For almost every safety-sensitive occupation, society insists on some objective demonstration of competence. We license pilots, credential surgeons, examine engineers, monitor air-traffic controllers. Plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians need to have documented apprenticeship experience, pass exams, in order to get their "ticket" or certification. To get a driver's license, you need to pass a practical exam.
Yet for the offices that command armies, shape economies, negotiate wars, appoint judges, and influence public health for hundreds of millions, we often require nothing beyond age, citizenship, residency, and electoral success. In a democracy, winning support from the voters is essential, but so is the basic idea that our leaders should have basic competence to perform their tasks safely. A republic is not a talent show, and a head of government is not merely an entertainer.
“Competence” is not one thing. There is the most basic medical level: is the person suffering from dementia, delirium, or another major impairment preventing safe functioning? But there is also higher-order competence: reasoning ability, breadth of knowledge, grasp of institutions, capacity to weigh evidence, and judgment under social and moral pressure.
A political candidate should not have to pass some official exam in order to appear on the ballot. That would invite obvious democratic and legal objections. Furthermore, elections are not licensing boards, and should not become them. The better idea is disclosure. Require candidates for the highest offices to undergo a standardized, transparent battery of cognitive and judgment-oriented assessments, and then release the results to the public in full. Let voters decide what to do with the information. That approach preserves democratic choice while reducing one of democracy’s recurring absurdities: the spectacle of candidates certifying their own brilliance and expecting the public to take their word for it.
What should such a battery include? First, some broad measure of general cognitive ability. A standard Wechsler IQ test is one option. Some other comparable test could be preferred, since the term "IQ" does carry some cultural baggage, which could lead to people arguing over the propriety of the test. In general, we would want a validated, independently administered broad cognitive battery. Second, a structured fund-of-knowledge component: not trivia, but basic competence in history, government structure, economics, science, and world affairs. The simplest example could be administering the same civics exam given to new immigrants seeking to become citizens through the naturalization process; it would be a curious--though not surprising--irony if a prospective president had difficulty passing a citizenship exam. The WAIS-IV "information" subtest is another option with rigorous norms. The Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Achievement would evaluate basic knowledge of science, social studies, and humanities. An existing U.S. government standard test is the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT), which would evaluate basic knowledge of government, world history, economics, mathematics, and management principles. Third, a situational judgment component modeled on tools such as CASPer, which is designed to assess how people reason through difficult interpersonal and ethical situations rather than merely what facts they can recite. The attraction of a CASPer-like approach is precisely that leadership failure is often less about raw cognitive deficit than about impulsiveness, vanity, rigidity, cruelty, gullibility, or the inability to think through conflict without narcissistic injury. A drawback of the CASPer in particular is that it is not immune to practice effects or coaching.
A major world leader boasted that he had a perfect score on the MoCA test. But of course, the MoCA is a screening test for cognitive impairment or dementia, and is not a measure of higher-order reasoning, fund of knowledge, or statesmanship. The fact that someone would boast about acing the MoCA reveals a comical misunderstanding of the distinction between cognitive screening and higher reasoning.
If I had to make a prediction--based on existing public information--there is at least one major leader in the world today who I suspect would have very low scores on these standardized tests of intellect, fund of knowledge, and social judgment.
There would be problems with this approach. A testing regime could become elitist, over-coached, or culturally narrow. It could flatter the prejudices of the credentialed classes while missing what politics also requires: stamina, courage, coalition-building, rhetorical force, and moral seriousness. Even the psychometrics are not perfect. That is why such tools should not be used as a blunt pass-fail system. Yet they should inform the electorate.
Testing of this type would not fully capture the traits most dangerous in public office. Measures of intellect, civic knowledge, and situational judgment still leave out organized dishonesty, shamelessness, authoritarian impulse, appetite for corruption, grandiosity, sadism, and the ability of a clever sociopath to game evaluative settings. The real problem of leadership failure is often not low intelligence but malignant character combined with sufficient intelligence.
