The Expertocracy plus DIE plus universal education creates a positive growth feedback of a negative beast. Each element reinforces the other, and each accelerates the mad rush…to where, exactly?
Let’s call this desperately desired destination the Land of Solutions. It is a sort of Utopia, but one which is still allowed some flaws. The Land of Solutions will ever have problems left for Experts to solve—in optimally scientific ways—where all are equal, and where all have diplomas. And where the latter two criteria are necessary for the people to recognize, and most of all acknowledge, the genius of Experts, and become geniuses themselves.
The result is something like this:
This Gelles is a reporter, surely with a hefty credential provided by some large number of years of formal education, who now sits at the New York Times “climate desk”.
The reason this odd desk exists, is to allow Gelles to offer his opinions on why such things as “battery passports” are necessary. These are tracking devices which let Experts in government know when you have used up your Expert-decided yearly “carbon footprint”, so they can shut down, presumably remotely, your battery. And thus your ability to travel.
Gelles reports on these, because credentialed Experts say these are a good thing. And those Experts who say these are a good thing, do so because other Experts have concluded that “carbon footprints” of this-and-such size are “good”, and those over it are “bad.”
The Experts who did that got their idea of “good” and “bad” levels from yet other Experts who have decided that the “carbon” that goes into charging those batteries should be limited at yet other levels.
Those Experts got the idea that “carbon” should be limited from other Experts and they in turn got it from others.
And so on. Every one of the Experts in the long and lengthening chain is doing his level best, or her level best, or its level best, to tweak the dials and set the switches allowed to be under their control. They are all sure they are doing the right thing, because every link in the chain calls to the others to tell them they are necessary and inerrant.
It’s “its” above because of DIE. All Experts are devoted to DIE, and the more DIE there is, the more Experts are devoted to it.
Problem is, with every increase in DIE, comes more Experts who are not as good as those who came before. Because in order to reach DIE, standards must necessarily be lowered. We have seen endless examples of this. Here are two more, if you need more convincing. (Remind me not to fly.)
It’s the same thing for Experts in all fields which provide Solutions to our rulers.
Of course, Experts, even those forced to DIE, still must possess formal education.
Which is why some colleges must now teach subjects “climate disruption“. Yes.
Mr Rawlance said the world of work was already changing, with corporations employing sustainability and climate officers, and this course was about “giving students the tools to imagine a different future”.
“These young people are going to be highly valued by industry because they’re going to have that holistic world view,” he added.
It is vastly easier for students under DIE to take, and pass, a course in “climate disruption”, instead of thermodynamics.
They must take something because of the aching need for credentials. Education is seen, almost universally, as a good. How could more education be bad? is strictly a rhetorical question. To answer “With ease” is to be a bad person.
This is not the well-known problem of the over-production of elites. That theory says the more educated credentialed there are, the more competition between them for limited spots, hence the more strife.
That happens to an extent. But what that theory misses is that in a DIE-based Expertocracy the number of spots is potentially unlimited. New slots which “require” educated credentialed bodies (they love to say “bodies”) blossom like fungus in a San Francisco bathhouse. The Land of Solutions is ever-expanding. Like the universe itself, it creates the space in which it lives.
There is no competition in the reporting-on-battery-passport chain. What happens when there are extra Experts is that more chains are formed (example: even MDs now must be educated in “climate change”). Each link becomes more specialized. Some become reporters, some wedge in between steps, and some become devoted to counting and enforcing the DIE or pushing ever more education.
The more links there are, the more Experts are cut off from the rest of the chain, and therefore we have more people who do not see, and cannot see, and don’t dare see the weakness of the system. The more fragile it becomes, but also more stubborn. It is guaranteed, for instance, that none of the burgeoning official Experts in the “climate” chain will admit there is no “climate crisis.” For them to exist, there must be.
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Excellent article!
Experts are like mob bosses who run mortuaries and politicians. They create their own demand.
Total collapse of the society may be be the only politically acceptable proof of a failed expertocracy that might lead to severely reducing its power. But actually societal collapse would increase the demand for expertise in analyzing the causes of societal collapse and in how to fix what experts have ruined.
The nation is sick unto death from the Dodd-Frank Syndrome: Barney and Chris in the House and Senate ruined the housing market by forcing banks to grant mortgages to people who did not qualify. That collapsed the economy. And then, as self-proclaimed experts in the mortgage market, they chaired the joint House-Senate Congressional investigations that made the banking industry, not the government, the scapegoat of blame for the economic ruin that Dodd and Frank had caused.
It's definitely time to update Shakespeare's "Dick the Butcher's" line from "lawyers" to "experts."
Malcolm Muggeridge prophetically wrote that "we have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility." It seemed a bit hyperbolic when he wrote it, but it's now so obviously, painfully true. God help us.