Charlatans & The Fallacy of Expertise
"A basic problem for people in politics is that approximately none have the hard skills necessary to distinguish great people from charlatans." - Dominic Cummings
Surpassing Star Wars, Harry Potter, and James Bond, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the highest-grossing franchise in movie history. Disappointed and deceived by charlatans disguised as heroes in real life, people have flocked to cinemas (or, more recently, their home theaters) to watch their favorite superheroes save the world from the latest “existential threat.”
Unfortunately, in the real world, villains and threats are not as black and white as they are in the movies. Oftentimes, those purporting to save the day have ulterior motives. We have written at length about how the world's elites have weaponized our fear of death and the end of the world to achieve compliance and public policy outcomes. From climate change to COVID-19, policy-makers and the media have convinced the public to act against their own interests by playing to our intellectual insecurities and convincing us to trust so-called “experts” rather than our own instincts and research.
Don’t get me wrong, the world needs experts. Without people dedicating their lives towards a particular cause, the many vexing problems of this world would never be solved. However, we must take their counsel in stride, knowing that even the theories of experts are often wrong or incomplete, funding for research can tie an expert’s hands or force bias, and expertise can blind individuals from thinking holistically beyond the minutiae of the specific problem at hand.
Whether it was due to deference towards his expertise or out of hatred for President Trump, many Americans placed blind faith in Dr. Anthony Fauci. So much so, that he quickly became a pseudocelebrity with his image plastered on everything from t-shirts to sacrilegious votive candles.
However, last week, emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act confirmed that Dr. Fauci is not the apolitical white knight many claim him to be. As stated by Jason Meister: "While Dr. Fauci was lying about the threat... lying about gain-of-function research, and lying about the Wuhan Lab he somehow had time to write a book about 'truth.'"
The lies about gain-of-function research and the Wuhan Lab are especially troubling. For the past year, Fauci has been adamant that the virus could not have originated in a lab, going as far as saying COVID-19 “could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.”
As it turns out, Fauci had a very real incentive to commit to the natural origin theory. If COVID-19 escaped from a lab, his statements that the importance of gain-of-function research “outweigh the risks,” really stand to undermine his authority as an expert. Furthermore, according to the Wall Street Journal: “From 2014-19, the National Institutes of Health sent $3.4 million to the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.... The NIH money was spent on researching bat coronaviruses, and it’s likely the WIV conducted gain-of-function research to make them more deadly or infectious.” Keep in mind this was AFTER the Obama administration halted funding for this type of research due to the risk it carries.
Despite his public comments to the contrary, it seems Fauci was aware as early as February 2020 that the virus could have leaked from a lab. An email from his deputy director, Hugh Auchincloss, shows concern over whether they had “any distant ties to this work abroad." Rather than be wholly truthful, Fauci was instead thanked by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, for his role in downplaying the lab leak hypothesis.
If COVID-19 leaked from a lab in China funded by American taxpayer dollars, it could very possibly mean the end of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s career and credibility. So what does he do? Rather than acknowledge both origin theories are plausible, he played into the media’s hatred for Donald Trump and made the notion of a lab leak out to be a fringe conservative conspiracy theory.
In a presidential election year, it worked hook, line, and sinker. It wasn't until the last few months that most anyone in the mainstream felt comfortable even floating the idea that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab. Now even President Joe Biden and Fauci have changed their tune and have expressed that the lab leak theory needs further investigation.
We have to start looking at the world’s problems holistically from a variety of vantage points. While we should give the opinions of experts the weight they deserve, we can no longer afford to take their word as gospel. As we've seen, it's not impossible for experts to have great conflicts of interest. Just because members of the general public are not “experts” on a topic, doesn’t mean they don’t have a right to think critically and question the accepted dogmas of the day.
Regardless of how impatient we are for answers, we cannot be pressured into believing that science is settled on any politicized issue. After all, if the accepted science of the day was never challenged we would all still believe the world was flat balancing on a stack of giant turtles.
