The Modern Political Quandary, Summarized
An expert is a person who knows more than you do about one thing, and very likely less than you about almost everything else — including, potentially, about the presuppositions underlying his own area of expertise, which he sees not as presuppositions but as facts. That false perception of his presuppositions is part of what identifies him as an expert.
Political life is the realm of piety (necessary opinion) and rhetoric (emotional persuasion), philosophy the realm of knowledge and dialectic. The search for knowledge thus entails a measure of impiety, which sets the philosophers into perpetual and essential conflict with any political community. Thus, as Plato shows, the best men will never enter political life unless it be by force, entirely against their will and better judgment; the best life, which is to say the philosophic life, is inherently private and non-political. It follows that the only practical hope for humanity is that the second-best men might enter politics, and somehow succeed there. And when was the last time that happened? And what is the likelihood that those second-best men, the men of honour and moral rectitude, would ever gain the support of the demos in sufficient numbers and with sufficient consistency to have any long-term efficacy in a democracy?
In modern civilization, or what is left of it, therefore, we are all at the mercy of either the whims or the pious conformity of the majority — “the many,” as the ancients called them — who are most susceptible to the pontifications of experts (real or self-described), by whom they are intimidated; least attracted to the men of honour (the gentlemen), whom they regard as undemocratic; and most easily swayed by demagogues and their assorted mouthpieces, due to their excessive reliance on emotion, and particularly their weakness for compliant sentimentality.
