Our last TVFMontana Blog Talk Radio show featured Dan and his “words of wisdom” commentary. Hopefully “Daniel in The Lion’s Den” will be a regular TVFM feature in the near future.
For all of you who requested the transcript of Dan’s commentary, here it is. Don’t forget you can always listen to the pod cast of this and all TVFMontana episodes at www.blogtalkradio.com/the-view-from-montana.
UNDERCURRENT
A column on history, politics, and culture
Tyranny Of The Experts
- Daniel Reddish
Should there be cooperation between neighbors, both far and near, in times of uncertainty and upheaval? There always has been and there always will be, allowing that you accept the possibility that the average person is in possession of common sense and self-control. There are cultural elites who do not accept this premise, and rig the game accordingly. Why is it that some of the most capable people you have ever met are sometimes the most incapable of admitting to a mistake? Such is the repeated story of any system that is eventually run by unimpeded “experts”.
We are now succumbing to the tyranny of the “experts”. Many of the “experts” are in way over their head and are held totally unaccountable for many of the moronic and destructive decisions that they make. They have hollowed out the economy and have made a mockery of constitutional government and a free and independent America. There was a time when we did not go to the “experts” to solve our problems. We went to each other. Take, for example, when the war department, in leading up to America’s involvement in the Second World War, publicly petitioned average Americans, farmers, machinists, factory workers, etc., to produce suggestions, plans, models, and considerations that would go into the eventual production of what was to become the US army jeep. Average Joes and Joannes rolled up their sleeves and defeated the greatest evil in modern times. Could this happen today? It is very unlikely.
The concept of liability as it is applied today is a set of ever tightening hands around the throat of change. These hands choking off the air of common sense approach belong to the “experts”. The physical construct of the current bureaucratic system run by “experts” makes it almost an impossibility to undo a bad decision. Just as a rock thrown into the water, the ripples cannot be recalled and their direction reversed. They continue going outward to the end of space
History is replete with examples wherein societal dilemmas, both great and small, were rectified by common sense actions undertaken by individuals or groups of people who would be considered average. In many cases the average people were centuries ahead of the “experts”. The term “limey” comes from the slang for British seamen who, on their own, discovered the effect of consuming citrus fruit which gave them the vitamin C they needed for the prevention of scurvy on extended south Pacific voyages. The average sailor figured this out. It was three hundred years before the British medical establishment, the “experts”, acknowledged this and entered it into their medical textbooks. It seems as though in some cases no matter how much knowledge one might possess, it is hubris that makes them apparently thick as a brick. In this case it added a third of a millennium more suffering for the general population. Such is the powerful effect of common knowledge and the importance of the gate keepers of that knowledge.
In ancient Egypt a cat held a sacred status in all facets of Egyptian life. One of the most powerful was the belief that the presence of cats in multitudes living in and around the granaries would produce more grain by the end of the harvest. Cats being cats, of course, one can assume undertook a massive depopulation of all attendant rats and rodents that would frequent the granaries. Consequently there was more grain at the end of the season. The “experts” attributed this to the god-like qualities they assigned to the cat. The mice knew what happened. The common cat raises its head again in history when it mingles with religious “experts” in the church-dominated European society of the Middle Ages. The church “experts” considered the cat to be a pagan symbol and initiated the widespread destruction of felines all across Europe. The festival of St. John was celebrated annually with the burning alive of cats in town squares. By 1400 the common house cat in Europe was nearly extinct. The result of this? The rat population exploded, being the main vector for a series plagues that at one point decimated upwards of two thirds of the entire population of Europe. Cause and effect? Gee, I don’t know, I’m not an “expert”.
And so it goes.
I agree