Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Trust the Experts

All Episodes

Previous Next

Feb. 12, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

13:28

Trust the Experts

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	The lofty title of expert designates entry into the hallowed pantheon of modern intellectual life.
	We trust our doctors, our scientists, our economists, our experts to provide us with objective, unbiased information about the world and what we ought to do in it.
	They apparently have privileged access to the arcane inner workings of reality that we plebeians do not.
	Therefore they take on a kind of sainted rank amongst our policymakers.
	What then do we do when it turns out that our superior class of scientists is as all too human as the rest of us mere mortals?
	It is actually correct to say that there is no such thing as an unbiased perspective.
	Every perspective is, indeed, tainted with the bias of being human, that is, having a situated view of the universe from our own standpoint.
	To avoid this, we would have to model our reality from the perspective of the very universe itself, which at best would be deeply unhelpful to human affairs and is, of course, not possible.
	Every human has a human perspective.
	They have human motivations, drives, passions, fears, and every other vice that has perennially plagued mankind.
	Our experts are as concerned with prestige, status, wealth, and sex as the meanest and least educated amongst us, and as prone to power-seeking behaviours as anyone else.
	Moreover, they often have an open and professed ideology with which to justify and advance a particular agenda that carries with it a set of contestable presuppositions about how the world ought to be.
	There is simply nothing special about being an expert in a field except for the fact that you know more about your specialist subject than a layman.
	It does not confer upon a person any virtue, any guarantee of moral conduct, nor absolve them of any prior wrongdoing.
	It just means that you know a lot about a narrow range of reality.
	And reality is a very complex thing.
	The interplay between different aspects of life is so irreducibly complex that making a change in one area can cause unexpected results in another.
	Ask the victims of the thalidomide scandal whether they were right or wrong to trust the science and whether they would trust it blindly in future.
	To look at a particularly narrow range of expertise and then conclude that this is the truth about the universe is a dangerous thing to do and fraught with unexpected consequences that we are continually reaping.
	Rather than approaching this in a humble manner, our experts often approach this with hubris, convinced that this time they have finally hit upon an eternal and immutable truth about reality, and now they have perfect mastery over circumstances and events.
	This is the problem with our experts.
	They are striving in vain for something they will never have.
	Certainty.
	They wish to be certain that things are as they describe them to be, and this creates a particularly myopic worldview which stunts their ability to operate as trustworthy individuals.
	As such, we see them fall into a pattern of confusion, where they are following the science, from contradictory conclusion to contradictory conclusion, flipping their opinions on things thought to be settled on a moment-by-moment basis.
	The experts therefore become people who cannot be relied upon, do not have a comprehensive view of the problem, and have no deep wisdom to impart.
	All they can do is take the latest surface-level data and conclude that, going forward, this is all the data that there is or will ever be.
	That is, until the next batch of data is produced from the science minds and they are all forced to change their minds once again.
	Because, like the rest of us, they're just human too, and have exchanged being able to accurately describe the world and make reliable predictions from that for the momentary fame and fortune of being the person who puffs up their own self-importance by being on the cutting edge of science.
	They end up sacrificing humility for hubris, and as every lie incurs a debt to the truth, turning yourself into a professional liar is definitely a concern.
	At no point do they seem to realize that this way of approaching any problem impugns their credibility, nor do they understand that their inability to form a coherent perspective on the world that persists through time discredits them as individuals and renders the very concept of an expert a liability for our civilization.
	Put simply, the rule by experts is destroying us.
	Let us take a look at a few recent examples of ruinous policy based on expert opinion, shall we?
	We need only go back a few years to the COVID lockdowns, in which we were told by relevant authorities would save lives, and maybe they did.
	However, the researchers, after the fact, could only conclude that lockdowns prevented 0.2% of deaths in the first wave of the disease, and in exchange, we imposed a catastrophic cost on the youngest and most vulnerable people in our society.
	Children were most affected by this expert power grab, with retarding effects we are only beginning to discover.
	Who knows what this stunted generation will endure because of the regime the experts imposed upon us?
	Did we at any point even ask the elderly if they were prepared to sacrifice their own grandchildren for a few more years of life?
	Would they have consented if they had known what the consequence would have been in advance?
	Moreover, the very architects of say lockdown policy in Britain violated their own regulations.
	Professor Neil Ferguson arranged for his married mistress to visit him at his home, breaking his own lockdown rules and forcing him to resign when his disgusting behaviour was revealed.
	Are we supposed to pretend as if this man is in fact a noble scientist struggling to improve humanity or a status-seeking degenerate who is following his basest instincts to get his end away?