If such a system were ever built, its legitimacy would depend almost entirely on procedure. The design would have to be approved by a genuinely bipartisan (or multi-partisan) commission, with unanimous sign-off from neutral experts in neuropsychology, psychometrics, constitutional law, ethics, and public administration. The instruments, scoring rubrics, security procedures, and interpretive framework should all be public. Results should be reported as a profile, not as a single score: cognitive intactness, reasoning, fund of knowledge, and situational judgment separated rather than collapsed into a single number. The public is capable of seeing that a candidate might be average in abstract reasoning yet excellent in judgment, or bright in the narrow psychometric sense yet impulsive, humorless, or socially incompetent. I think this type of evaluation could improve the overall safety and stability of the world.
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
Sunday, April 5, 2026
Chapter 29 - Religion & Nationalism
Nationalism—loyalty and commitment to serve one’s country—is, in many ways, a secular cousin of religion. Patriotism—the warmer, more emotionally charged attachment to one’s nation—is a secular cousin of religious piety. Nations, like religions, have founding stories, revered leaders, martyrs, songs, holy days, symbols, and texts. A flag can function almost like a religious icon. The national anthem is a bit like a hymn. A constitution is not literally a scripture, of course, but psychologically it can occupy a similar place: quoted selectively, interpreted by specialists, and treated with special reverence in times of crisis. In many countries, national symbols are everywhere—flags outside homes, in schools, at sports events, on the lapel of a suit, and so routinely in the background of films and television shows that people hardly notice them. These are not just decorations; they are signals of belonging.
Just like religion, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Humans need belonging. National identity can give people meaning, gratitude, pride, and a feeling of rootedness. Patriotism can bring people together to cooperate, to build a good society, or to face difficult problems. This is true not only of nations, but of smaller units too: provinces, states, cities, schools, neighborhoods, families. People can love a landscape, a language, a history, or the memory of ancestors who endured hardship and built something.
But the same psychological mechanism that creates warmth and cooperation also creates outsiders. Fellow citizens of our nation, just like fellow members of a religion, become members of an ingroup, and therefore receive preferential regard, support, and trust compared to outgroup members—"foreigners."
At its best, patriotism is gratitude and stewardship. It is care for one’s home, loyalty to neighbors, respect for institutions that protect people decently, and a wish to pass something worthwhile on to the next generation. At its worst, patriotism becomes collective vanity. The nation stops being a practical civic arrangement and starts to feel almost sacred—above criticism, above humility, perhaps even above ordinary morality. The home group is imagined to be uniquely virtuous, uniquely wronged, or uniquely deserving. Critics become suspect. Outsiders become threatening. At that point harshness can begin to feel justified.
Just like religion, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Humans need belonging. National identity can give people meaning, gratitude, pride, and a feeling of rootedness. Patriotism can bring people together to cooperate, to build a good society, or to face difficult problems. This is true not only of nations, but of smaller units too: provinces, states, cities, schools, neighborhoods, families. People can love a landscape, a language, a history, or the memory of ancestors who endured hardship and built something.
But the same psychological mechanism that creates warmth and cooperation also creates outsiders. Fellow citizens of our nation, just like fellow members of a religion, become members of an ingroup, and therefore receive preferential regard, support, and trust compared to outgroup members—"foreigners."
At its best, patriotism is gratitude and stewardship. It is care for one’s home, loyalty to neighbors, respect for institutions that protect people decently, and a wish to pass something worthwhile on to the next generation. At its worst, patriotism becomes collective vanity. The nation stops being a practical civic arrangement and starts to feel almost sacred—above criticism, above humility, perhaps even above ordinary morality. The home group is imagined to be uniquely virtuous, uniquely wronged, or uniquely deserving. Critics become suspect. Outsiders become threatening. At that point harshness can begin to feel justified.
Often patriotic citizens forget that their own families were once immigrants. If you go far enough back, almost all humans are descended from "immigrants," except perhaps some who live in sub-Saharan Africa. As we have discussed earlier, humans originating in central Africa have migrated across the world over tens of thousands of years. Depending on how you define the geographic limits, a very limited proportion of families still live in the homeland where their ancestors were the first human settlers. Ironically this proportion is particularly low in North America, which is the place where nowadays we see particular hostility to immigrants.
One of the great ironies of civilization is that many countries have beautiful constitutions and noble founding ideals while behaving badly toward outsiders. At their best, constitutions speak of liberty, justice, equality, dignity, due process, fairness, and restraint of power. But the emotional force of these values often applies only to insiders. A country may insist that its own citizens deserve humane treatment and equal standing before the law, while showing indifference or contempt toward people outside the border. The moral imagination stops at the passport.
