In Praise of Elitist Snobs

Why Demonizing People Who Know Things is the Path to Destruction

A 4 year-old child is not as skilled at painting as Michelangelo.

You know, Michelangelo. The guy who painted the Sistine Chapel:

I think we can agree that he’s better at painting than a 4 year-old.

Such a statement should hardly be controversial. However, the underlying truth in this statement is far more controversial than you might imagine.

First off, we can all agree that Michelangelo spent an enormous amount of time and practice dedicated to honing his craft and developing his skill. In addition, Michelangelo’s brain itself was far more developed in his prime than the brain of a 4 year-old, simply because he was older.

A 4 year-old might love painting, but they simply haven’t lived long enough to acquire the same amount of skills and expertise that Michelangelo had.

This is what I mean by “better”. Michelangelo was simply capable of producing the kind of artistic work that a 4 year-old is not.

Some might argue that they “enjoy” the finger paintings of their 4 year-old child more than the work of Michelangelo. That’s perfectly fine and valid. What you enjoy is completely subjective and up to your own taste and opinions.

However, if you say that your 4 year-old’s finger paintings are just as good as the work of Michelangelo, then we have a problem.

Again, when we use words like “good” and “better”, we have to clarify whether we’re talking about knowledge, skill, and expertise, or whether we’re talking about how much we “enjoy” something.

Your enjoyment of a piece of art might be subjective, but the amount of knowledge, skill, and expertise that went into that piece of art is not subjective.

Yes, it’s true that most art is not made in order to be judged on its technical merits. It is simply an expression of what the artist feels that is transmitted through whichever medium they have chosen, whether that’s painting, sculpting, photography, film, music, etc.

In this way, art is accessible to anyone. Nearly anyone can use their voice to sing a tune or pick up a piece of paper and a pencil and begin drawing.

However, there are also standards of quality by which we can judge art. Just because someone has chosen to express themselves through sculpture does not mean they have attained the same skill level as Michelangelo, who also created this:

To say that the work of someone who just picked up a piece of clay is equal to Michelangelo’s David is not only absurd, it cheapens the incredible achievements of human beings who have dedicated their entire lives to attaining the skill level and knowledge it takes to produce awe-inspiring works of art that have stood the test of time.

While it is true that highly skilled people are capable of producing unenjoyable art, that is a different conversation than one about quality and expertise.

No sane person would argue that William Hung is as good of a singer as Frank Sinatra.

To further illustrate this point, take the example of Blade Runner 2049, a movie that the majority of audiences regarded as “boring”, yet has incredible visuals, excellent cinematography, acting, set design, costume design, and CGI.

Matt Miller from Esquire described the film this way:

“I could have sat through three hours of this thing with the sound off, just staring at the works of art on the screen. Nearly every frame looks like some sort of dystopian masterwork painting — a credit to cinematographer Roger Deakins, who should finally get his goddamn Oscar for this.”

Movie critics and Oscar judges alike are evaluating a movie based mostly on the technical aspects and quality of the film, not simply by how much they “enjoy” the film.

While the enjoyability of the film is an important aspect, it’s not the only aspect. Some of the most highly-rated films of all time are extremely sad, gripping, human dramas that don’t leave you with a happy feeling. They’re not necessarily “enjoyable”, but that doesn’t subtract from the fact that they are incredible, compelling stories and excellent pieces of art made by people with extraordinary levels of skill and dedication.

Producing a film is an incredibly complex endeavor with many moving parts that all have to come together a certain way in order to produce a high-quality end-product.

It is a tremendous feat of skill and artistic genius to produce a film like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

To say that a high school art project is equal to The Shining only cheapens the genius of Kubrick, and subtracts from all of the skill and hard work of everyone involved in producing it.

They are not equal. Nowhere close.

It’s impossible to truly appreciate the kind of skill, hard work, and dedication that goes into creating anything truly excellent without also recognizing how lacking other things are.

Noticing how lacking other things are does not make you an “elitist snob”. It just means that you know enough to know the difference.

I would rather praise truly excellent works of art, hard work, and human ingenuity than to bring them all down to the same level.

(Did somebody say “participation trophies?”)

The experience of being in awe of something truly spectacular is only possible if we can admit that there is a difference between the work of an amateur and the work of a true master.

