Contra Experts

The American Mind ^ | 02/02/21 | Helen Roy

[PoliticallyShort]

Of the countless lies the American people are meant to believe, perhaps the greatest is the myth of expertise. The American managerial elite confuses the ability to perform verbal gymnastics with omniscience. This is an old story. Unlike the many iterations of sophists and pharisees before them, ours deploy increasingly gnostic feminist and racialist rhetoric to replace the real skill of parsing complicated situations. We’ve seen this dishonesty recently with the GameStop event, and persistently throughout the Coronavirus response. Our experts have become clerics. In all cases, “reality” is “explained” by our Social Justice shamans, who bamboozle everyone with terms like “problematic whiteness” and “health equity,” redirecting the public’s attention to exclusively valid kinds of suffering. Only the scientific elite can understand the cure. Don’t believe your lying eyes; accept, instead, our pretty lies.

Nowhere is this mystification more intense than in their approach to the family, where the failures of the modern administrative state are most clear. Over the course of the 20th century, technocrats oversaw the near total obliteration of domestic life in America. From the very start, the progressive administrative state stood in opposition to the teleology of the family. About the early progressives, Christopher Lasch writes in Haven in a Heartless World: “Educators and social reformers saw that the family, especially the immigrant family, stood as an obstacle to what they conceived as social progress… The family preserved traditions that retarded the growth of the political community and the national state.”

[conservativeimage]

"Management is concerned, Mister Torrance."

[billyboy15]

A lot of fancy words to say people use words to disguise lack of ability.

In the good old days we’d simply say they were full of sh*t and leave it at that.

[marktwain]

Extremely well written.

I might write different last paragraphs.

[jmacusa]

The definition of experience is not making the same mistake twice.