This is one place where constitutions and scriptures are interesting to compare. At their best, both reach toward universality. At their worst, both become tribal property. People sometimes quote them not to enlarge compassion, but to justify selective loyalty. There is something strange about passionately affirming equality while only feeling it fully for one’s own side. If fairness, justice, and dignity are real values, they should not evaporate when a person happens to be born on the wrong side of a line on a map.
Religion and nationalism can also become strongly fused. In some places this fusion is formal and built directly into law and state power: religious leaders may hold autocratic authority, or the state may define itself in theological terms. In other places the fusion is softer but still very real: politicians wrap themselves in sacred language, imply that the “real” members of the nation follow the dominant religion, and use religious identity as a marker of patriotism. Religion then lends nationalism sacred prestige, while nationalism lends religion the machinery of the state. In many parts of the world, it feels as though these tendencies are intensifying again. The old tribal reflexes are not difficult to awaken.
This is also the point where nationalism begins to resemble religion most vividly: sacrifice becomes noble. The soldier lost in battle becomes a secular martyr. Military cemeteries become sacred ground. National memorial days, uniforms, solemn parades, salutes, flyovers, and moments of silence are not trivial theatre; they are rituals. Some of these rituals can be dignified, moving, and morally serious. But psychologically they are doing something very similar to religious ceremony: they sanctify loyalty, make sacrifice visible, and bind the group together around a shared story of suffering and duty.
Once the nation is felt to be sacred, military power begins to acquire a special moral glow. Global military spending is now close to $3 trillion per year. And broader estimates of the economic impact of violence run to roughly $20 trillion annually. Even allowing for debate about definitions and methodology, the scale is staggering. It is also vastly greater than many published estimates of what would be required each year to eliminate extreme poverty. Beyond the numbers, there is the cost in human talent: engineers, chemists, manufacturers, and researchers working on military technology could instead use their abilities to give the world better housing, cleaner energy, safer roads, prosthetics, better medications, water systems, or even simply better playgrounds for children, instead of better ways to maim or kill them.
Human societies will always require policing, disaster response, protection against violent actors, and organized defense of civilians. But it is worth imagining a more mature global arrangement: less dependence on giant national war machines, and more emphasis on internationally accountable peacekeeping, policing, engineering, disaster response, and protection of human rights. It is worth imagining a system in which soldiers or security personnel would train with colleagues from other nations, in different parts of the world, learn other languages, work alongside people from other cultures, and spend more of their careers helping with floods, fires, epidemics, rebuilding, mediating regional conflicts, and civilian protection. The point would not be to erase local loyalties, but to weaken the automatic “us and them” mentality.
What can be done about this problem? This is one place where the best of religion and the best of civic life actually converge. The best religious values call for compassion, humility, fairness, hospitality, and recognition of the dignity of other persons—not just of one’s own tribe. Likewise, the best constitutional ideals call for equal protection, restraint of power, due process, and humane treatment. The United Nations, however imperfectly, points in this direction. The UN Charter speaks of promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with one of the most beautiful sentences in political history: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
Einstein, especially after the arrival of nuclear weapons, moved toward this kind of thinking as well. He argued that the scale of modern destructive power had made old-style nationalism dangerously obsolete, and he supported some form of supranational democratic authority—what he often called world government—as a way of preventing catastrophe.
Of course, there are dangers in any larger political arrangement. A world government, if badly designed, could become bureaucratic, overreaching, or tyrannical. There would have to be strong safeguards: systematic democracy, term limits, limited executive power, fair elections with protections against propaganda, and protections against wealthy candidates or partisan blocs using economic power to sway the electorate unfairly.
One of the great ironies of civilization is that many countries have beautiful constitutions and noble founding ideals while behaving badly toward outsiders. At their best, constitutions speak of liberty, justice, equality, dignity, due process, fairness, and restraint of power. But the emotional force of these values often applies only to insiders. A country may insist that its own citizens deserve humane treatment and equal standing before the law, while showing indifference or contempt toward people outside the border. The moral imagination stops at the passport.
This is one place where constitutions and scriptures are interesting to compare. At their best, both reach toward universality. At their worst, both become tribal property. People sometimes quote them not to enlarge compassion, but to justify selective loyalty. There is something strange about passionately affirming equality while only feeling it fully for one’s own side. If fairness, justice, and dignity are real values, they should not evaporate when a person happens to be born on the wrong side of a line on a map.