As Jonah Goldberg wrote in the National Review:

“Facts that might inconveniently intrude upon the self-esteem of others must be demolished. So, as grade schools eliminate keeping score at games, postmodernists try to eliminate the notion of keeping score at anything, ever. Scores, you see, imply winners and losers, and if anybody feels like a loser then they feel bad — and anything that makes you feel bad is necessarily illegitimate.

Gangster rap gets compared to Mozart and the mentally handicapped are allowed to vote — because “who’s to say” that gangster rap isn’t the classical music of today, and who’s to say that a man with the IQ of a seven-year-old doesn’t have an “equally valuable perspective”?

It’s understandable that, in our open and egalitarian culture, we would look with great skepticism on the notion that some people are better than other people. But that’s not really what elitism, properly understood, is about.

“Elite” derives from the Latin for “elect,” though not necessarily in the democratic “electoral” sense. It means those who — through efforts and talent — self-select themselves as qualified to lead, and teach, by example.”

Unfortunately, some people believe that art is purely subjective, and if someone enjoys a piece of art, then educated opinions from critics are invalid and worthless.

While these things are debatable, there comes a point when people who don’t have much knowledge about how movies are made just simply don’t understand what makes a film “good” or “bad”.

That doesn’t mean they’re stupid or inferior. It just means they haven’t taken the time to gain knowledge or expertise in that area.

In other words, their opinion is not equal to the opinion of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. And this is true of everything, not just art.

Using film again as an example, almost everyone can acknowledge that the dialogue in the Star Wars prequels is awful, for the most part.

Most people can also acknowledge that Quentin Tarantino is incredibly skilled at writing characters and dialogue, and that’s a big reason why his movies are widely praised and enjoyed.

George Lucas is simply not skilled enough to produce the kind of work Quentin Tarantino is, and that’s been abundantly clear for a very long time.

However, if someone really loves a movie that has terrible writing and acting, and you tell them that the movie they love is “terrible”, they’ll usually just get offended and angry at you.

Most of the time, they won’t ask you to elaborate on why you think the movie is terrible. They just hurl insults at you, such as “you’re a pretentious asshole” or “you’re an elitist snob”.

In short, those people are simply not knowledgeable enough to understand all the different aspects that make for an excellent film, just like I’m not knowledgeable enough to understand what makes for an excellent wine.

Winemaking, like filmmaking, is an incredibly complex process that requires a lot of hard work and skill to pull off. You can’t just pick up some grapes at the grocery store and produce good wine, just like you can’t just pick up a camera and produce a good film.

If I happen to like a cheap, low-quality wine, I will at least be honest enough with myself that it is, in fact, low-quality and that my palate is simply not developed enough to be able to appreciate a higher-quality wine.

What I won’t do is ask for the opinion of someone who knows a lot about wine, and then call them a pretentious asshole when they tell me the $8/bottle wine I like is garbage.

Unfortunately, these people don’t care to know the difference between something made with skill and something made cheaply for mass consumption. They like what they like, and they simply don’t care if their taste is poor, underdeveloped, and juvenile.

(On the other side of the spectrum are the clueless people who think that a high price is an automatic sign of quality. These people tend to think that they are superior to others simply because they can afford something expensive, when in fact, they’re just clueless and arrogant. Only the true experts can recognize when something is affordable and high-quality. For this reason, and many more, I am grateful for the “elitist snobs” of the world.)

I don’t pretend that my palate is just as developed as anyone else, nor do I pretend that the cheap, low-quality wine I like is just as good as wine made with skill and excellence.

I don’t necessarily need the most expensive, high-quality wine in existence. It’s far better to find a balance between quality, enjoyability, and affordability.

However, finding something that strikes this balance takes knowledge, and knowledge takes time to develop.

That’s why I try, in all things, to be humble enough to ask for advice and knowledge from those who do know what they’re talking about. And I am appreciative when they take the time to teach me.

In fact, I admit that I probably only like cheap, low-quality wine for the sugar rush it gives me, much like the rush people get from big, silly, CGI-filled Superhero movies.

Unlike fans of those movies, I would never claim my wine is “good”. Only that it is “enjoyable” and appeals to the simplistic parts of my brain that produce dopamine and make me happy when I consume sugar.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what people do with their opinions on all kinds of things, from movies, to food, to much more important matters, like science, geopolitics, foreign policy, and international relations.

