No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
– Lord Salisbury (1877)
Churchill’s famous quote is almost a corollary to Lord Salisbury: “you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together–what do you get? The sum of their fears.”
“you should never trust experts”
Do politicos count as experts too ?
Oh wow, a Samizdata quote of the day uttered by a relative! A very, very distant relative, but one of my ancestors was one of Katherine Tudor’s children by her marriage to the Lord Salisbury of the time (can’t remember which of her 4 marriages that that was, her 1st or second one I think).
I trust in experts up to a point, in areas that are important to me and concurrently have little knowledge. I have faith in what they say and assume that their advice will result in a net gain. But in those cases, I am an interested party to my own misery, and accept the fact that they have a hidden agenda of some sort (everyone thinks more than they say), but in total, doesn’t eclipse the benefits I derive from the association.
It is when an ‘expert’ proffers their advice unsolicited where I automatically assume a harmful hidden agenda, or an agenda that does not have my direct well-being at heart. Unfortunately in our cultures, experts and Statism are two peas in a pod. What is Good for One is Good for All. And when one examines such experts ‘facts’ they are usually steeped in some sort of mysticism and a priori belief and everything they propose works axiomatically from there.