The Real Sin Of The Expertocracy With Covid
You’re sick. Not doing at all well. You go to a celebrated doctor (God bless you for trusting him) at a major hospital. Guy was recommended by many as knowing most about your symptoms.
He diagnoses you. Bad news. What you have is going to kill you. Very probably.
But before you can think about modifying your will to give your dishes to your neighbor instead of your sister—why did she marry that man?—the doctor says there is hope.
There’s this new treatment, he says. Involves major surgery and a course of harsh medication. Hasn’t really been tried yet, except in a handful of experimental cases. And it didn’t work in all those cases. There’s no guarantee of success.
You want to try it?
You tell the doc, yes, you might like to try it. But first you’re going to get a second opinion. After all, your life is on the line.
That’s when something happens.
Your doctor begins to shout at you. Do you know who I am, he yells? Now you’re really worried, because it seems your doctor has amnesia.
But no. Because now he tells you that he has forbidden you to ask for a second opinion. He cannot be questioned, he says. He asks: which of us has the medical degree, you or me? How dare you doubt him. He knows best.
He says he won’t allow you to leave the hospital without the treatment. Of, if you do go without it, he’s going to have your company fire you, take away your insurance, and kick you onto the street.
There are many questions that arise from this scenario, but here’s the main one which interests me: given what happened, and your doctor’s arrogant apoplexy, what is the probability of success of this new treatment?
Now please watch this.
The elites, which I call Experts, indeed blew it. They called it wrong about lockdowns. They pooched it with masks. They erred about closing schools. The models which led policy were hilariously wrong. They weren’t even close with social distancing, and the miraculous six feet savior protection zone.
They oversold, in no small degree, the vax. They said if you got it, you could not become infected, or get sick. They said that. Often. What a blunder! They said the vex could not cause harm, kicking a century’s worth of science under the bus. Vaxes by design cause harm.
Then they said, in many places, either get the vax or lose your liberty to work. Or to buy and sell.
Were all these monumental idiocies sins?
A sin, as at least Yours Truly knows well enough, is when you knowingly embrace a wrong. You choose evil over good.
Uncertainty is not a sin.
If you can’t tell whether or not it’s going to rain, but gamble because of the now-sunny skies that it won’t, and yet you get wet, this is not a sin. This is an honest mistake. But if you think it will rain, but lie to your “friend” and say it won’t. That’s a sin.
When the doom was released upon the world, rulers and Experts embraced panic in various degree. Take Andrew Ferguson’s preposterously ridiculous model.
It should never have been believed, but it was. It was believed because of haste and because of limited knowledge of rulers. Those rulers picked the wrong Experts to advise them. This was often incompetence. Incompetence is not a sin.
The came the evidence the model was wrong. It wasn’t long in coming, either. It was not incompetence that causes rulers and Experts to ignore the error. It was something else.
And not just about these models. But about lockdowns—which competent rulers and Experts would never have advocated, as even the WHO, at first, said don’t do them (in a large report coincidentally published in 2019). When it became clear lockdowns were only causing harm, rulers asked neighbor to rat out neighbors who violated the rules (which German is now doing for those having high thermostats).
You know the whole sad story. It was just like the scenario above. Take your medicine or else. It was forbidden to question Experts and rulers. People who did were canceled. Then came the lies, repeated endlessly, from those in power. Long past a time where incompetence could explain their actions.
It was the lies and the quashing of resistance that were the real sins. It was them outlawing knowledge of Reality.
And now those who question “covid measures” have been determined to be a terrorist threat. By the Department of Homeland Security.
That Department, you must recall, was created in the last panic. Created in opposition to all sober opposition, opposition which predicted, long time readers will recall, that you, dear reader, would eventually become the enemy.
It’s scarcely worth saying we told you so.
Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.
I was going to use Pogo, thought about Pogo's aphorism, and decided that I was saying something about Biden that is totally different and that today Pogo would not say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Today, Pogo would say, "They have seen their enemy, and he is us." Biden was Pogoironic when he said, "I have seen the enemy, and he is you."
Back then, in the fabulous Fifties, when Pogo Possum first shared his insights with America, we were "one nation, under God, indivisible..." Then, we could all believe that we ("us") were the ultimate source of our problems. Not so now. They are the cause, not we; they are the nation's enemies, not us. The Pogoirony of Biden's accusation is not just due to the historical shift; it is also due to the hypocrisy: Biden knows that he and they, not we, are America's true enemy, but out of desperation and necessity he's obliged to shout the Big Lie because Biden also knows that the enemy, which for a hundred years waged The War On America with incomparable political skill, is now, in part due to him, fighting that war with such glaring dishonesty, appalling treachery and incomparable incompetence that for the first time in a hundred years it risks losing the war.
Sad.
All-too-true and understated.
Your definitions of "expert" and "enemy" are way too narrow.
In the Era of J'accuse, an "expert" is a special forces commander, an elite leader, of the martialized ruling class of "our democracy," which is, itself, a self-proclaimed majority comprised of self-identified racial and sexual victims (and their intersectional allies and defenders) of white male oppression, entrenched capitalist greed and invidious legal discrimination, which self-proclaimed majority of self-identified victims, by virtue of the conflict of social forces, the contradictions of historical events and the dialectical struggle for victory over racial and sexual oppression and material need, was chosen by the arc of history to culturally authorize, educationally credential, professionally train, morally entitle, politically pedigree and legally empower "experts" to define, identify, track, bait, trap, ferret out, expose, trash, doxx, cancel, disparage, impugn, silence, harangue, harrass, threaten, intimidate, libel, defame, abuse, spy upon, search, arrest, jail, prosecute, bankrupt, imprison and bring to utter ruin and total destruction the "enemy," those who, when invited and given every opportunity to do so, refuse to self-identify as a victim or to criminally conspire with the self-proclaimed majority who do.
Biden, the Expert in Chief, has seen the "enemy," and he is us.
L'ennemi c'est moi!