They discard any standards of quality, and place their opinions at the same level as experts who have dedicated their entire life to acquiring knowledge and skill in a particular area.

Anyone who dares say that their opinion is inferior or invalid is a “pretentious asshole” or an “elitist snob”.

Fine. So be it. If they are “elitist snobs”, then I am grateful they exist.

Enjoy what you enjoy, but at least realize there’s a difference between McDonald’s, and a meal from a Michelin Star restaurant.

Most of what is produced and consumed, from music and movies, to food, clothing, and furniture, to political campaigns is the equivalent of junk food; easy and cheap to produce, lacking in substance and quality, and enjoyed by millions of people.

The fact that most people can’t see the difference, and then call those who can “elitist snobs” is a symptom of a much bigger problem in our society.

That problem is the complete rejection of expertise and knowledge.

As Tom Nichols writes:

“I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers — in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.

The death of expertise is a rejection not only of knowledge, but of the ways in which we gain knowledge and learn about things. Fundamentally, it’s a rejection of science and rationality, which are the foundations of Western civilization itself.

This isn’t just about politics, which would be bad enough. No, it’s worse than that: the perverse effect of the death of expertise is that without real experts, everyone is an expert on everything.

To take but one horrifying example, we live today in an advanced post-industrial country that is now fighting a resurgence of whooping cough — a scourge nearly eliminated a century ago — merely because otherwise intelligent people have been second-guessing their doctors and refusing to vaccinate their kids after reading stuff written by people who know exactly zip about medicine. (Yes, I mean people like Jenny McCarthy.)

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Why Dumb People Think They Are Smart

“I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do.”

— attributed to Socrates, from Plato, Apology

In a 1991 study called “Unskilled and Unaware of It”, researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger tested research subjects on criteria such as humor, grammar, and logic.

Then, they compared their actual test results with how well each subject thought they performed.

Lo and behold, the subjects who scored best thought they did poorly, and those who scored the worst thought they passed with flying colors.

According to RationalWiki:

In simple words it’s “people who are too stupid to know how stupid they are”.

The implication is that someone who hasn’t learned much about the subject would have no appreciation for how much there is to learn about it, and so might grossly overestimate their level of understanding.”

This could explain why people with bad taste think that what they like is “good”, and why they can’t tell a difference between something of high-quality or low-quality.

A McDonald’s hamburger is just as good as a $15 burger made by hand with high-quality, fresh, local ingredients from an experienced chef.

The Fast & The Furious 8 is just as good as Shawshank Redemption.

The 50 Shades of Grey novels are just as well-written as the works of William Shakespeare.

In other words, they’re so lacking in knowledge that they don’t even know what “good” is, and anyone who does is regarded as a pretentious, elitist snob.

Mediocrity Despises Excellence

There is no doubt that some people are born with seemingly endless amounts of natural talent, intelligence, and ability.

While it is easy to believe that some people are destined to be more successful than you because they are simply “gifted” or “lucky”, this idea often is far from reality.

When you believe that some people have it “easy” and are “blessed”, you can easily write off their accomplishments as being “luck” rather than hard work, discipline, and dedication.

When you do this, you lose the incentive to work very hard, because you believe you’ll never be able to attain that kind of success anyways, so why bother? That kind of success takes being blessed with natural talent, after all, and you don’t have it.

It’s easier to believe this than to admit that you caved to fear, uncertainty, pressure, and insecurity, and chose the easy way.

The way of mediocrity.

Just like everyone else around you.

Because of this, the people among us who do choose to rise up, be extremely disciplined, sacrifice the pleasures the rest of us indulge in, and dedicate enormous amounts of energy and time to achieving excellence and knowledge in their chosen area of expertise are usually hated, not praised and celebrated.

Those around us who nurture and strengthen their intelligence, rather than dull it to “fit in”, are seen as arrogant or pretentious.

Why? Because it shines a bright light on the fact that we’re lazy and our lack of success is our own fault. The only person to blame for making poor life decisions is ourselves.

We see it as a threat and a challenge to our mediocre way of life, and instead of rising up to meet the challenge, we stubbornly defend our mediocre way of life, because we like being comfortable.

So, when we see someone pursue excellence and attain success, we start making excuses.

