Recognition as an expert may well be a primary justification for rejecting someone’s advice.
While I admit to the iconoclastic urge, such is not the controlling factor. It’s a symptom. That urge is derived from experience. Having confronted so many experts and their damnable effects, I have learned a healthy cynicism about their abilities and motives. The greater problem is who uses those experts as a defensive shield for their tyranny.
Reputation is one thing, but propaganda can create a false reputation. That should be self-evident. That’s because we may know intuitively, if not consciously, those who desire control over others are morally disqualified to wield it. The ambition for great causes always includes the baggage of control, of some unspoken necessity of dragging you, I and everyone else into their plans. At the end of the day, they are always willing to use threat of force to include us.
But it’s always for our own good, you see. The experts tell them so.
This is the business of usurping God’s Throne in Heaven. He simply can’t be allowed to tell you or me something different than what these ambitious folks and their experts are so sure God has told them. It’s the logical flaw of concrete consistency. Yes, that’s a logical flaw, if you are operating in God’s revealed logic. It’s the assumption God can be brought down to our level of human reason, that a thing cannot be both A and not-A at the same time, and then applying that to God.
The God I serve is big enough to tell you one thing and me another, and they be conflicting things. Not because He’s playing head games with us — if any human did that, it would be some dastardly thing. But God is big enough to avoid such limitations. We can’t pretend to evaluate Him on our level. So if I claim to speak for God, I would be the last person to demand the use of human power to enforce my declaration of what God wants for you. He’s big enough to handle your acceptance, or rejection, of what I might say about His wishes. This applies to the whole range of discussion about whether there even is a God, or many, or nothing.
If I am deluded, that’s my business. More to the point, it’s none of your business. Your certainties are not mine, and mine are not yours. The biggest lie of all has consistently been one set of certainties must be followed or we all perish. This is the favorite lie of tyrants, and is the presumption behind trotting out experts for or against anything you can imagine.
It’s the excuse for child welfare laws which see thousands of families each year torn apart, something which pokes a finger in God’s eye. He owns the persons of this world, and it lies entirely in His hands to grant ownership of children to some of the most pitiful parents you can imagine. But they aren’t your children, so if you can’t find a way to persuade them so that your wishes prevail over theirs voluntarily, stay out of it. The burden is upon you to cultivate that leverage via love and sacrificial care, not by calling the local child welfare authorities. Their expertise is founded on a well established hostility to God and the cosmic level of moral order. It’s based upon a presumption of ownership over children which the officials did not bear.
That presumption of ownership extends to you and I. Having a pretense of the will of the people changes nothing. Other people around you don’t own you, and cannot assign ownership to some agent to act on their behalf. They do own themselves, in one sense — you can’t rightly exercise use of their bodies by force for your amusement. But the second greatest lie of experts is conjuring up some fantasy of how your less intrusive actions encroach upon their self ownership. For example, the insane presumption behind hate speech codes, and the imaginary “emotional distress” people suffer when you say certain words or phrases. The only reason some words hurt is because we have created a psychotic culture in the first place. Fix the psychosis and the words don’t matter.
You have the God-given right to be wrong, and so do I. The very notion of expertise itself is evil. A more reliable metric is trust, a trust earned by good results, and a humble willingness to be questioned every step of the way. It’s that rejection of the question which is sin.
