Dealing with the Elite Expert Class

Why experts should be treated with suspicion until proven otherwise and why any assault by them on our freedoms must be firmly rejected

Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari

In the last two decades, the unwashed masses, in which I include myself, have had to put up with an expert class that thinks itself better than us, sees us as unable to think for ourselves and manage our own affairs, and for the good of humanity has decided to remove our hands from the wheel and do the driving for us.

There’s so much that’s wrong with this. The worst part is the assault on our freedom. The expert class sees our globe as confronted with one existential crisis after another: climate change, pandemics, conflicts that may escalate to nuclear war, unsustainable national debts, etc. These crises threaten the globe and so need global solutions—sovereign nations are no longer seen as up to the task.

But what gives these global elites the moral authority to be our planet’s problem solvers? And what is their track record in actually solving our problems (their handling of the Covid pandemic was pathetic)? The one existential crisis that the global elites never mention—and that’s because they are the main culprits responsible for creating it—is the assault on our freedom of thought and expression.

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) was an active commentator on world politics during the Cold War. When others were ready to capitulate to communist ideology, often under the banner of “better red than dead,” he said No. For him, the “ultimate profanation,” as he put it, was in giving up our freedoms by capitulating to tyranny.

Just to be clear, there are many experts where the better part of wisdom is to listen to them and enlist their services. Most people in the trades who do your plumbing, fix your electrical problems, and install satellite dishes on your roof are safe experts. Sure, there are incompetents. And you want to make sure that they have no conflicts of interest that incentivize them to perform shoddy work. If the Mafia controls union work and charges premium prices for substandard parts and labor (which has been known to happen), then you’ll need other experts.

In some academic fields, experts can generally be trusted to know what they are doing. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science, and engineering have all been relatively immune to woke lunacy. That’s not to say that woke lunatics haven’t been eager to subvert these fields. But it usually takes the form of forcing hires of mediocre researchers in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Nonetheless, the professional societies for these disciplines will typically still have high standards, and researchers who are outstanding will rightly be known as such by their reputations.

That, however, leaves the self-styled experts, the elite expert class. They may in fact not be experts in the things about which they speak and write with apparent weight and authority. Or they may be experts, but be so compromised, that you can’t trust them as far as you can throw an adult elephant. You can tell that you are dealing with these bogus experts by the standard litany of fallacies that they throw at you.

I used to teach courses on logic and critical thinking, and one of the fun topics covered in such courses was formal and informal fallacies, such as affirming the consequent, the ad hominem argument, the loaded question, etc. What’s nice about these fallacies is that once they are defined and known, instances of them can be tagged as such and used to quickly refute someone committing the fallacy. As it is, our elite expert class has invented a whole new set of fallacies. Calling these fallacies out helps to disarm them. These newly minted fallacies include:

• The Conspiracy Fallacy: Call what you’re trying to discredit a “conspiracy.” Even if as often the case it is a real conspiracy, pretend that only tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists would hold to such a “crazy idea.” The use of the word “conspiracy” to discredit a view can be attributed to the CIA and its attempt to draw attention away from whatever role it might have played in JFK’s assassination. Example: Questioning the safety of vaccines is to be engaged in a conspiracy theory.

• The Zero Evidence Fallacy: Boldly claim that there is no evidence whatsoever for the position being advanced. You may have made FOIA requests, you may have uncovered leaked documents, you may have eye witness accounts of falsehoods and malice. In this fallacy, none of that matters. The expert class need merely deny that any evidence exists. And if something is said to be evidence, simply affirm, with a sneer, “You call that evidence? That’s no evidence.” Example: Peter Hotez claiming that there’s zero evidence for SARS-CoV-2 being the result of a lab leak.

• The Settled Science Fallacy: Here a scientist or someone claiming to act in the name of science attempts to discredit your position by invoking settled science. Science has shown blah-blah-blah, so get with the program. But real science is never settled. It is, as with all human enterprises, deeply fallible and subject to revision (which is why there are scientific revolutions!). Other voices should always be heard, or at least open to being heard, and doubts should be met through reasoned discourse and not by invalidating or shaming dissenters. Example: Claiming that masks and social distancing helped to stop the spread of Covid—the better science in fact contradicted this view.

• The Oozing Confidence Fallacy: Here a supposed expert wins the day simply by confidently asserting what they want you to believe. No explanation or justification is required. We saw this during the Covid pandemic when doctors pooh-poohed supplements like vitamin D, for which good evidence existed that it could help those infected. As it is, many doctors have never even taken one course on nutrition in medical school, and so regard as quackery anything except drugs and surgery. And yet they ooze confidence in dismissing remedies they know nothing about. Example: Yuval Harari claiming that humans are hackable animals for which free will is an illusion (in making this claim, was Harari acting freely?).

• The We-Know-What’s-Best-for-You Fallacy: This could also be called the paternalistic fallacy. Because the experts are so smart and we’re so stupid, they need to step in and save us from ourselves. No matter that many of these global elite experts hate humanity, being thorough-going Malthusians who see the planet as benefitted by having fewer of us. Example: Making sure that we minimize our carbon footprint and live austere lives to redress climate change.

I’m sure there are many more fallacies that can be ascribed to the elite expert class—perhaps readers of this brief post can add their own under the comments. Yet underlying all these fallacies, and all the push by the expert class to assert control, is a fundamental conflict of interest. They claim to want what’s best for us, but in fact they have their own agenda, which they are committed to ramming through irrespective of our welfare. The agenda is globalist. It sees sovereign nations as an unfortunate artifact of outdated political ideas. Someone needs to take global charge, and they are happy to usurp that role.

This agenda treats democracy likewise as a relic that needs to be updated—in fact radically revised—in light of new exigencies. Democracy, as in individuals having a say in their fate and government, accordingly gives way to a democracy of institutions (as Mike Benz notes) that tries to keep the positive associations we have with the word “democracy” but guts it of all significance for ordinary people. Do we really trust a democracy of institutions composed of the WEF, WHO, CIA, along with big tech, big ag, and big pharma?

Worse yet, the globalist elite expert class regards freedom of thought and expression as an unfortunate casualty in their efforts to save humanity. As it is, there is only one savior, so whenever anyone else insists on saving you, run for your life. Freedom of thought and expression is the ultimate progress. Any efforts by the expert class to curtail it, despite all their talk about advancing progress, are in fact regressive.