“He had rich parents and more resources than me”.

“She is naturally beautiful and talented. That’s the only reason she’s successful”.

“He’s forgetting who he is and where he came from. He’s no better than us”.

We tell ourselves these things, not to excuse away the success and achievement of others, but to excuse our own lack of hard work and dedication.

The truth is, we’re just jealous.

We pay attention only to the final result, the nice car and house, the six-pack abs, the extravagant vacations, and we ignore the years of struggle that lead up to it.

Only when we have gone through similar struggles and have worked for years to attain excellence ourselves can we ever comprehend or appreciate what these people have accomplished.

Nor can we ever appreciate what this excellence produces, such as great works of art.

We can’t even fathom how much more difficult it is to produce something great than it is to produce something we’re capable of, so we underestimate it, and it fails to impress us.

It’s hard to be emotionally moved by something like the Sistine Chapel, a symphony performance, or a masterful sculpture because we have no idea what kind of struggle, blood, sweat, and tears it required to produce those things.

Why? Because we’ve never dedicated that much effort or struggled that much in our entire lives.

Those who have never achieved excellence see little more than a big hunk of stone when they look at Michelangelo’s David.

So, when someone is emotionally moved by such a thing, we think they’re silly or weird.

Oftentimes, what that person is actually reacting to isn’t the piece of art itself, but the overwhelming realization of how much work, failure, and heartache went into producing it.

To ponder such a thing produces the kind of profound humility and awe that most people aren’t even capable of understanding or experiencing.

Such an experience is addictive, and makes the latest Superhero movie dull in comparison.

This kind of understanding also gives you the ability to appreciate all kinds of things that you may not necessarily enjoy.

I am no fan of the Opera. I get zero enjoyment from it. However, I am still humbled and amazed at the skill and dedication of performers who have achieved excellence in that art form.

When you gain the ability to appreciate excellence, it becomes extremely hard to be entertained by and enjoy mediocrity.

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear

And yes, some people are very lucky and absolutely do start off life way better than others. However, this is not an excuse not to try to improve ourselves and our lives.

It’s easier to just write off the achievements of successful people and go on living a mediocre life like everyone else around us.

To make ourselves feel better, we dismiss and tear down the achievements of those who have attained excellence and expertise.

Because we’re jealous, we refer to them as “elitist snobs”.

Because we resent these “experts”, we purposefully spite them and ignore their advice, and tell ourselves, “they’re no better or smarter or more talented than I am”.

If someone dares expose our laziness and lack of knowledge and expertise, we take it as a personal offense, and start calling names and throwing insults.

Because we have no idea how much effort it takes to achieve excellence, knowledge or competence in an area, we mistakenly think that it’s not that hard, and that we’re just as good as anyone else.

This overestimation of one’s knowledge and competence, and the disdain for those who are more knowledgeable and competent can have nothing but disastrous effects on our society.

Seeds of Distrust

Take, for instance, a hypothetical scenario in which your child falls terribly ill, and nothing you do improves their condition. In fact, their condition has become severe, they are in extreme pain, and you are desperate to cure the illness and make them better.

In that situation, would you rather your child be under the care of a general practitioner fresh out of medical school, or an “elite”, 30-year pediatrician?

If you chose the elite pediatrician, and he or she gave you instructions that you didn’t like, or that contradicted something you read on the internet, what would you do?

Would you go with your “gut feeling”, or would you trust the opinion of the expert?

Would you call the elite pediatrician an “elitist snob” because he claims to know more than you do about medicine and illness?

Would you claim that your opinions about medicine and illness are just as valid as those of the elite pediatrician because you spent a few hours on Google, WebMD and in your Facebook “mom group”?

I sure hope not.

This is just a small, isolated example, but our answers to these questions will reveal a lot about how we think about experts and the knowledge they possess.

The Washington Post highlights alarming trends in public distrust of expertise, especially when it comes to science:

America risks drifting into a new Age of Ignorance. Even as science makes unparalleled advances in genomics to oceanography, science deniers are on the march — and they’re winning hearts and minds more successfully than the academic experts whose work they deride and undermine.

