Excellent essay. You’re correct that this is only the beginning. For too long the institutions, experts, and elites have tried to push a narrative that everything was working just fine, when, in fact, the calm surface hid a raging current of destruction below. Too much is broken. Simple solutions won’t be viable. The entire system needs to be repaired, but who can be trusted with the task?
Yeah I think this is a common problem we as humans face. The ivory tower expert who faces no consequences vs the uneducated chuds who have to deal with the experts being wrong but can’t explain why they are. I think the main problem is when experts get so lost in academic consensus (which is sometimes driven by truth but other times driven by historical circumstances cough cough Zionism) they don’t actually make good arguments yet they refuse to acknowledge this. Our current elite class is still blaming “messaging” rather than acknowledging they’ve destroyed true religion family formation community and made people miserable for a few extra bucks. It’s why Deneens idea (taken from ancients) of the elites replenishing through the non elite classes to stay in contact with them is important.
Murray showed himself upas the soulless empty vessel with a mediocre IQ that he clearly is but Smith has also been majorly hypocritical in the aftermath of the debate.
Very nice piece. I have some thoughts, but am in general agreement with your diagnosis. I have been saying much the same thing. We need a bridge between elites & experts.
The immolation of expert credibility is downstream from the great schism (and maybe even cold civil war) taking place throughout the West, between on one side the forces of Our Democracy™, who represent the globalist neoliberalism that owns and operate the world and all the people who eat well off it (profs, politicos, mainstream journalists, managers and bureaucrats etc), and the rest of us all sort of huddled under the umbrella of nationalist populism or populist nationalism.
Our Democracy™ represents the culmination of maybe a century of actual democracy and civil society being subsumed by bureaucratic managerialism, where the expert class and the elite class have each other's backs, feather each other's nests, and vouch for each other's credibility. But while they were busy hogging almost all of the power and almost all of the assets, they became blind to their Achilles' Heel (we all have 'em): the secular cosmopolitan postnational expert class was gradually detaching itself from the nation and its people, from local communities, norms, values, concerns—which is why when they decided they were going to install a reign of Moral Clarity (where morality means they're always right and everyone else is always either evil and/or stupid), it came across as a conquest instead of a reformation.
Whatever happens next we'll need all our experts to be OF US and not just OVER US. Most people are fine with various experts having better jobs and homes etc than the rest of us (assuming they seem to be earned through hard work), but when these same people decide that their status entitles them to tell the rest of us what we must think and believe and who to vote for, this is when they go from allies to enemies.
Excellent essay. You’re correct that this is only the beginning. For too long the institutions, experts, and elites have tried to push a narrative that everything was working just fine, when, in fact, the calm surface hid a raging current of destruction below. Too much is broken. Simple solutions won’t be viable. The entire system needs to be repaired, but who can be trusted with the task?
Yeah I think this is a common problem we as humans face. The ivory tower expert who faces no consequences vs the uneducated chuds who have to deal with the experts being wrong but can’t explain why they are. I think the main problem is when experts get so lost in academic consensus (which is sometimes driven by truth but other times driven by historical circumstances cough cough Zionism) they don’t actually make good arguments yet they refuse to acknowledge this. Our current elite class is still blaming “messaging” rather than acknowledging they’ve destroyed true religion family formation community and made people miserable for a few extra bucks. It’s why Deneens idea (taken from ancients) of the elites replenishing through the non elite classes to stay in contact with them is important.
https://rallytheremnant.substack.com/p/dave-smiths-gatekeeping-paradox?r=4av78e
Murray showed himself upas the soulless empty vessel with a mediocre IQ that he clearly is but Smith has also been majorly hypocritical in the aftermath of the debate.
Very nice piece. I have some thoughts, but am in general agreement with your diagnosis. I have been saying much the same thing. We need a bridge between elites & experts.
The immolation of expert credibility is downstream from the great schism (and maybe even cold civil war) taking place throughout the West, between on one side the forces of Our Democracy™, who represent the globalist neoliberalism that owns and operate the world and all the people who eat well off it (profs, politicos, mainstream journalists, managers and bureaucrats etc), and the rest of us all sort of huddled under the umbrella of nationalist populism or populist nationalism.
Our Democracy™ represents the culmination of maybe a century of actual democracy and civil society being subsumed by bureaucratic managerialism, where the expert class and the elite class have each other's backs, feather each other's nests, and vouch for each other's credibility. But while they were busy hogging almost all of the power and almost all of the assets, they became blind to their Achilles' Heel (we all have 'em): the secular cosmopolitan postnational expert class was gradually detaching itself from the nation and its people, from local communities, norms, values, concerns—which is why when they decided they were going to install a reign of Moral Clarity (where morality means they're always right and everyone else is always either evil and/or stupid), it came across as a conquest instead of a reformation.
Whatever happens next we'll need all our experts to be OF US and not just OVER US. Most people are fine with various experts having better jobs and homes etc than the rest of us (assuming they seem to be earned through hard work), but when these same people decide that their status entitles them to tell the rest of us what we must think and believe and who to vote for, this is when they go from allies to enemies.
Great work by Wokal Distance!