The Age of the Expert.

Our society is being slowly strangled by experts. They’re crawling out of the walls like maggots out of a month-dead corpse. I wouldn’t mind if they merely offered us advice, but they don’t. Buoyed by a perception of superiority instilled in them by the system of higher education, they function through self-endowed didactic. They tell us what we must do and what we must not do. And they indulge in my favourite process: reductionism. Everything is reduced to some arbitrary and immutable number. We must drink so much water every day; we must eat so many portions of fruit and vegetables every day; we must not drink more than so many units of alcohol a week; our body mass index must not be allowed to rise above this figure etc, etc, etc... And failure to follow their strictures will have catastrophic consequences. We will be dehydrated, or under-nourished, or a dangerous drinker, or clinically obese.

And they don’t stop at the level of what we consume; they’re invading the very core of what we are. I’ve never known so many people have so many things ‘wrong’ with them. It seems that every bit of a pain, every aspect of mood, every inconvenient character trait has to be identified as a ‘condition’ and given a grand sounding name. They even reduce the names to initial letters, so as to make them more believable because they’re easier to say.

“I hear Mrs Smith’s got PNS.”

“Ooh! What’s PNS?”

“Something to do with the brain, I think. They’ve only just discovered it. She keeps forgetting to go to bed at night, and falls asleep in the armchair.”

“How old is she now?”

“102.”

“So what are they doing about it?”

“They’ve given her some tablets.”

“Are they working?”

“Not yet, but they say it’ll take time. Trouble is, she gets high blood pressure, splitting headaches and a rash over both arms now. She was fit as a fiddle before.”

This process is also invading the way we run our day to day affairs. We’re being drowned under a torrent of regulations and guidelines that are writ in stone by ‘experts.’ The police, healthcare professionals, teachers, and many more bodies are complaining that they’re not allowed to apply good sense any more. The regulations are sacrosanct. They seem to have been brought down to us by Moses and are not to be varied under any circumstances. If we carry on like this, we’ll forget what good sense is. I think the Daleks are winning.