There is a 18 percentage point gap, for example, over whether parents should be required to vaccinate their children: 86 percent of scientists favor this, as compared to just 68 percent of the general public. There is a much larger gap on climate change: 87 percent of AAAS scientists say it is caused by human activity, compared to 50 percent of the public. Almost all scientists — 98 percent — say humans have evolved over time, while just 65 percent of the public thinks they have.

In most cases, there are determined lobbies working to undermine public understanding of science: from anti-vaccine campaigners, to creationists, to climate-change deniers.

Not surprisingly, many scientists — whether they design climate models or genetically engineer crops — feel they are under assault. In just five years, since the latest survey in 2009, the number of AAAS members who feel that “today is a good time for science” has plummeted from 76 percent to 52 percent. There is increasing skepticism about American global leadership in science and the way science is taught in schools.

The Problem of Hubris: Why So Many Believe that Trusting Experts is Dangerous

Many will point out that, when certain ideas become entrenched within systems of power, expertise becomes dangerous.

I believe that this sneaking suspicion lies at the heart of why so many of us distrust experts.

No doubt, we could name a long list of unjustified wars, disasters, and tragedies perpetrated by, or at the advice of “the experts”.

What makes these mistakes so dangerous and grand in scale is the blind, unquestioning faith we often put in “experts” for really important decisions that affect the lives of millions of people.

When the experts are wrong, the results are often disastrous.

For this reason, we must hold experts to a really high standard, not blindly follow them without question.

When your doctor is prideful, thinks he knows everything, and isn’t open to new evidence, then you have a bad doctor.

When scientists publish inaccurate, biased or downright corrupt research to serve powerful interests, then you have bad scientists.

When a politician advocates for policies that have been scientifically proven to be destructive, then you have a bad politician.

Trusting blindly in anyone, including “experts”, is never a good idea.

However, in all of these cases and more, the root problem is never expertise, and demonizing expertise doesn’t solve the problem.

The root problem is decision-making that is grounded in blind faith, and not grounded in really good evidence.

In fact, the only solution to these problems is more and better evidence.

The best experts are those who base their beliefs on good evidence.

Experts who don’t base their beliefs on good evidence are eventually exposed as frauds, and are no longer considered experts.

The better the evidence, the better the expertise.

So, yes, while we should always be skeptical and question the findings and conclusions of experts, the standard we use must be really, really high.

If you want to hold experts accountable, then you need to do so using really good evidence.

No other standard is going to cut it.

If your doctor tells you to vaccinate your kids (because the evidence shows vaccines are safe and effective) and you tell your doctor that Jenny McCarthy said vaccines cause autism, then expect to be called an idiot.

You can’t just “question the experts” if you don’t know what you’re talking about and have no good evidence to back up your claims.

The opinions of Alex Jones, the pastor on TV or Marsha from your Facebook “mom group” aren’t going to cut it.

As you can see, ignorance, corruption, arrogance and being unwilling to consider evidence isn’t just a problem with doctors, scientists, and politicians.

It’s the same problem you find with the people who say that “experts can’t be trusted”.

It’s a problem rampant among religious movements, Facebook mom groups, conspiracy theorists and communities of “skeptical parents”.

Hubris and bad thinking are universal human problems, not problems unique to “experts”.

Nobody should be trusted unless they have sufficient evidence to support their claims.

How Do We Know Who to Trust?

The best kind of evidence is evidence that is verified by other, independent experts.

If a single scientist comes forth and makes a claim, he shouldn’t be trusted until other, independent scientists run the same tests and confirm the results are accurate.

That’s how good science is done, after all (more about that here).

Science isn’t perfect.

In fact, science fails a lot.

This is to be expected. After all, the Scientific Method is a method that learns from its mistakes. You test multiple hypotheses, and over time, weed out all the incorrect ones until you land on the correct one.

And, even when you think you have the correct hypothesis, it’s always subject to change if more evidence is discovered later by other scientists.

Even scientists conducting rigorous experiments make mistakes or perceive things incorrectly. This is why scientists rely on each other to either confirm or disprove their findings by repeating their experiments over and over again.

This is known as the “Peer-Review” process. It’s a checks-and-balances system that scientists use to ensure that their findings are accurate, and not one-off flukes.

Because of this, science has a built-in mechanism for correcting its own errors. Eventually, science will weed out all the wrong answers. What’s left over, after eliminating all the wrong answers, is what we call “facts” or “truth”.