Religion and nationalism can also become strongly fused. In some places this fusion is formal and built directly into law and state power: religious leaders may hold autocratic authority, or the state may define itself in theological terms. In other places the fusion is softer but still very real: politicians wrap themselves in sacred language, imply that the “real” members of the nation follow the dominant religion, and use religious identity as a marker of patriotism. Religion then lends nationalism sacred prestige, while nationalism lends religion the machinery of the state. In many parts of the world, it feels as though these tendencies are intensifying again. The old tribal reflexes are not difficult to awaken.
This is also the point where nationalism begins to resemble religion most vividly: sacrifice becomes noble. The soldier lost in battle becomes a secular martyr. Military cemeteries become sacred ground. National memorial days, uniforms, solemn parades, salutes, flyovers, and moments of silence are not trivial theatre; they are rituals. Some of these rituals can be dignified, moving, and morally serious. But psychologically they are doing something very similar to religious ceremony: they sanctify loyalty, make sacrifice visible, and bind the group together around a shared story of suffering and duty.
Once the nation is felt to be sacred, military power begins to acquire a special moral glow. Global military spending is now close to $3 trillion per year. And broader estimates of the economic impact of violence run to roughly $20 trillion annually. Even allowing for debate about definitions and methodology, the scale is staggering. It is also vastly greater than many published estimates of what would be required each year to eliminate extreme poverty. Beyond the numbers, there is the cost in human talent: engineers, chemists, manufacturers, and researchers working on military technology could instead use their abilities to give the world better housing, cleaner energy, safer roads, prosthetics, better medications, water systems, or even simply better playgrounds for children, instead of better ways to maim or kill them.
Human societies will always require policing, disaster response, protection against violent actors, and organized defense of civilians. But it is worth imagining a more mature global arrangement: less dependence on giant national war machines, and more emphasis on internationally accountable peacekeeping, policing, engineering, disaster response, and protection of human rights. It is worth imagining a system in which soldiers or security personnel would train with colleagues from other nations, in different parts of the world, learn other languages, work alongside people from other cultures, and spend more of their careers helping with floods, fires, epidemics, rebuilding, mediating regional conflicts, and civilian protection. The point would not be to erase local loyalties, but to weaken the automatic “us and them” mentality.
What can be done about this problem? This is one place where the best of religion and the best of civic life actually converge. The best religious values call for compassion, humility, fairness, hospitality, and recognition of the dignity of other persons—not just of one’s own tribe. Likewise, the best constitutional ideals call for equal protection, restraint of power, due process, and humane treatment. The United Nations, however imperfectly, points in this direction. The UN Charter speaks of promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with one of the most beautiful sentences in political history: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
Einstein, especially after the arrival of nuclear weapons, moved toward this kind of thinking as well. He argued that the scale of modern destructive power had made old-style nationalism dangerously obsolete, and he supported some form of supranational democratic authority—what he often called world government—as a way of preventing catastrophe.
Of course, there are dangers in any larger political arrangement. A world government, if badly designed, could become bureaucratic, overreaching, or tyrannical. There would have to be strong safeguards: systematic democracy, term limits, limited executive power, fair elections with protections against propaganda, and protections against wealthy candidates or partisan blocs using economic power to sway the electorate unfairly.
A more modest movement in this direction would simply be to greatly strengthen international law and increase the authority, accountability, funding, and capacity of institutions such as the United Nations, rather than pretending that national sovereignty must remain absolute forever.
The task is not to abolish tribal feeling altogether, but to civilize it—to channel it toward celebration, artistry, local pride, friendly competition, and cooperative belonging rather than toward prejudice, ostracism, and war. At best, tribalism, nationalism, and religion give us festivals, songs, neighborhoods, architecture, and cultural beauty. At worst, they give us fear, exclusion, and repeated conflict.
The task is not to abolish tribal feeling altogether, but to civilize it—to channel it toward celebration, artistry, local pride, friendly competition, and cooperative belonging rather than toward prejudice, ostracism, and war. At best, tribalism, nationalism, and religion give us festivals, songs, neighborhoods, architecture, and cultural beauty. At worst, they give us fear, exclusion, and repeated conflict.
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