Saturday, December 27, 2008

Experts and Disaster

Dear George,

It’s a good thing the drones have been conditioned not to make a move before consulting an expert. Everything from child-rearing to sex to investments to schooling has been delegated to one expert or another.

The truth is that this has been a shitty decade for experts. It’s been one screw up after another. Our financial “experts” have given us an economic meltdown; our military “experts” have given us Iraq and Afghanistan; our manufacturing “experts” have given us the near collapse of General Motors and Chrysler.

Hell, we don’t need a War against Terror; we need a War against Experts!

It’s only a matter of time before any given expert self-destructs. Experts claim that the key to their success is their mastery of systems. Supposedly, these systems are the products of rational, value-free analysis. However, scratch a system and you find an ideology. To paraphrase the late John B. Roche, the first precept of system creation is, “Whose ox was gored?”

Behind every expert stands an ideologue who is his boss. Because systems are so value free, they can be bent and shaped to fit any form of insanity. Hell, even Jack the Ripper had a system when he gutted his whores.

Because the cachet of a system is its objectivity, the belief in them is unshakable, even if a given system produces negative results. Poor results are never the system’s fault. It simply wasn’t utilized correctly. It was human error or some other anomaly like that.

Experts are never wrong. It’s people who screw up. If only we could computerize life all our problems would be solved.

But until we do that all we can rely on is the system, for better or for worse, in sickness or in health.

The people still believe.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

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