Thomas Jefferson

Across Kyle’s reading, Jefferson recurs as two things at once: the patron saint of the educated electorate and a study in self-deception. American Sphinx (Joseph J. Ellis) is the deepest portrait — Jefferson governed “almost entirely from his writing desk,” “not a profound political thinker” but “an utterly brilliant political rhetorician and visionary” whose genius was to “articulate irreconcilable human urges at a sufficiently abstract level to mask their mutual exclusiveness.” Ellis renders him as “a flawed creature” combining massive learning with extraordinary naïveté and “piercing insights into others with daunting powers of self-deception.” His pro-urban note — city-dwellers “can act in a body readily and at all times” — is the book’s one captured observation, anticipating digital cohesion-at-distance.

Jefferson is the founding authority for the Educated Electorate thread that runs through The Death of Expertise, Brave New World Revisited, and Amusing Ourselves To Death: “a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives,” and his “elementary republics of the wards” presupposed informed local participation as the unit of self-rule. The flip side appears in The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (Walter Isaacson), which casts Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy” — “raking” twenty of the best geniuses “from the rubbish annually” in his Notes on the State of Virginia — as the prefiguration of today’s credentialed meritocratic elite, contrasted against Benjamin Franklin’s balance-seeking ideal of “true merit.” Charlie Munger’s USC commencement cites him too: “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”

Context: Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, the third U.S. President, founder of the University of Virginia, and a central Enlightenment figure whose legacy is complicated by his lifelong ownership of enslaved people.

Where this appears

• American Sphinx — Ellis’s portrait: brilliant rhetorician and reluctant public figure, “a flawed creature” with “daunting powers of self-deception”
• The Greatest Sentence Ever Written — Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy” as the prefiguration of the credentialed meritocratic elite
• Educated Electorate — source of the framing quotes on self-government presupposing knowledge and the “ward republics”
• The Death of Expertise — Jefferson in the founding frame for an informed republic
• Brave New World Revisited — Jefferson’s ward republics as the form assuming educated participation
• Benjamin Franklin — the balance-seeking foil; Franklin soothed Jefferson during the Declaration’s editing
• Charlie Munger — USC Gould School of Law Commencement Address — quotes Jefferson on an educated citizenry
• Amusing Ourselves To Death / Joseph Smith — Rough Stone Rolling / Working Toward Zion / An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins / The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin / Benjamin Franklin — An American Life — further references

From Roam

• “I have made it a rule, said he, whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body. I took my lesson from an incident which I will relate to you. when I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice Hatter … was about to open shop for himself—his first concern was to have a handsome sign-board, with a proper inscription. he composed it in these words ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats—for ready money,’ with a figure of a hat subjoined: but he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. the first he shewed it to thought the word ‘Hatter,’ tautologous, because followed by the words ‘makes hats’ which shew he was a Hatter. it was struck out. the next observed that the word ‘makes’ might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats. if good & to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made. he struck it out. a third said he thought the words ‘for ready money,’ were useless as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit, every one who purchased expected to pay. they were parted with, and the inscription now stood ‘John Thomson sells hats.’ ‘sells hats’ says his next friend? why nobody will expect you to give them away. what then is the use of that word? it was stricken out, and ‘hats’ followed it, the rather, as there was one painted on the board. so his inscription was reduced ultimately to ‘John Thomson’ with the figure of a hat subjoined.” Benjamin Franklin Source