The Rule of the Experts, Part Three
One of my most popular and widely referenced articles, back in my “conservative media” days, was a piece entitled “Parasitocracy,” which has subsequently become the opening essay of my Limbo series, Progressivism 101.
That essay sprang to mind as I read this headline from NBC News: “Fauci warns reopening states: You can’t ‘leap over things.'”
One of the most important things that the states must not “leap over,” of course, is Fauci’s ego, his day in the spotlight, his historical moment. How dare they bypass or belittle his advisories and warnings! How dare they act as if his expertise is no longer necessary! How dare they leave him behind!
No one has benefitted more from this Pandemic that Ate a Planet than Dr. Fauci — or, to state the same thing from a perspective truer than his own, no one has lost more. For all the media attention, public deference, and political influence over the lives of millions, the truth is that history will be very unkind to Dr. Fauci, along with all his equivalents throughout the nations of the formerly semi-free world. And if there is an eternity doling out fates beyond the realm of history’s temporal human judgment, I suspect his (and their) prospects will be even bleaker in that realm than we mortals can perceive.
Meanwhile, a few brave individuals in the medical community, epidemiologists who, unlike the Faucis of the world, still have more professional integrity than material ambition, continue to speak out publicly, in the few forums left to them, against the current global “policy” of deliberately prolonging the pandemic in order to create the optics of a crisis where there is none. These brave dissenters — now outcasts in their profession and effectively enemies of the State (except, so far, Sweden) — continue to speak reasonably about life, death, and the limits of medicine and government. For this heresy, and on the moral authority of the Faucis, these decent men and women are being publicly vilified, their reputations destroyed, their thoughtfulness and honesty mocked and assaulted by the slavish millions and their chain-jerking spokesmen and propagandists.
I hope those few decent humans of the medical profession, trying to talk sense to hysterics and tyrants, and being demeaned and punished for their efforts, have the breadth of vision to understand that in the long run, doing what is right, displaying real virtue, and letting truth be one’s guide, even when you are hated and rejected for these things, are not merely the road to a better world; they are the better world, a world that exists in any time and place — or rather beyond time and place — in the spiritual realm of that minority who choose to be true to life and the mind, even when every social force around them is dead set against the soul and thought.
They will not win today’s argument — they may lose much more than the argument, in fact — but they will win the only prize that ultimately matters. They will keep their souls clean through an age smeared with the vileness of petty self-interest, childish fear, and calculating moral and intellectual compromises of all sorts. In professional terms, they will be the outliers in their trade who remember why they studied medicine, and what a doctor is. The future will be kind to them, and more importantly, they will be able to live as self-respecting adults in an age of perpetual, amoral children.
The opposite, however, will be the fate of their immediate conquerors, the socially-sanctioned experts whose self-serving lies and willful blindness are being used as a public bludgeon to beat down the honest professional minority. These experts’ short-term ascendancy is the measure of their defeat.
History, should there be any adults left in mankind’s unpromising future to write it, will record these various forgettable Faucis, our administrative state experts, as the slavering lackeys of totalitarianism, soulless career climbers who were only too willing, even eager, to forge the chains that bound their fellow men, in exchange for the empty prize of momentary acclaim and social approval. They will be classified by the historians of the future as parasites deadlier and more insidious than any virus, groveling through the intestines of their betters, eating life.
For the sake of their fragile egos, their reputations, the approval and admiration of the crowd. Their motivations are obvious. And these are shameful motivations, the motivations of weak, small beings.
