Experts

Phantoms...who had faced the journey to the bus stop-perhaps for them it was thousands of miles-and come up to the country of the Shadow of Life and limped far into it over the torturing grass, only to spit and gibber out in one ecstasy of hatred their envy and (what is harder to understand) their contempt, of joy. The voyage seemed to them a small price to pay if once, only once, within sight of that eternal dawn, they could tell the prigs, the toffs , the sanctimonious humbugs, the snobs, the "haves," what they thought of them.  CS Lewis The Great Divorce Ch 9

I am hearing too much of this anger against experts and authorities not because they have been wrong nor even because they have lied or slyly deceived, but because they are perceived as arrogant - and some of them certainly are. I believe in disruption, but not all disruption.  Bilbo thought that an invasion of dragons might be good for the people of the Shire, but in the end only indirectly upset their applecarts. Are we silently cheering on RFK Jr only because he is making The Experts uncomfortable?  If you think you have better reasons, what are they?  He is more arrogant than they. When challenged he changes the subject and counteraccuses. When he says that relying on experts is not science, that is "a truth that people use to lie with," as a psychiatrist friend of mine used to say. Those words are true, but he expands that into "I don't have to listen to anyone," like a schoolgirl slamming the door to her room. Science means trying to get it right, not just mocking experts.  After all, if you are the experts now, what is to stop people from mocking you when the dead are counted, with even more justification?

He has the facts largely wrong.  Even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while, but when challenged on medical knowledge he will respond that Big Pharma contributes lots of money to politicians.  He is providing the explanation for why they would be wrong if they were wrong, but has evaded the part where he shows they are wrong. Maybe the setback on deaths from measles or rubella will not be extensive.  Perhaps the number of people who died needlessly will be small, with only a few unheard people carrying tragedy for the rest of their lives. Maybe we bounce back quickly. 

I worked with doctors and researchers my whole career, and a lot of them are arrogant and know less than they think. They can be disdainful. If you are not prepared they can make you feel bad. I don't know that much about experts in other fields, but I have seen the acrimonious, even career-destroying arguments between opposing camps in a half-dozen fields. Childish, illogical, unfairly argued, corrupt - and somehow we have more knowledge about many things than when I was a boy. How did that happen? Was all of it from tearing down and disrupting?  Did that fix everything?

Maybe I'm just reading the wrong people.