Midwest Chick's Place

We mean it as an irony or a slur, but the word cannot be reclaimed in that way.  There’s too much gravitas associated with it.

Dennis Prager wrote an article last week on PJ Media that got me thinking.  The gist of his article was the fact that we have, and to an extent continue to put our faith in ‘the elites’, the ‘educated’, the ‘experts’.  All of this without understanding the underpinnings of what those labels mean.

In the public sphere, the American people have ceded their collective power to these people.  If someone doesn’t have a degree in X, Y, or Z then their opinions, no matter how well researched are dismissed.  Part of this is perpetuated by the media (who many consider to be educated and therefore worth listening to).

In order to get an ‘advanced’ degree, a person has to research some minutia in a field and write a really long paper on it.  

That makes them an ‘expert’ on something really, really narrow and small.  But for some reason they feel that those additional letters behind their name and, in the case of PhDs, the use of Dr. makes them an expert on, well, everything.  But their mindset is as narrow as the dissertation that got them those letters.

As Prager put it:

 Most experts know a lot about one thing: their narrow area of expertise. They know as much about other areas of life as non-experts. But they think they know a lot. Yet, because experts were never taught to ask, “What is the price?” anyone who asks that question is likely to give better advice than almost any expert.

Which is why an epidemiologist doesn’t think about the financial or mental costs of lockdowns.  And we let them ruin lives because we let them do as they wanted.  Because the populace, like the ‘experts’ themselves, equates those narrow degrees with broader knowledge.

The public has been trained for years that the only way to be happy is to have a degree–doesn’t matter what it’s in.  The more advanced the better, even though it truly means nothing.  Professional degrees (MD, etc.) nothwithstanding.  Part of that training is to equate those degrees with knowledge.

This has, in part, gotten us to where we are now.  We have to change how we think about those degrees and the people that have them and decide if there is real value in what they are saying.