	If everything that has been done to us was so above board, why did Biden feel the need to pardon Fauci, dubbed America's doctor, on his way out of the White House?
	It beggars belief to suggest that these people are good and decent, operating nobly with only our best interests in mind, when they instead act like a criminal cartel that has to give itself legal immunity as they flee with their ill-gotten gains.
	Peter Dazak, one of the men instrumental in the events of the COVID era, was published brazenly in The Guardian, informing us that COVID-19 was not created in a lab, and therefore any suggestion that it leaked from a lab was just a conspiracy theory.
	Trump appointed CIA Director John Ratcliffe revealed that information compiled during the Biden administration suggested that, in fact, the source of COVID was indeed a lab leak, upending the entire narrative on COVID, which we were told with absolute certainty could not have been true.
	Again, the all-too-human corruption of Fauci, DAZAC and the Biden administration reveals its face, that it was taking advantage of our goodwill and faulty assumptions about experts, that they were doing their best for us.
	It is in almost every conceivable subject that our experts are deceiving not only us, but themselves.
	They have a particular ideological perspective, and with it comes an agenda, and so they mine data to create justifications for advancing that agenda in the face of the ruin that these policies are inflicting upon us.
	Institutions are not neutral, and the experts that fill them were happy to flex their power during the era of COVID.
	You may of course remember the censorious regime of the fact-checkers, who were determined to only allow their official approved narrative of all events on social media, a narrative that eventually proved to be wrong.
	Indeed, even the practical benefits of fact-checking were shown to be easily replaced by community notes.
	As a recent post from the London School of Economics and Political Science tells us, community note fact-checks can be high quality.
	Community notes, like other fact-checks, work.
	Community notes is a fundamentally legitimate approach to moderation.
	Believe it or not, I didn't need an expert to tell me this.
	Extremely dangerous to our democracy.
	But does this restore the accounts of those tyrannised during the era of the fact-checkers?
	Does this restore to good graces the people who were oppressed by the expert consensus?
	While the new systems of community notes may prevent these injustices from happening in the future, does this bring about any accountability at all to those people who ruined others for telling the truth in service of protecting the power drawn from their lie?
	Immigration is another great example in which the experts have been categorically wrong on every count.
	During the first tenure of Tony Blair and New Labour, an influential research paper by the Home Office entitled Migration, an Economic and Social Analysis provided the intellectual foundation for New Labour's mass immigration policy, and in it, they argued broadly that though there may be challenges which come with mass immigration, economic theory dictated that it would grow the economy and produce a boom of prosperity.
	Here are some quotes from it.
	Migration is welfare improving, not only for migrants, but on average for natives.
	Migrants are self-selected.
	Partly as a result, migration is most likely to occur precisely when it is most likely to be welfare enhancing.
	Migrants will pay taxes, both direct if they are in work and indirect.
	Given the usual age structure of migrants, this would imply that migration would be likely to raise per capita income.
	They did accept that there would be some negative outcomes, but concluded that these would be outweighed by the benefits.
	Well, how has this played out?
	We have had unprecedented levels of immigration which began with Tony Blair's opening of the gates to 250,000 net new people a year, which culminated in the Boris wave, which was nearly a million net new people per year.
	Where's the growth?
	Why do these graphs not correlate?
	Instead, the Institute of Fiscal Studies has told us that we are going to have to pay £100 billion extra in tax just to be able to afford the immigration that has been inflicted upon us.
	And this is only the financial cost.
	What is the cultural cost of giving our country away to people who don't care about it?
	When only 21% of the births in London are English, and 79% of them are foreign, what are we doing to ourselves because of the policy experts?
	We give away things that were not ours to give and will be extremely difficult to claw back.
	Why did Americans think the economy was worse than it was, according to the experts?
	They had studies to show you that the economy was doing brilliantly until suddenly they didn't.
	And they have been forced to admit that, yes, actually, the voters were correct in their assessment that they have been getting poorer, and they were right to vote for Trump's economic program.
	We have learned in retrospect that the experts had the wrong data and that their epistemological methods are not, in fact, superior to the direct lived experience of the common man on the ground.
	If this is the case, what use are the experts?
	But will this impact their perspective?
	Will they admit their own ignorance, folly, and the damage that they have done to millions of Americans by pursuing an agenda that was leading to their impoverishment?
	No, of course they won't.
	They will simply flip from one scientific truth to the next, forever avoiding accountability for their actions and the dire consequences they have brought about, like they always do.
	Every aspect of the managerial technocracy is driven by the rule of these liberal experts, and time after time, what we have seen is that it turns into a power grab by repulsive losers in the arena of social interaction by which to amplify their professed area of experience into a weapon which is used to cudgel the normal society that otherwise failed to recognize their mono-dimensional brilliance.
	The experts, as we have seen time and time again, are just human like the rest of us.

▲