Our goal, no easy one, is to figure the trajectory of the Expertocracy. Their goal we know. Complete total full control of every aspect of all life under the guidance, all-seeing, and humorless rule of Experts. But forecasting the shape this will take, and at what rate it all happens, is difficult.
Let’s first review a couple recent Expertocracy power grabs. There are many more than this, but these struck me as emblematic.
The Executive branch of the Regime created a new set of laws which to beset us. This new batch falls under the label “environmental justice“, a term without any definite meaning, which is a definite plus. Like “climate change” or “sustainability”, it allows, and requires the Regime to fill in the meaning as they go along.
The new law comes about by Executive Order. Order: that which must not be disobeyed without penalty. The Order is law. (Incidentally, the new law blathers on about “lived experiences”, which always means “non-lived fantasies”.)
Congress still passes some laws, most of which they don’t write themselves, instead farming the work out to staffers and lobbyists. And anyway the laws they blindly affix their signatures to are vague, mere frameworks for the bureaucracy, the bones of the Expertocracy, to which they add your flesh.
It’s the same with Executive Orders. They are not specific. They make announcements like this: The new Order establishes “an Environmental Justice Scorecard, which will track Federal agency performance on environmental justice, including on the Justice40 Initiative.”
The Order also says the Regime will “battle” “environmental racism”. That “battle” is important, a key Expertocracy component.
Why? Because it will be impossible for offices dedicated to ferreting out “environmental racism” to not discover, everywhere they look, “environmental racism”. After they are in business a few years, it will be announced, despite their best efforts and plethora of new rules and fees, “environmental racism” only ever increases.
Next example is cult of Safety First! member Kathy Hochul, ruler of New York. She wants to ban all tobacco sales. All as in all.
Now if your first reaction to this is “Tobacco is bad; it won’t hurt to ban it”, then you are qualified to join the Expertocracy. Forget that. What’s curious, for us, is that this woman, and her subordinates, are also in favor of marijuana, which is most often smoked just like tobacco.
“But Briggs, ackshually, marijuana is…” Sigh.
Here’s another entry, which might seem obscure. It is anything but.
How has Twitter changed for climate scientists since Elon Muck bought it?
Fewer active scientists, fewer tweets, fewer likes per tweet, fewer retweets per tweet, and less likely to go viral.
A thread with some data. ?
— Dr. Robert Rohde (@RARohde) April 20, 2023
This person bills himself as both “Dr” and “PhD”. He is an Expert. An Expert is a credentialed Regime-supporting person with expertise. Experts are, as is obvious, the soldiers of the Expertocracy.
Expert do not see themselves as propagandists. But as purveyors of Official Truths. They never doubt themselves in substance: disagreement over The Consensus (one exists in every field) is forbidden, though to prove to themselves their open-mindedness they allow disputes over trivia.
As you can see, Experts cannot bear being ignored. It wounds. There has to be a deep and nefarious reason for the lack of adulation he craves.
There has been no silencing. What’s absent is the old promoting of Official Truths on Twitter since Musk bought it. This absence of propaganda disturbs Experts. Our Expert took great pains to track numbers of tweets and interactions of people like Micheal Mann, whose only gift to science has been his numerous lawsuits suing his critics.
Our last example is another one you might not have thought fit the pattern. But it does. Quoting:
Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, has spoken in support of legalized medically assisted suicide, calling it “feasible” despite the clear teachings of the Catholic Church against it.
“Personally, I would not practice suicide assistance, but I understand that legal mediation may be the greatest common good concretely possible under the conditions we find ourselves in,” Paglia said in a speech on April 19 during the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.
One wonders what the bishop practicing suicide assistance would amount to. Going through the cancer ward with a sharp knife? Never mind.
The common theme, as we have discussed many times, is this: Experts in search of “problems” they can apply Expert “solutions” to. And those, like the bishop, surrendering his duties to Experts.
Experts hunt for, and if they cannot find, they create “problems.” This is why they are immune to any demonstration there is no problem in need of a solution.
