The others, due to herd mentality, chime in and say, "The sun rises from the west." Then, "The sun rises from the west" becomes the consensus, and these individuals take it as the truth, refusing to accept that the sun rises from the east.
However, don't think that Soros would oppose the Western democratic system. On the contrary, Soros has spent a large amount of money promoting the Western democratic system globally. For instance, Soros heavily funded the democratic parties in Ukraine, and the current Russia-Ukraine conflict can actually be traced back to Soros's political investments in Ukraine twenty years ago.
This precisely reflects Soros's shrewdness.
If there were no ninety percent of idiots in the world, who would financial tycoons like Soros scalp?
To play the pig-slaughtering game, one must first learn how to raise pigs.
Soros's method of doing things is like hearing a mentally challenged person say, "The sun rises from the west," and replying, "Wow, you're so smart, I didn't know that before." Soros uses this approach to get along with the mentally challenged and then says to them, "Since we have such a good relationship, why don't you give me those pieces of paper with numbers and famous faces on them." Then, the mentally challenged person gives all their money to Soros.
Reflecting on myself, I realize I'm still too young, hotheaded, and too honest.
If a fool does something foolish to offend me, I would directly call him an idiot and then argue with the idiot for a long time. But in hindsight, arguing with an idiot is a very idiotic thing to do.
When dealing with a fool who offends me by doing foolish things, I should think of a way to move all the fool's money into my house, leaving the fool penniless.