A brief outline of a theory of the destruction of the West's expert class
The expert class is the modern equivalent of pre-industrial artisans being replaced by machines and assembly lines. And it will destroy society before it will allow itself to be replaced.
A fun bit of news before I begin:
That’s your boy!
And thank you everyone for your continued support as I took time to step away while I took care of things in my personal life. I will return from my break tomorrow and will be back full-time on Wednesday—after being gone for much of the last month. Expect a flood of new posts in the coming weeks. Your continued support allows this.
Now you would think that I am rolling in dough, but I am not.
Therefore, before I start my post, I have a request:
As some may know, I was recently dismissed from medical school on trumped up charges using a rigged hearing process because of my publicly stated views on Covid. I have never had any disciplinary action against me but suddenly had a dozen+ filed in 6 months.
I was kicked off campus multiple times. Deans spread rumors about me to students who were on social media, who then spread these rumors online. Normal conversations would be misinterpreted out of recognition. I faced some allegations that the admins refused to even specify.
The school hired some of the country’s leading legal experts to rig the hearing, creating entirely novel procedures just for me, denying me my right to have witnesses testify on my behalf, a right to respond to allegations, etc.
I could pursue a legal path, but that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of fighting. I just want to move on with my life and fulfill my dream—somehow—of working in the healthcare field.
I know it is a long shot, but it’s all I am, and my exclusion—due to doing what I was trained to do as a scientist and speaking the truth—is an injustice that I will not accept.
To do this I need $30K to clear my immediate debt obligations such as maxed out credit cards from legal fees etc. This would help me avoid any worsening of my family’s spiraling credit score and possible bankruptcy.
Please help. It would mean the world:
https://www.givesendgo.com/kevinbasslegal
Without any further ado, the post…
Due to the Internet, social media, and now AI, the expert class no longer has a monopoly on expertise.
In losing that monopoly, the expert class also loses its legitimacy.
The insistence on socialism and equity is not a plea on behalf of the powerful for the powerless.
It a projection of the expert class's own insecurities in the face of its annihilation--and thus the loss of its privileges--as a socially valuable class.
Socialism is the only way the expert class can maintain its power and privilege: by being the administrative class administering socialism.
This makes the expert class not merely not progressive but in fact deeply reactionary: it is trying to maintain its obsolete position by freezing, as much as possible, the current social order in place, with the expert class at its head.
The only difference is that, in the information age, the expert class is no longer needed--or not needed to nearly the same extent, in the same way, or in the same numbers.
The expert class today is largely obsolete: and this will become only more painfully obvious over the coming decade.
The expert class's place within the social structure can only be guaranteed by increasing moral hysterics, histrionics, spectacles, and totalitarianism.
And through a turn from a technical claim to legitimacy as a class to a moral claim to legitimacy.
This explains what has occurred over the past decade.
This moral claim to legitimacy must have the expert class consistently denying both science and reality.
This is because science and reality were once its sole province--it had expertise about science and reality, while nobody else did.
But now science and reality belong to everyone.
The expert class must deny science and reality in the name of morality to ensure that it can lay claim to something everyone else cannot.
This denial is the only way that the expert class can lay claim to anything distinct from that widely available to the public.
The expert class must lay claim to esoteric moral and technical knowledge that the public apparently cannot fathom.
And it must constantly assert this claim as being equivalent to science--even though it is the absolute opposite of science.
The expert class must, in a word, be consistently unscientific and reality denying in order to maintain its claim that it has anything different to offer the world than what is already available to everyone.
This is clearly catastrophic, since the expert class holds the reins of power: it means that the expert class will drive society into the ground in order to maintain its grip on pseudolegitimacy and power.
The expert class must be cleared away as we know it for the new social order to emerge in its destruction.
The expert class will fight to the death to prevent this annihilation.
It will even destroy society to prevent it.
The future will have experts, but not those who belong to the current expert class.
The rest of society must outmaneuver, outflank, and destroy the current configuration of the expert class to ensure the next phase of social progress.
The above is just a sketch. My break has transformed me intellectually. More to come on this in the coming weeks and months.
I think you are on to something - what we are seeing from our ‘elites’ is not confidence but terror. At some level they realize they are useless and their status, not to mention paychecks, are threatened. They see their social inferiors voting for Trump, or Brexit, or mocking their latest thoughts on gender or climate or other fashionable beliefs, and so make even more deranged pronouncements.
I expect this to be self correcting, but there will be many more victims along the way.
Bummed at the lack of political sophistication on display here. The notion that the capitalist class just ‘wants socialism’ should code as a) obviously untrue, and b) a regurgitated talking point from 1987.
Sheldon Wolin’s work on inverted totalitarianism is a good place to start for a better understanding of American political dynamics. More broadly, we live in what Gary Gerstle describes as the “neoliberal political order,” which governs most political behavior. The order masquerades as a bipolar ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative political spectrum…primarily on social issues, but there’s broad agreement among most political actors that things like “economic growth is good” and “we don’t want government agencies making iPhones,” etc. The order agrees on almost all major issues, and allows dissent on meaningless culture war issues to divide workers against each other—conveniently for them, that prevents us from rising up against the elites and the bosses.
So Bass’s analysis is completely upside down, even if he’s got some basic facts right. Nothing that can’t be overcome with a little light reading or a few hours of earnest inquiry on YouTube.
For starters, actual leftists like me have nothing but contempt for liberals and the Democratic Party; many of us believe universities are hedge funds with books, and that both parties are bought and owned by corporate interests. Those “elites” in education, banking, finance, oil, pharma, and tech have more contempt for us than they do for Trump…but you wouldn’t know that if you listen to NPR, Fox News, WaPo, or the New York Times. They pretend we don’t exist or dismiss us derisively as “Trump supporting populists.”
Anyway, thanks for reading with an open mind. My intention isn’t to offend, but the characterization of “socialism” was just way off base.