One thing that’s clear through this pandemic is that expertise as a whole has no political power. Our modern…

One thing that’s clear through this pandemic is that expertise as a whole has no political power. Our modern societies run on expertise, they’d collapse in an instant without it. But expertise has zero coordinated power to shape what’s done with its work. /1

Some of that is self-inflicted. Universities are some of our oldest institutions, the way humanity institutionalised expertise to have power in societies. They’ve been under assault for decades, and now are like dogs doing tricks for treats. They ‘compete’ in fake ‘markets’. /2

Set up by populist politicians to divide and conquer. A Vice-Chancellor today is much more passionate about beating other VCs in the competition for students and funding, than they are about think tanks and shock jocks and social media governing our knowledge. /3

Academics treat universities as glorified travel agents, funding and organising their ridiculous number of conference junkets in glamorous foreign locations. Like doctors, they’re more passionate about starting wars with their own ‘administration’ than collective action. /4

Expertise could shut down all of the populist blowhards running the world today inside a day. If they used some of the intelligence to coordinate their activity. The world can’t function without that expertise, it’s in the driving seat. /5

It’s a damning indictment of it that it wallows right at the bottom of social status hierarchies, completely ineffectual, despised and powerless. Too obsessed about being right to make that being right politically powerful. On social media all day in righteous indignation. /6

Convinced its mobilising resistance by wailing at the injustice of what’s not being done. Suckered by the same bastards who perpetuate those injustices, who invented these platforms to monetise the anger that causes. Absolutely blind to the power of bureaucracy. /7

The bureaucrat, the only inroads expertise has ever made into genuine political power. Expertise can do so much better than what we’re seeing right now, it has the smarts. ‘Now I am become death’, Oppenheimer saw the travesty of expertise co-opted by populist bullies. /end