Article by Kurt Schlichter in Townhall
Why Are All the Experts Such Dopes?
The great progressive dream is to dispense with rule by us mere citizens in favor of a government staffed by technocratic, disinterested experts who selflessly apply the principles of science (social science and real science) to create a better, more efficient, effective, and impactful society. Of course, the progressive advocates of expertocracy assume that those experts will share their coastal, urban and blue perspectives, mores, and values – funny how that works. And it has been working, for them at least. We normals are now expected to defer and submit to the commands of unelected functionaries bossing us around for our own good, though this is only good for those said experts and their fellow travelers in the ruling class. Over about 250 years, America has gone from its leaders being selected on the basis of the divine right of kings to its leaders being selected by on the basis of the divine right of nerds with advanced degrees from Yale.
The sordid reality of our glorious expert caste is exemplified by that nimrod gnome Fauci taking a break from generating conflicting stories about how he helped fund a Chi Com bioweapons lab to giggle in his emails about how Brad Pitt played him on SNL, a TV show that was last funny … well, ask your dad when that was – he might remember. See, today even alleged the experts in comedy are falling short.
It might be one thing if the experts demonstrated some expertise. If these doofuses could actually make the trains run on time, at least our trains would be on time. But our experts today are such that they think it’s a great idea to spend billions on high-speed trains running between Bakersfield and Fresno – the one choo-choo journey on earth where you desperately want to be late.
Have you noticed that all the experts…stink?
The experts on war haven’t won one in twenty years.
The experts on diet told us for decades we needed to eat processed carbs and eschew the meat our ancestors thrived on.
The experts in finance gave us 2008; the experts in healthcare gave us Obamacare.
This is not new. Long ago, the experts gave us eugenics and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, perhaps the best proof one might offer to support the notion of systemic racism since, of course, the experts are a key component of the System.
Now, experts are not always wrong. In fairness to Dr. Fauci he was right about COVID, at least for a moment. Of course, this is only because, over the last 18 months, that ubiquitous shrimp has literally taken every possible position on the pandemic, so he was bound to have been right at least once simply because of the sheer number of different and often contradictory poses he struck. Remember the Great Mask Circle of Jerking Us Around? His just-FOIA’d emails reiterate that idiocy. First, masks were bad, then good, then we needed two masks. One of those has to be correct, right?
And then there are the Wuhan lab lies. “Oh well I never! The thought that commies might have let a bug out of their lab is preposterous, unscientific and – worst of all – racist!” Yeah, it was a real stretch for those nuts on the internet to think the source of a bat coronavirus outbreak might not be the pangolin buffet just around the corner from one of the only labs in the world doing US-funded Frankensteinian experiments on bat coronaviruses. So nutty, in fact, that the smart people at Facebook – experts in fact-checking, according to themselves – suppressed those nuts while the smart people in the media called it a “conspiracy theory.” And guess who was right? The nuts.
But hey, you should totally believe the experts when they tell you that, no Schiff, no foolin’, this time the world really is going to burn to a crisp in 10 years if you peasants don’t give up your trucks, cheeseburgers, and freedom.
How dare you suspect their expert opinions come from anything but the purest of sciences! Experts are unaffected by the concerns of mere mortals, such as money, fame, and social acclamation. By the way, enjoy reading Dr Fauci’s book on the way to that giant BLM march, which experts declare is exempt from COVID restrictions because racism, as embodied by blue collar cops getting in fights with felons, is a worse danger than a deadly virus those same experts’ friends let set loose.
Not surprisingly, today everyone wants to be an expert, because alleged expertise is power. This has spawned the rise of credentialism – look how Mrs. * insists on being called Dr. * even though, for all its worth, her ridiculous education doctorate might as well be in phrenology. Nor do you actually need a real field in which to declare yourself an expert. Cheesy frauds who a few years ago were mere race hustlers are now professional “antiracism” experts, cashing in big on their expertise/scam by shaming liberal saps at universities and corporations at five-figures a harangue. The bar just keeps falling as everyone seeks their own expert cred. The “survivors” of various oppressions – transphobia, fatphobia, whatever – are a kind of expert too; we’re certainly expected to listen to them tell us what to think without daring to challenge them. And then there are internet “influencers,” their expertise in literally everything is demonstrated by their number of followers. My favorite are the legal experts on Twitter – both with and without law degrees – sharing the full (and fool) benefit of their inexperience on legal questions and inevitably getting it not just wrong but massively, incoherently, inexcusably wrong.
There’s a cure for this plague of experts, and it’s called “accountability.” Accountability is the bane of experts, so our ruling caste has dispensed with it. That’s why these people can be wrong time after time after time – on COVID, on Russia, on why crime happens and on how the economy works – and yet still maintain their public sinecures even though they are batting .001. The real reason the elite hated Donald Trump was not that he was an ideological conservative (he only sort of was) or that he tweeted mean things (they like mean tweets, just not ones directed at them). It was that Trump identified the failures of “the best and the brightest” and called them out. There is nothing these experts hate more than challenges to the authority they think they deserve.
The elite won’t hold its own members accountable, but we normal people can. Normal people should stop simply shrugging and heeding the urgings of the alleged experts. Instead, we should ask questions and demand results. And the conservative media, unlike the mainstream’s bunch of licensed, registered regime apologists, must continue asking tough questions like, “Why do you think that?” and “Where’s your proof?” instead of swooning over tiny toads like Tony F.
What Instapundit Glen Reynolds calls “The Suicide of Expertise” is right there in front of us. Sadly, we ourselves are now experts – in the disastrous consequences of the failure of expertise.
