Expertarians
Favoring or enforcing strict obedience to ‘EXPERTS’, especially those of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.
Expertarian: favoring or enforcing strict obedience to ‘EXPERTS’, especially those of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.
An expertarian is someone who claims expertise and then claims that their expertise is a strong enough basis to establish insane, anti-freedom, tyrannical, authoritarian policies… and that expertarian holds the government gun (or a similarly powerful institution) at their fingertips to enforce their edict.
[A quick note: I first published a copy of this essay anonymously and shared privately with close friends in late 2020. Given the state of the world, I think it’s time to roll this thesis up into the rest of our writing about how the Next Frontier is taking shape… and our thesis that industry+innovation+individualism are the keys to antifragile freedom+flourishing. My thinking on the role that expertarians play became much clearer over the last 14 months since I first put this essay out, so I made a few tweaks in this version.]
Since I published this anonymous essay, we’ve seen quite a few seriously gnarly expertarian situations unravel catastrophically, from the catastrophic United States departure from Afghanistan, to the current Ukraine crisis, to sheer absurdity in financial markets and inflation conversations, and other known and many low-key stories.
LINGUISTIC ROOTS OF ‘EXPERTARIANISM’
THESE DEFINITIONS ARE TAKEN FROM TYPING EACH WORD INTO GOOGLE.COM:
Authority: (1) “the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience.” (2) “a person or organization having political or administrative power and control.” (3) “The power to influence others, especially because of one's commanding manner or one's recognized knowledge about something” (4) “person with extensive or specialized knowledge about a subject; an ‘EXPERT’.”
Authoritarianism: “the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom; lack of concern for the wishes or opinions of others.”
Authoritarian: “favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.”
Expert: (1) “a person who is very knowledgeable about or skillful in a particular area.” (2) “having or involving a great deal of knowledge or skill in a particular area.”
Now we arrive at the precise, new term for the 21st century authoritarianism that we are now seeing (integrating the above dictionary definitions, i am coining the following terms here):
*Expertarian: favoring or enforcing strict obedience to ‘EXPERTS’, especially those of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.
*Expertarianism: the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to ‘EXPERTS’ at the expense of personal freedom; lack of concern for the wishes or opinions of others.
(*These are definitions that I am coining here for the first time, to my knowledge.)
WHAT IS EXPERTARIANISM?
Over the past 20 or so years, a strange new iteration of authoritarianism has taken root in the United States of America.
Authoritarianism by definition is state-enforced strict obedience to authority that kills personal freedoms. In America, this authority has become a complex web of three-letter agencies run by so-called ‘EXPERTS’ in niche fields who use their ‘EXPERTISE’ to fear-monger Americans into handing over their freedoms.
We are living in a weird black-mirror episode, where instead of our rights being swiftly eroded by a classic authoritarian (think Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or modern-day China) regime, right now in America (and elsewhere in the world), we have a new and novel EXPERT-ARIAN regime that slowly erodes our rights in the name of 'listening to the EXPERTS.'
This mysterious 'EXPERT CLASS' takes many forms.
They are the prophetic unidimensional climate-catastrophists: stop producing energy, halt the economy or we'll all be DEAD in a decade or two… just ignore the environmental degradation and famine that will result from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a horrible global development empowered by our expertarian driven energy policies.
They too are the 'all-knowing' fact-checkers on social media: obey the fact-checkers or else face being branded as a heretic, or worse, censored outright! Strict obedience to the fact-checkers takes precedence over freedom of speech.
How about the pandemic puppet masters? Wear your mask, cancel your Holiday plans and close the synagogues! OR ELSE!
If one dares to challenge the expertarians 'nothing-to-see-here’ edicts about what her kids are being taught in school, because the experts said it's what’s best, she will find herself without a job, and her family might be threatened.
Here’s another golden nugget. It turns out that we might award the expertarian of the year award to former Afghanistan puppet-president Ashraf Ghani, who wrote a book called Fixing Failed States. Ever the expertarian, he fled his country immediately upon his state failing in spectacular fashion.