Scientists constantly seek to disprove each other’s claims and assumptions, not prove them.

Science is the closest we’ll ever get to a truth-telling device, because it’s simply a process for getting less wrong over time.

Contrary to what many believe, science is not a set of beliefs or facts.

Science is simply a process we can follow to acquire knowledge about the world around us.

As I said earlier:

When we attack experts who have spent years obtaining knowledge, we are also attacking the very methods by which they obtain this knowledge.

When we attack science, we’re attacking the most reliable tool we’ve ever developed for determining what’s true.

How to Question the Experts

So, if you go to your doctor and question his conclusions, where do you get your evidence that you’re going to present to him?

Surely, you and I aren’t scientists who are qualified to carry out our own double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical studies ourselves.

So, who is qualified?

That’s right. Experts.

Who determines if the work of a scientist is accurate and credible?

Other scientists.

Why?

Because they have expertise that you and I don’t.

So, when the vast majority of the experts line up on one side of an issue (like vaccines), and a bunch of people without any expertise line up on the other side, you can be pretty damn confident that the experts are right.

If you want to question an expert, you need to present him or her really good evidence that has been verified by other, independent experts.

Otherwise, they’ll probably just laugh you out of the room and tell you to go back to your Facebook mom group.

The “Appeal to Authority” Fallacy

If I were to say to you, “You should trust what this scientist says, because he’s a scientist”, I would be committing a fallacy.

It’s no different than saying, “My pastor is always right, because he’s a pastor”.

What makes the conclusions and advice of experts trustworthy is not merely that they are experts.

What makes them trustworthy is that they’ve done the work necessary to support their claims with really good evidence.

Now, if I were to say, “The vast majority of scientists have come to the same conclusion on this topic” (say vaccines or global warming), you might hear people say, “That’s an Appeal to Authority fallacy!”.

And, they’d be wrong.

When scientists have done the work necessary to repeat each other’s experiments, weed out all the wrong answers, and the vast majority of them arrive at the same answer, you and I don’t have to question anymore.

The science, as they say, is “settled”.

At least, until better evidence is presented.

The answers that come from such a strict application of the Scientific Method are as good as we’re ever going to get.

There’s no other tool for discovering truth that has ever been more accurate and reliable.

Not faith, not speculation, not suspicion or “gut feeling” and certainly not hope or wishful thinking.

Yes, science is an “Appeal to Authority”, but not to an individual.

It’s an appeal to the collective wisdom of scientists following a proven process.

Again, with science, there’s a built-in method for correcting errors. There’s a solid checks-and-balances system that keeps scientists honest, called “Peer-Review”.

With science, this is what you’re appealing to.

And this is why you can have confidence in scientific consensus.

Are you going to go back to school, study for a decade to become a scientist, conduct your own research and prove them all wrong?

Yeah, me neither.

Could all of those scientists still, somehow, be wrong?

Yes. It’s happened before. When humans are involved, no system is ever 100%.

However, if you claim that a piece of peer-reviewed research is flawed, you better be able to prove your claim with good evidence, and not just suspicions or conspiracy theories.

It’s extremely rare that a scientist comes along with strong evidence that challenges what we currently hold to be true, but it has happened.

Unfortunately, scientists who do have such evidence are oftentimes persecuted, ridiculed and shunned.

Galileo was one such scientist. He was convicted by the Catholic Church of heresy for daring to say that the Earth revolved around the Sun, even though nobody questions that fact today.

So, were the “experts” of the time the problem?

No. Galileo was the expert, and he had the best evidence.

He wasn’t persecuted by the Catholic Church because they peer-reviewed his research and determined it to be false.

They persecuted him because he challenged their beliefs, which were not based on good evidence. They were based on faith, guess, speculation, etc.

Again, the problem was hubris and bad thinking, not expertise.

Too often, those who “question the experts” are doing the exact same thing that the Catholic Church did to Galileo. When experts prove that their beliefs are false using good evidence, they attack and villainize the experts.

When that happens, the anti-expertise crowd are no better than the Catholic Church was in the year 1633.

Can scientists be paid and corrupted to publish findings that benefit powerful interests?

Yes, of course! They’re flawed humans, capable of being corrupted like anybody else.

However, in order to buy scientific consensus, it would require you to pay enough money to all scientists to keep the same secret, and never have a single one of them expose the research as being false.