This isn’t much of a post, I’ll admit. My impetus was going through Sam Francis’s Leviathan, and realizing he hadn’t supplied many practical examples. You will be able to find many, though, once you start looking for them. However, I was delighted to find this agreement with the main thesis (this is quoted in the book’s foreword from another article):
As it is presently constituted, the mega-state exists for the purpose of social manipulation. Its elite, trained in the techniques of social engineering and social therapy, gains power nd budgetary resources by inventing social problems and crises, and then designing and applying solutions for them.
Above, and years ago, I claimed “sustainability” had no definite meaning, but meanings would be supplied by Experts with reference to solutions. Just this morning (Wednesday) while writing this, I saw this:
The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) will shortly be seeking feedback on its future priorities for the next two years. …
The ISSB will balance advancing new research and standard-setting projects in a timely manner with its previously agreed activities1 to build on the foundation established by its initial two Standards, S1 and S2. The ISSB expects to issue these Standards towards the end of June.
Pure scientism. Pure Expert behavior. Both are needed for the Expertocracy.
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— An Expert is a credentialed Regime-supporting person with expertise. —
This is the perfect definition for a capital-E Expert. The credentials are necessary but not sufficient. The backing of the Regime is vital.
What makes the above even more illuminating is what it omits. Outside of government propaganda mills, one is called an expert only after establishing a record for achievements of an objectively verifiable sort in a recognized field of endeavor. If we judge by the Experts we’ve been bludgeoned by in recent years, the capital-E Expert doesn’t need that sort of qualification. There’s a wealth of information in that.
A good reference on what the concept ‘sustainability’ means (although the examples are inevitably out of date) is the late Wilfred Beckerman’s 1995 book ‘Small is Stupid: Blowing the Whistle on the Greens’. Beckerman identifies sustainability as a weasel-word. There is no objective operational definition capable of use in economic analysis. Sometimes, he notes, it is used as an unnecessary euphemism for ‘welfare’; at other times, the meaning depends on the whim of an activist (especially when the dictates of sustainability contradict human welfare). Maybe obvious these days, but few people were interested when he wrote this book.
Briggs quotes:
“Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, has spoken in support of legalized medically assisted suicide, calling it “feasible” despite the clear teachings of the Catholic Church against it.”
[“Feasible” simply means “possible to do easily or conveniently.”]
[Paglia continues] “’Personally, I would not practice suicide assistance, but I understand that legal mediation may be the greatest common good concretely possible under the conditions we find ourselves in,’ Paglia said in a speech on April 19 during the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.”
We might wonder what “conditions” Archbishop Paglia, thinks we “find ourselves in” (he uses the present tense) that make assisted suicide ‘the greatest common good’”? A shortage of cash, perhaps, and need to sell grandma’s house? A sick child who’s become an expensive inconvenience? A teenager who’s depressed?
Paglia speaks like the devil himself, and so must be his sock-puppet. See how easy that was to discern?
As for these Frustrated Climate Scientists, their circle-jerk masquerading as “consensus” got noticeably smaller without Twitter cheating on their behalf.
What cracks me up is how many former ‘blue checks’ (the Sneetches with the stars on their bellies) don’t want to pay a measly $8 / mo. for a service they use daily, both personally and professionally. Most of journalism and publicity these days is just cutting and pasting from Twitter for a particular slant, so it’s little wonder “AI” can do their jobs for them, backwards and in high-heels.
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If you want to see the eventual culmination of where we are heading look no further than the Vogons from The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy.
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The Expertocrats are expert in nothing, but they are the New Pharisees of the Church of Dysanthropy. True Believers are called upon to assist in the removal of mankind from Gaia’s realm. The only *good* human is one who has stopped breathing.
Ain’t Paglia suspected of faggotry concerning his love of not only heresies, but homoerotic frescoes featuring himself?
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/catholic-archbishop-paglia-homoerotic-fresco/
Perhaps I’ve stated it here before but it bears repeating: an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing–and then proceeds to tell you all he knows…
An Expert is always someone who reinforces THE SCIENCE ™ by being good at deceptively engineering “results” or rather emphasing the sleights of hand they want you to focus on.
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/pfizer-fda-dr-walensky-knew-fetuses
Experts are synonymous with Public Relations.