Sometime back in the late 1990s, Utne Reader, a magazine which was then what we called “progressive”, voted Ithaca, NY, the Most Enlightened city in America. I lived there at the time, being confined at Cornell. Utne got this right.
They have one meaning of “most enlightened”, but I have another: farthest gone.
Ithaca was then what we now call woke. It also was then, and might even be now, the city with the greatest proportion of Experts, and where the greatest proportion of people have an unquestioning faith in Experts.
It is also therefore the city with a school which still, to this very day, now–today, requires kids to wear masks outdoors and indoors.
They also ban kids from speaking during lunch. “If the students had to ask the teacher a question, she told me, they had to first don their masks, and then take them off again to continue eating.”
“Second-graders who began school there as kindergarteners in fall 2020 have never experienced a normal day of school in their lives.” Why, the article says, is a “story of how, when faced with a crisis, many public health authorities—along with regular people and bureaucrats following the authorities’ lead—believed that the more extreme the response to the virus, the more wise and virtuous the policy.”
It was Experts who designed the “responses.” And it was the pull of toxic femininity and the cult of Safety First! that demanded them.
The school is “populated with the offspring of professors, doctors, and lawyers.” Which is to say, the spawn of Experts.
There is no evidence that masks have protected the kids, but there is Expert theory that says they do. Anyway, protecting kids is not the main goal of mask mandates. It is to protect Safety First! cult members, who are frightened of everything, and insist you should be too.
Now you will laugh at this school, its idiot parents and its hersterical teachers, and you should. And you will pity the wee tykes who are being uselessly tortured in the name of Safety First!, as you should.
But your derision and your pity means nothing to Experts. The evidence, which is constant, everywhere, and massive, that their “solutions” are not only ineffective, but positively harmful, means nothing. Not to them.
Why? Because they have looked into their minds, their brilliant awesome credentialed minds, and discovered a great treasure. They have discovered their thoughts are worthy and wise and beyond question. Because their Degrees say so.
Their “solutions” work because they thought those “solutions” into existence. The “solutions” cannot therefore be wrong. They are right and true by definition.
An Expert worshiper, and journalist, though I repeat myself, tweeted “The parental rights movement actively threatens the safety and wellbeing of children and by extension, democracy itself” (she links to a long whiny article on the subject).
“Democracy” is what they call the Expertocracy, the uniform rule by Experts. The form of government in which credentialed Experts decide what is best for all things. I want to stress that all. It means what it says. Each and every aspect of life must come under the sway of credentialed Experts. They know best.
You, mom, reading this blog, do not have a PhD in momming. But Experts do. By convention, they know more about how to raise your kids than you do. If you carp, you are treated with the disgust you deserve. How dare you question an Expert?
“Do not confuse your experience with your own child with my degree, my certified diploma bearing degree, in momming. If I, an Expert, let you raise your own child by your own lights, you will almost certainly do so sub-optimally.”
“Therefore, you must follow this mandated government-enforced Expert-designed child-raising guide. You must report regularly. You must meet the metrics. Failure to do so will invoke harsher “solutions” to save your child from non-certified ideas.”
That’s just for kids. Now imagine this happening everywhere, all the time, for every aspect of your life. Don’t believe it, even after three hard years of experience? Spending cash is now illegal (over a thousand Euros). Because Experts know you’re up to no good, and because they can’t track it for their models. (We warned you about this years ago, and even earlier here, and many other times.)
Sometimes the “solutions” will be modified by the cult of Safety First!, sometimes by toxic femininity, sometimes by plain greed of the oligarchs, but at all times by the adamantine hubris of our Expert class.
It’s bad now, but it’s going to grow much, much worse. Especially as the titanic DIE efforts at universities are now paying off in a flood of addled graduates. In olden days, at least Experts had a minimum intelligence. Under DIE, they will not be required to have any.
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Beautifully put. A degree in momming 😉
Thankyou for the perspective
Much worse 🙏
This reminds me of a certain shorthand my wife and I share, in our secret language of idioms, mantras, mottos and shibboleths: "Experts in expertology." When it makes an appearance, that means troubles a' brewin'.