And then you’d have to keep paying all those scientists. Forever.

If you don’t, somebody along the line is eventually going to present better evidence, submit it for review, and the whole house of cards comes crumbling down.

Again, scientists constantly check each other’s work and try to prove each other wrong.

In order to keep the conspiracy going and suppress the truth, you’d have to pay every single scientist on the planet to shut up. Forever.

In other words, it’s just not possible. At the very least, it wouldn’t be worth it.

And, in the case of those “secret cancer cure” conspiracy theories, it also requires you to believe all scientists and researchers on the planet are evil and willing to sacrifice millions of lives for a few bucks, including their own family members who get cancer.

Yes, Experts Can Be Trusted

So, again, if your argument is that experts can’t be trusted because they’re corruptible or capable of making mistakes, you’re right, but you’re oversimplifying the entire issue.

What we must do is demand good evidence from our experts.

To do this, we need other, independent experts to check their work.

Expertise isn’t the problem. A lack of expertise is the problem.

More and better expertise is the solution.

I will once again defer to Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College at the Harvard Extension School and the author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters:

“A significant number of laypeople now believe, for no reason but self-affirmation, that they know better than experts in almost every field. They have come to this conclusion after being coddled in classrooms from kindergarten through college, continually assured by infotainment personalities in increasingly segmented media that popular views, no matter how nutty, are virtuous and right, and mesmerized by an internet that tells them exactly what they want to hear, no matter how ridiculous the question.

The experts, voters were told, waged wars they didn’t know how to win, signed trade deals that depopulated America’s towns and unleashed a plague of terrorism. Trump adviser Steve Bannon even required new White House staff to read The Best and the Brightest, the landmark study of the origins of the Vietnam War, as a cautionary tale about intellectual pinheads who rammed the United States into a ditch in Southeast Asia.

But Bannon, like so many others, misunderstood the book’s message, which was not about the domination of experts, but rather about what happens when experts are ignored. Before and during the debacle in Vietnam, actual experts on Asia and other subjects were pushed aside, often by people who thought their own intelligence and professional success in other endeavors (running a car company, for example) made them more capable. Bannon is right that the book is a cautionary tale — but one mostly about people like Steve Bannon.

The cure for these transgressions, however, is not to replace expertise with ignorance: It is to replace it with better expertise.

The Founding Fathers believed that civic virtue was built on education and knowledge. In a republic, citizens need not be experts, but they must learn enough to cast an informed vote. Or, in the words of James Madison: “A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

If Americans do not rediscover this foundational truth about their own system of government, they not only court disasters from pandemics to wars; they risk ceding their government either to the corruption of a mindless mob — or, in the wake of a disaster, to a new class of technocrats who will never again risk asking for their vote.”

Populism and the Rise of Donald Trump

“The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin’s lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. “They think they’re better than you!” is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again.

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents — and her supporters celebrate — the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance.

When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth — in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn’t seem too intelligent or well educated.”

This was excerpted from an article written by Neuroscientist Sam Harris for Newsweek nearly 10 years ago.

Electing Presidents, it seems, has always been nothing more than a popularity contest for control over an arsenal of nuclear weapons that could annihilate the entire planet multiple times over.

Rather than elect the most intelligent, competent, and experienced people to the highest seats of power in the world, the American public seems to value candidates who “support the concerns of ordinary people” and “are just like us”.

We distrust those who have expertise and intelligence, and see them as separate than us, and thus they will likely not have our best interests in mind.

So, as a result, politicians have learned that, in order to win election, their best course of action is to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.”

— Bertrand Russell

The problem is, the vast majority of the “ordinary people” in our country seem perfectly content with lacking the critical knowledge it takes to elect those who are competent at making good decisions at such high levels.

In fact, they are proud of the fact that they’re just “simple, average Americans”, and actively attack those who seek to obtain more knowledge and expertise.

George W. Bush even joked during his Yale commencement speech:

“To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States.”

Instead of challenging the public to increase their knowledge and hone their intelligence, politicians congratulate voters on their ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and simple-mindedness.

They pander to the masses by flattering and complimenting them on their lack of knowledge and expertise, and they attack those who pursue these things.

