I'm encouraged by this

Kristof comes close here. He "gets" it, like in his last piece, but his closing exhortation that "we can do better!" is moronic.

Again, the intellectual conceit rears its ugly head. One liners like that at the end of the piece miss the point. Nothing is going to happen. No interested party is going to police themselves when there is no real accountability anywhere.

The Republicans know this; that's why they don't bother trying to control people. It's a less rosy view on human nature, to be sure, but it's one that's not buried in denial the way Kristof's is.


Still it's nice to hear that experts have no idea what they're talking about. Being an expert myself at so many things, I've known this for years. But people looove to look to experts to tell them what is and what isn't. People love to be led, which is why the founders of this country wrote obsessively about the need for vigilance when confronting tyranny. What many of them were unable to see, however, blinded by the enlightenment, was that the tyranny on the outside isn't nearly so dangerous as the servitude and passivity on the inside.

Tyrants don't just pop out of nowhere- they are the expression of the collective will every bit as much as an elected president. The difference is that the president can get voted out after a while and so is more on guard to public sentiment than the tyrant who rules by the sword.

But democracy or not, we still have tyrants everywhere. They've just moved out of government and into science, education, and medicine. These are the people who tell us all what to do- even the presidents. They are experts who rule by the study rather than monarchs who rule by the blade. But the effect on people is no different. It is arbitrary enslavement.


As for me, I've more or less stopped minding this. Truth is squishy, and there's no sense in trying to flatten it out. That's not what it's there for. Truth is ammunition and can be fabricated and manufactured to fit any weapon. It is only the pre-programmed biases of the observer that interfere with his being shot down (by a particular argument). Being pre-programmed, however, the observer is almost never aware of this, and so he receives the expert's "wisdom" as if it were truth.

And round and round it goes. . .why not take a ride? People will believe anything.