Technocratic Tyranny: Against Expert Rule By James Reed
David Runciman published in 2018, How Democracy Ends, which The Guardian.com, has given a lengthy extract, so this is another book I do not have to read, even if I could afford to get books, but at present I am struggling to pay my power bill. Anyway, the wheels may have fallen of the chariot of democracy, as seen most clearly in the Great Divides in most of the West, but clearest in America, where the Biden regime is engaging in the Great replacement of white Americans. The open border is about replacing “we, the people,” the antithesis of democracy.
What is wrong then with the rule of the experts, epistocracy? As I see it, the problem is that the experts get it wrong almost as much as the ignorant, and at least the ignorant often do not make the sort of wide-ranging decisions that those full of intellectual hubris and puffed-up pride make. It comes down to this; ruled by the likes of Covid king Fauci? From what we have seen, not so. The experts have their own biases, and most of these biases are dangerous to social wellbeing. The experts have given us almost every crisis and threat we now face, from chemical pollution to nuclear war, so it would be insane to trust them any further. It all assumes that more university knowledge is a good thing, when in fact, most of it is debatable bs.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
“So why don’t we give more weight to the views of the people who are best qualified to evaluate what to do? Before answering that question, it is important to distinguish between epistocracy and something with which it is often confused: technocracy. They are different. Epistocracy means rule by the people who know best. Technocracy is rule by mechanics and engineers. A technocrat is someone who understands how the machinery works.
Epistocracy is flawed because of the second part of the word rather than the first – this is about power (kratos) as much as it is about knowledge (episteme). Fixing power to knowledge risks creating a monster that can’t be deflected from its course, even when it goes wrong – which it will, since no one and nothing is infallible. Not knowing the right answer is a great defence against people who believe that their knowledge makes them superior.
Brennan’s response to this argument (a version of which is made by David Estlund in his 2007 book Democratic Authority) is to turn it on its head. Since democracy is a form of kratos, too, he says, why aren’t we concerned about protecting individuals from the incompetence of the demos just as much as from the arrogance of the epistocrats? But these are not the same kinds of power. Ignorance and foolishness don’t oppress in the same way that knowledge and wisdom do, precisely because they are incompetent: the demos keeps changing its mind.
The democratic case against epistocracy is a version of the democratic case against pragmatic authoritarianism. You have to ask yourself where you’d rather be when things go wrong. Maybe things will go wrong quicker and more often in a democracy, but that is a different issue. Rather than thinking of democracy as the least worst form of politics, we could think of it as the best when at its worst. It is the difference between Winston Churchill’s famous dictum and a similar one from Alexis de Tocqueville a hundred years earlier that is less well-known but more apposite. More fires get started in a democracy, de Tocqueville said, but more fires get put out, too.
The recklessness of epistocracy is also a function of the historical record that Brennan uses to defend it. A century or more of democracy may have uncovered its failings, but they have also taught us that we can live with them. We are used to the mess and attached to the benefits. Being an epistocrat like Mill before democracy had got going is very different from being one now that democracy is well established. We now know what we know, not just about democracy’s failings, but about our tolerance for its incompetences.
The great German sociologist Max Weber, writing at the turn of the 20th century, took it for granted that universal suffrage was a dangerous idea, because of the way that it empowered the mindless masses. But he argued that once it had been granted, no sane politician should ever think about taking it away: the backlash would be too terrible. The only thing worse than letting everyone vote is telling some people that they no longer qualify. Never mind who sets the exam, who is going to tell us that we’ve failed? Mill was right: democracy comes after epistocracy, not before. You can’t run the experiment in reverse.
The cognitive biases that epistocracy is meant to rescue us from are what will ultimately scupper it. Loss aversion makes it more painful to be deprived of something we have that doesn’t always work than something we don’t have that might. It’s like the old joke. Q: “Do you know the way to Dublin?” A: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.” How do we get to a better politics? Well, maybe we shouldn’t start from here. But here is where we are.”
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