And, perhaps worst of all, they deliberately feed the masses false information because they realize that very few of us will actually be curious enough or interested enough in the truth to fact check anything that is said.

These are the “ordinary people” who are entrusted with deciding who are the best candidates to lead the most powerful nation in recorded human history.

In fact, this is the very reason why the general public doesn’t vote directly on the issues, and why we have a Representative Democracy instead. The whole point is that we elect the most qualified people with the most expertise to make these decisions for us, because we are not qualified to make them ourselves.

Only when we gain the necessary expertise should we run for office.

Until then, we should only vote for people who have.

Unfortunately, when the general public turns elections into popularity contests, instead of contests for who has the most knowledge and expertise, the entire system begins to come crashing down.

Gullible Voters are the Best Kind of Voters

Donald Trump, a man who has always pursued an aggressively secular life and has never once indicated that he holds any kind of sincere religious belief prior to the election, is all of the sudden the darling of the Evangelical Right because of the profession of his “great love for God”.

Apparently, they just take his word for it when it comes to his radical, and radically convenient, religious conversion.

Franklin Graham, son of the famous preacher Billy Graham, even went as far as to write:

“Never in my lifetime have we had a president willing to take a strong, outspoken stand for the Christian faith like President Donald J. Trump has”.

Similar endorsements have come from other Evangelical heavy-hitters, such as Jerry Falwell Jr. and Dr. James Dobson.

…even though, when asked on the campaign trail for his favorite Bible verse, Trump couldn’t think of one.

Here’s a good one:

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.”

— Matthew 7:13

Even worse, according to the New York Times:

Mr. Trump even appears proud of his lack of learning. He told The Washington Post that he reached decisions “with very little knowledge,” but on the strength of his “common sense” and his “business ability.” Reading long documents is a waste of time because of his rapid ability to get to the gist of an issue, he said: “I’m a very efficient guy.” What little Mr. Trump does know seems to come from television: Asked where he got military advice, he replied, “I watch the shows.”

Instead of taking the time to educate ourselves on the complexities of the world, we instead go off of our “gut feeling” when it comes to massive decisions of great consequence for millions of people.

In fact, when it came time to elect the next President of the United States at the end of 2016, when asked why they were voting for one candidate or the other, most people would say things like, “Trump don’t take no shit and he says it like it is”.

Or, “Hillary seems more “Presidential” than Trump”.

When it came time to decide whether Britain should remain part of the European Union or not, most people made their decision based on things like, “I preferred the color of the old blue passports to the purple EU passport”.

Or, “It would be nice to have a change every once in a while”.

The day after referendum, the most Googled question in the UK was “What is the European Union?”.

In fact, the UK’s Justice Secretary said that Britons have “had enough of the experts”, and should trust themselves, rather than the experts.

It’s true that the “experts” have been responsible for a great number of calamities, disasters, and bone-headed mistakes throughout history.

However, using these mistakes to completely discredit expertise and knowledge as a whole is completely ridiculous.

If you believe that experts are a bunch of idiots who don’t know any better than you, then you can find all kinds of examples throughout history to support your belief.

However, you’d have to only pay attention to the mistakes, and ignore the overwhelming amount of accomplishments experts have contributed to society.

No doubt, the car you drive, the roads you drive on, the building you’re in, the furniture you’re sitting on, the clothes you’re wearing, and the internet service and electronic device you’re using to read this very sentence right now were all developed by, you guessed it…

Experts.

Appreciating Elitism

When we undergo surgery, we want an elite surgeon.

When we go to a concert, we want elite musicians.

When we watch sports, we want elite athletes.

When it comes to the goods we purchase and the services we pay for, we want them to be produced and performed by experts who have dedicate lots of time honing their skills.

Not amateurs.

When we attack experts who have spent years obtaining knowledge, we are also attacking the very methods by which they obtain this knowledge.

Attacking experts is a not-so-subtle message to everyone around us, including the children upon which the future of our civilization rests, that pursuing knowledge itself is a bad thing.

Those people we attack are the very people that our nation used to praise and celebrate.

Now, we celebrate, praise and elect to the highest offices the exact opposite kinds of people.

Perhaps we should re-evaluate whether tearing down the accomplishments, knowledge, successes and expertise of others in order to make ourselves feel better about our own mediocrity is worth sacrificing the future of our nation and the very foundations of our civilization for.