Absolutely we need trust in expertise again. But never in a million years will we achieve that by ‘listening…
Absolutely we need trust in expertise again. But never in a million years will we achieve that by ‘listening to voters’. All that produces is a continuous barrage of ignorant, whining complaint.
This is populism’s destruction at work. /1
https://t.co/k407nKhwP9 https://t.co/wJtRTcUqis
Populist movements say that we lose trust in expertise because ‘elites’ are out of touch with ordinary people, who need to be listened to.
That’s absolute rubbish. What populism does is make the basic operating system of society everybody’s business. /2
When in fact historically they paid no attention to that at all. They rightly left it to expertise to manage.
Populism is a pandemic of busybodyness. Where everybody is encouraged to think they’re an expert in everything. Which means everything grinds to a halt. /3
To say we can restore trust in expertise by doing even more of that is completely bananas. It pours petrol on the fire.
Trust will return when it is *led*. When political leaders stop using expertise as a political whipping boy, the ‘elites’ of populist vote-buying rhetoric. /4
It’s now common for pretty much everybody for example to interpret the success of somebody like Trump as the result of struggling key groups, like white male blue collar workers.
That’s nonsense. All change is always led. /5
That group like any other will respond to any life situation in a way they are led to respond to that situation. If they’re struggling with employment, how they respond will depend on how they are led to respond.
We cling to this idiot idea of democracy as ‘bottom up’. /6
No human group, of any size, works in that way. All change is led, by about 5% of the group. Some disempowered groups are gentle and quiet. Others try to sack parliaments.
The difference is in how they’re led. Always. /7
We saw the same with Covid, claims that public health collapsed because ‘people’ had fantasy complaints like ‘vaccine fatigue’, and were crippled by ‘lockdowns’.
All nonsense. Public health collapsed because it was led to collapse. Deliberately. /8
We saw in the world wars that people under much harsher privations than during Covid were led to follow a course, despite their sufferings.
What happened with Covid was populists simply leading people to interpret public health measures as unacceptable oppression. /9
A tiny minority led this change. The anti-State libertarians, though really populists wanting to capitalise on an emergency to boost their own status.
Until we ditch our idea of democracy as led by ‘the people’, it will continue to collapse. /10
That’s populism, not democracy. They’re absolutely not the same thing, they’re not even similar.
Populism leads to fascism. Fascism isn’t a distinct thing, it’s just populism allowed to run. Hitler and Mussolini were populists before they were fascists. /11
We will get trust back in expertise only when we stop thinking ‘the people’ is a thing, to be consulted. When that trust is again led, by giving it status again.
As Victorian England did. Where engineers were feted by royalty.
/end