By trusting and putting all of our faith in experts, we’re removing any responsibility we have ourselves to put in the work, do our own research, verify information, and make decisions for ourselves.
We’re also taking it on faith that they don’t have any personal motivations guiding their dictates and behaviors. We’re assuming their professions are absolute, that there are no choices to be made, and that they act according to some manual the rest of us cannot access.
All one need to is look no further than their own profession. Whether you’re a doctor, a lawyer, a marketer, an administrative assistant, or a janitor, you all know people who’ve been in the profession for years… maybe decades.
What is it them makes them experts within their profession? Is it simply tenure? Do we not all know people who’ve been doing their job for far too long who are more of a bottleneck to innovation and advancement than they are an agent for progression? Have we not all experienced people who’ve been doing their job for so long that the industry itself has passed them by?
It should also concern us when we have only one “expert” to rule them all. As long as their are different points of view or differing opinions within a profession, we cannot simply assume that the person we’ve deemed an “expert” knows more than others or has only “the right” answer.
Sometimes, we confuse the word “expert” with the idea that this person knows the most. Or worse, the fallacy that they know everything there is to know, or everything “we” know, about their area of expertise. That will never be true.
The Famous Dr. Fauci is looked at as the be-all and end-all for COVID information and protocols, but he’s been out of the field for decades. I’m confident a lot has happened in the field of medicine, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of doctors who’ve tried new methods and had more recent and relevant experiences that make their opinion every bit as important as Dr. Fauci’s.
Yet, when we hear a dissenting or alternative opinion from one of those doctors, we automatically assume they politically motivated, while Fauci couldn’t possibly be.
As Americans, we’re dangerously close to completely losing our signature ability to think critically or enter with healthy skepticism.
From where I’m sitting, our “experts” are letting us down, and we’re protecting them, and ourselves, from alternative approaches to solving significant problems.
It’s time to reverse course, and drop the “expert” label, before it’s too late.
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