While ancient societies organized themselves under kings, the modern era has given rise to the Expert Class. With smug self-satisfaction no different from the inherited royalty of old, this new class expects us to obey their every utterance. We must declare independence from them.
The embrace of an expert class in America runs counter to 250 years of American philosophy. Of course, the founding principles of our self-governing republic are of little concern to those who have determined themselves worthy of being our masters.
There was a simple reason that Americans fought for independence. While philosophical in nature, the War of Independence was practical in its expression. The reason was summed up by one of the last surviving minutemen from the 1775 Battle of Concord, a fellow named Levi Preston.
When asked why he and the others had fought, Preston said: “what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to and they meant that we shouldn’t.”
The Americans of that day did not see “self-governance” from the king as a new thing. Governing themselves was the status quo.
The notion of self-governance arose from a deeply different view of the dignity of man than much of the world had then held … Or, frankly, does even today. It is the view that each of us can govern ourselves. It finds that the corruption of mankind by sin is such that concentrated power in a single person or elite group will absolutely be abused to the detriment of everyone else.
It also rests on the practical wisdom of people who know they are free. This plays out in matters big and small. A famous experiment took place in 1906, at a county fair in Plymouth, England. Statistician Francis Galton asked hundreds of laypeople to estimate the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox.
He found that the median guess of 1207 pounds was accurate to within 1 percent of the true weight of 1198 pounds. The AVERAGE guess was 1197 pounds. But the truly shocking fact was that the crowd’s average AND median guesses were both closer than the individual predictions of the majority of experts.
The experience of COVID, in which experts issued moronic dictates unhinged from facts or science, awakened many people to the perils of “trusting” our republic to those with academic credentials. While I rely on the expertise of the doctor I hire to address my own pain or illness, I would no more trust him to oversee the health of everyone than that guy minding the cow in Plymouth.
Subject-matter experts can only be counted on to provide advice, not rule. They should be asked to give input, but their edicts must be ignored.
The late William F. Buckley Jr. once said, jokingly but sincerely, that he would “rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” He later explained that he feared the damage the “intellectual arrogance” of the intellectual elite could do to society.
And that is why our Founding Fathers expected us to use the First Amendment, not for mindless entertainment but thoughtful debate. Pauper or king, president or farmer, any one of us is likely to make the wrong decision at any one time. The brilliance of our republic’s framers was to harness the wisdom that can result when all of us, acting in our motivated self-interest, seek to achieve the best possible outcome.
As a self-governing people, we must set aside the notion that experts have a special claim on our republic. “We, The People” have governed ourselves. If we always intend to, we’d better get to it.