Then there are the expertarians who opined that inflation is merely transitory, because, well, they said so all the while pushing towards more centralized, regressive controls over money and repressing innovation and industry.
I can go on and on, and of course I can be much more nuanced with each of the above.
In short: the EXPERTARIAN thesis is that ‘EXPERTS’ are quickly becoming the authority-class in this new dystopian, anti-freedom and anti-flourishing world order. We’ve gone from authoritarianism being strict obedience to authority, especially as enforced by the government, to strict obedience to the ‘EXPERT CLASS’, especially as enforced by the government.
WHAT MAKES AMERICA GREAT
Among the many reasons why America is great is that we are a nation of polymaths who are intellectually curious and able to make decisions for ourselves in a wide variety of different problem areas.
America is great because Americans are awake to the fundamental truths that govern our day to day lives.
America is NOT great because we know how to follow the instructions of our ‘RULERS’ or the 'EXPERTS'. In fact, we are founded on slapping those who try to rule directly across face (i.e. The Declaration of Independence).
America is not great because of a toxic “freedom for me but not for thee” ‘EXPERT CLASS’ making decisions, demanding STRICT obedience to those decisions, and imposing their will on the American people.
America is great because we are a nation of risk-takers who innovate, and we don’t necessarily follow the ‘EXPERT’ wisdom on our innovation adventure.
We are a nation of individualists who make powerful, first-principles informed decisions. At our core, we do not make decisions for the sake of ‘following the EXPERTS’ or because “we have to trust the ‘SCIENCE’, and we have to trust the ‘SCIENTISTS’.”
Americans have a long history of making data, first principles, and first values driven decisions, in which we ourselves use the SCIENTIFIC METHOD to test, iterate, and discover what works.
Most importantly, Americans are brave; we take risks, regardless of if the ‘EXPERTS’ want us or advise for or against taking said risks.
It is from the embrace of individually calculated risk that America derives her unprecedented prosperity. Some fail spectacularly to which the ‘EXPERTARIANS’ might gawk or say ‘I told you so’. But other times, those risks pay off and the bravehearts driving prosperity with innovation and individualism make many fossils out of all of the EXPERTARIANS who tried to get in their way.
I LOVE & RESPECT PHYSICS AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD.
It's important that I say emphatically: I LOVED AND RESPECT PHYSICS, THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD, INNOVATION, AND FIRST PRINCIPLES TRUTHS ABOUT THE UNIVERSE.
This essay is NOT a call to write-off the fundamental truths of physics and operate ignorant of the world around us. On the contrary, this essay is a call for each of us as individuals to deeply question everything and arrive at our own decisions grounded in truths of nature and our own principles, philosophy, and faith.
I love science. I love physics. I love math. I love technology. And I love knowledge. But there is a difference between hard physical truths and the narratives and intrusive policies that ‘EXPERTS’ create based on, at best, an ill-applied version of the scientific method.
The traditional use of the word 'expert' referred to craftspeople who achieved mastery in his or her ability to create real, tangible goods and other stores of productivity and value.
Unfortunately, our class of ‘EXPERTS’ has largely devolved from master producers of economic value to a class of authoritative figures in highly theoretical fields that are governed by complex models (not tangible products) with massive uncertainties, massive error bars, and enormous assumptions that the so-called ‘EXPERTS’ often don't even bother to explore, let alone disclose.
Very often in our modern day landscape, ‘EXPERTS’ are merely theorists and modelers who know a whole lot about nothing tangible, who try to impart their intangible, flawed models on the rest of society because “the model says so”.
They often become ‘EXPERTS’ just because they spend years studying all the nuances (and often flawed or incomplete nuances) of the ‘EXPERTS’ before them that devised intricate models and theories based on the siloed, theoretical ‘EXPERTS’ before them. The cycle keeps going deeper and deeper, digressing further and further away from true mastery of a craft or source of value creation.
I’ll end with this. Thinking through this Expertarian thesis, I can only help but meditate on John Galt’s (of Atlas Shrugged fame) oath:
“I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."