The Myth of the Impartial Expert

& the Legitimacy of institutions

Where does power come from in democracy?

Well, that's a stupid question, isn't it?  It is in the name. Demos, people, and Kratos, power. Therefore, at least according to Theory, the power comes from the people.

The people elect the politicians that will be in charge of the country and are, therefore, the supreme power within the state. In a democracy, popular opinion is the force behind all political movements and what gives a government its legitimacy.

However, this high school civics’ class explanation does not really go into the process of how opinions form. So, we do need to ask ourselves; where do we get our opinions?

Our opinions form based on our experiences. This is how opinions are organically formed, and these opinions reflect our daily lives. Most people have strong opinions when it comes to food, music, and the people who they like or dislike because they eat, listen to music, and socialize every day.

However, most people are not in charge of geopolitical matters or managing the economy, so, how can they form an opinion when they have no experience which such matters?

The answer is that they do not have any opinions about these matters, but they adopt them from people they trust. These very people will be the topic of this essay; Experts.

This might happen when we are reading the newspaper, watching a video on YouTube, or even reading a book about it. At the end of the day, we always defer our opinion on matters in which we don't have any personal experience.

To quote Walter Lippmann: “Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is great, we cannot choose between true and false accounts. So, we choose between trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters.”¹

So, when it comes to politics most of our opinions are not our own, they are the opinions of the people we trust. This is important because in a democracy, whoever is seen as credible and to be trusted will have great power over public opinion.

In this sense, elections are much less about the candidates and policies and much more a question of which experts you trust. To quote Curtis Yarvin: ”There is no way to receive a mainstream university education, read the Times every morning, trust both of them, and not be a progressive.” ²

The same, however, could also be said of the Fox-News-watching conservative and his leads us to the conclusion that when it comes to democratic politics, public trust is the most essential resource there is. In other words, he who controls what information is seen as credible also controls how most people think. 

Here we arrive at the central question of this essay; where does credibility come from?

Each one of these “experts” will try to give the appearance of being impartial and completely credible. In my opinion, there is no such thing as an impartial expert in the fields of politics, philosophy, and economics because these “experts” have the power to influence public opinion. This power very often corrupts because at the end of the day every expert is a person and part of an institution, both of which have interests.

Not all experts are biased, mind you, mathematicians, chemists, and other experts that are generally not connected to politics can actually be impartial because they have no power to influence the politics of their nation through their professions. In fact, you can look at Soviet and Nazi mathematics, and you could not spot any bending of reality, their social sciences on the other hand… are less reliable.

But when we look at fields that are not scientific such as politics or economics, we will find it difficult to stay grounded in reality (Despite Poli-sci and Economics Majors denying the fact to their last dying breath). We cannot perform replicable experiments to confirm or refute a certain claim, therefore we are left with nothing but the interpretations of these “experts” who claim to be “scientific” and “objective”.

The key thing that we must mention here is that people trust institutions far more than they do individuals. Indeed, most experts are experts only due to two facts; that a university gave them a piece of paper and that a prestigious newspaper has indirectly endorsed them by giving them a platform.

Trust in an institution is something that is circular. If I ask somebody that reads the New York Times why they think that the New York Times is credible, they will say that it is because they expose the truth through good reporting. However, what this person thinks is the truth depends on what the New York Times Prints. And so, we have a vicious circle that can be observed not only in the New York Times but in every single publication ever, from Pravda all the way to Infowars.

Once a person trusts an institution, they will also come to believe the narrative that this institution endorses and to get a person out of this cycle is almost impossible. This is the reason why almost nobody is convinced by political arguments, they will not see your sources are credible, and you will not see theirs is credible either.

However, it is important to mention that this cycle can only occur when a newspaper or channel has an internally coherent ideology. Any publication that does not have a defined ideology will not be convincing because they will be unable to build a consistent and seductive narrative that will be able to explain the complicated current events in simple terms. Once a person believes in the narrative, they will believe that they have found the truth and they will interpret the world through this narrative.

This cycle is repeated over and over and over thousands of times as long as this hypothetical person believes that his interpretation of the world is correct. The only thing that can break a person out of this cycle is a hard slap on the face, not from you, mind you, but from reality itself.

In other words, a person that is already a fanatic will remain a fanatic until reality forces him to see that something is not okay, and he starts asking difficult questions to himself. So, this cycle is more of a spiral in either goes up when a person believes more and more fervently that they have the truth, and it can go down when a person starts seeing that the things that he believes are not reflected in reality.

So, at the end of the day credibility does come from the truth and those ideologies and institutions that wrongly interpret the world will sooner or later crumble. However, this is not instantaneous, sometimes it takes whole generations of bullshit for the credibility of an institution to be lost.

The best example of the 20th century is without a doubt the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership based their whole project on the premise they were building a prosperous and classless utopia and most people did believe in it. 

However, this faith quietly crumbled between the contrast of reading that the Soviet Union was vanguard of the revolution heading towards utopia and the everyday reality of living in a stagnating economy. The credibility of Pravda and the Communist Party was lost little by little until there was none left.

Now we can ask ourselves is the credibility of most universities and mainstream newspapers going up or down? Of course, this is a stupid question, if their credibility was going up you wouldn't be here now, would you?

We are here because we are losing or already have lost our faith in the current narrative, somehow reality does not seem to align with boomer progressivism. We are here because we are losing the trust that previous generations had placed on the “experts” that we are supposed to see as authorities on political matters.

And believe me, I've been through the whole process, once upon a time I was also a filthy liberal but yet, in my life experience, I feel that something just isn't right. At first, I didn't know what it was, but with time my opinion formed. And now I believe that our modern way of thinking is fundamentally wrong and that we, personally, will pay the price for these consequences. 

The purpose of this essay is not to go into an indictment of the modern world, but I think that it is important to explain where I am coming from. The thing that, in my eyes, broke the credibility of liberalism is the fact that almost all developed countries are not having enough children and that this will result in a demographic collapse. This has been clear since the 70s, but it was just ignored. Instead, this incoming crisis has been left to us by the boomers as a parting gift.

But by no means am I the only one, there are millions that day by day become more disillusioned (for their own reasons) and are in the search for something to replace our rotting status quo.

The great majority of these people are turning away from the progressive status quo and then doubling down with even more radical progressivism (The sort of people who believe that one spoonful of cyanide is bad, but two are good) . Others become completely uninterested in politics, and then there’s us on the right, that are looking for something else, but unlike the left, we have no unifying vision.

So, we must ask ourselves; how can we create right wing institutions that are credible enough to influence the narrative and appoint their own experts?

Well, the same rules of the credibility cycle also apply to our side. If we want to descend and lose credibility, we must act as deranged as possible. That is sure to frighten away all the young, intelligent and ambitious people, while leaving us with edgelords and peasants with tin foil on their heads. 

If, however, we want to increase our credibility we must take the cycle upwards, we must focus on quality and originality. I believe that an important part of this is not pretending that we are impartial experts on political matters. We are biased, we want to change the way that people think and how our societies work, and we must produce interesting content to do so.

Progressivism was fresh in the 60s, nowadays, it is beyond stale and its credibility is withering away, this will provide fertile soil for new institutions with new narratives. The only question that remains to be answered is what these narratives will be. This is something that we all on the online right will come to define, indeed, the hope that drives this channel is to have a small influence in this coming process.

1. Public Opinion, 1919, page 223

2. An open letter to open minded progressives, 2008, chapter 4