Whose collective knowledge are you speaking of? Those who froth at the mouth whenever their sacred cows are even remotely questioned. Or are you talking about politics by algorithm. I'm sure public opinion and knowledge can be optimized, so those who want certain results get them. Bernays and his ideological children in public relations and marketing (with demographers, political scientists and operatives, and big data prophets mixed in) could serve up all the common knowledge necessary so one could govern however they wished. It's not that people don't believe in the system, it's that the system doesn't believe in the people. Like I said before, I'm not talking about a third party with a different ideology than the democrats or republicans; I'm talking about a third party that runs on the platform of harnessing the collective knowledge of their constituents.