The kind of everybody is equal mentality that must underlie such a statement boggles my mind. It's an attitude that is shockingly disconnected from the real world. We may as well be talking about Santa Claus.
Typical issues that go to referendum in Switzerland range from the trivial (shall we raise taxes to build a new football stadium/road tunnel/etc), to the constitutional (should international treaties be able to override referendums... that one is running at the moment). In none of these cases is a decision so complex that it can't be understood by everyone in a short time.
Generally, I've found that anyone claiming a government-level decision is too complicated to explain to an average person is trying to cover up major weaknesses in the underlying arguments.
The kind of everybody is equal mentality that must underlie such a statement boggles my mind. It's an attitude that is shockingly disconnected from the real world
The extent to which people differ in their moral and intellectual potential is the defining difference that creates right wing vs left wing politics in basically any democratic society. Read Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" to get a very insightful analysis of why this is so. Far from being mind boggling, it's entirely expected that different people have different intuitions about the capability of the average person.
Reality is one way, and we build models of it in our minds to differing degrees of accuracy - the better your models the better you are equipped to make decisions in life. This applies to political decisions, major life choices, what you eat for breakfast.
Politicians are not only not very well versed in the fields they need to understand, they're sometimes purposefully ignoring it in order to do something popular among their voters. Direct democracy makes this a bigger problem - it turns into tyranny of the majority and there is no check on what is popular (in Switzerland there are actually a lot of checks, but I'm talking more in general here about Athenian style direct democracy.)
Imagine a direct democracy in France once they have a majority Muslim population - you could start to watch the freedoms we take for granted in the West being rolled back one at a time. And it's not that their ideas are equally as good as our Western ideas - not all ideas are equal, and I think despite being obviously biased, it's true for me to say that many of our ideas are superior.
If you had a direct democracy in South Africa, they would take all property from the rich and redistribute it. The country would promptly fall apart like Venezuela and Zimbabawe where similar things happened. In Switzerland I think people understand the ramifications of doing, what on the surface, sounds like a good thing.
Representative democracy doesn't save us from this at all (the scenario in South Africa looked like it would come to pass, and they reversed course under international pressure) but it may curb some of the worst excesses of a direct democracy.
If you take two 25 year olds, and one spent 7 years in the university system learning 'book knowledge', and one spent 7 years in industry learning via an apprenticeship (this sort of situation is common in Switzerland), then who is really more knowledgeable? What even is knowledge? Is knowledge obtained only from professors, or from managers and supervisors on the job, or practical experience, or a blend of all of these?
There's a reason the most famous successful tech CEOs in the USA seem to be college dropouts.