Right and Wrong

 

You May Be Right

You may be right
I may be crazy
Oh, but it just may be a lunatic you're looking for
Turn out the light
Don't try to save me
You may be wrong for all I know
But you may be right

But what if you are wrong and I am right?

All things being equal, there is, on average, a 50% chance that an individual is right and a 50% chance that an individual is wrong.  In most authoritarian governments, where those can be differentiated as to how the sovereign of the government is chosen, e.g. a dictator, a hereditary monarch, an elected monarch, etc. but the sovereign of the government is an individual.  The are also other authoritarian forms of government where the sovereign is a smaller group within the whole group. That is, not an individual but e.g. a junta, an oligopoly, single party rule, etc. where not all individuals in the larger group are members of that smaller group.  That smaller group still has a 50% chance of being right and a 50% chance of being wrong.

The question about how an individual within a group, or a smaller group within a larger group,  behave is the subject of distributions within statistics.  That is what averages are all about.  An individual is 100% right or 100% wrong but there is a difference between a group and an individual. A fair coin flip is on average 50% heads, but on each individual flip of the coin it will be 100% heads or 100% tails, and not 50% head and 50% tails. 

The government in the US is not an individual or a smaller group, but is all of the People.  A smaller group, or a large group, has not only a mean, its average value, but also a standard deviation from that average value, tolerance.  If a group is normal, then that standard deviation will NOT be zero.