You Have a Duty to Think For Yourself

There's a good article on the veneration of experts and our right, nay, neigh! our duty to buck like a horse and free ourselves of this obsession. Stop genuflecting to experts? That's counterintuitive.

Put yourself for a moment inside this head: 'I have no fixed points of reference. I know wealth is illusory. My rent or the value of a house depends on TV property shows keeping the people geared up on paper profits from a stock market that floats on central bank funny money. How to spend it?  Perchance to dream. Reaction video of my neighbors watching me in a brand new car. When life gets rough, the tough go shopping. Tomorrow belongs to me. It's my life.  People try to put us down. Talking 'bout my generation. From the nipple to the bottle never satisfied.'

The mantra permeates from the advertising poster into every corner of popular culture (why aren't there songs about scientists?). We are sold this way of thinking with the jukebox jam, TV gunk and curated censored social media bubble gum every single day.

Watch Edward Bernays selling tobacco (video below): Here are these great celebrity minds. They smoke. Doesn't everyone? It's a consensus. Become part of it or your friends will laugh at you. Got a niggling concern about cancer? Who made you an expert? Here are some doctors who smoke.

Watch Neil deGrasse Tyson sell experts : "What I will say of this virus is this. We are in the middle of a massive experiment: WILL people LISTEN to scientists? In this case referring to medical professionals." Stephen Colbert: "Anthony Fauci?" Tyson: "For example. These are warnings issued  by scientists for our own good." They are right because they are scientists. The science is settled. There is a consensus... be part of it or your friends may laugh.

Note the clipped, slick delivery of the Tyson/Colbert exchange. Scripted to convince. Like a commercial.


As Kevin Smith's article shows https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/29/the-question-of-evidence-when-governments-push-political-narratives/ that is not how science works and we, humble you and me, have a DUTY to challenge experts, scientists and government on issues that concern the daily living of our own lives.

Experts say... surveys suggest... nine out of 10 cats prefer... Luckies because they're less irritating to the throat but "more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette". https://www.history.com/news/cigarette-ads-doctors-smoking-endorsement

When did "trust the expert" become the mantra of our age? I'm not questioning expertise. I am asking why we buck our own responsibility to decide. Instead of thinking for ourselves, many of us just defer to an off-the-shelf directive which, by definition, is one size fits all and doesn't apply to our situation at all.

It is the "Internet answer", the parting shot to every debate. The appeal to experts is, however, entirely a marketing technique. It was developed by Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew, the father of public relations and author of Propaganda. Far from thoughtful or scientific it's a tactic to bamboozle you (bamboozle: trickery, flattery, hoodwink, mystify, confound).

Trust the expert is nothing more than a sales pitch dating from the 1920s when over-production meant companies needed advertising to make people buy the excess products that they didn't want (advertising: to show people celebrities, to remind them they don't look like celebrities, to sell them a product claiming to make them look like celebrities).


It wasn't long before "experts say" jumped from the lingo of the advertiser to the newscaster. The press, radio and television were financed by advertising and they borrowed its language. The pitch is: trust your betters and don't stand out. Listen up, here's the news.

There is no reason to defer to experts, however. The jurist Lord Sumption bears repeating:  "I am not a scientist but it is the right and duty of every citizen to look and see what the scientists have said and to analyse it for themselves and to draw common sense conclusions."
Or as Kevin Smith says of his career resolving financial disputes: "weigh up the evidence and decide the most likely scenario."

Why are people afraid to think for themselves? Because they live in a dream state: Nobody's gonna tell me what to do but I won't be thinking for myself. I will argue till pigs fly for my refund in the store, for my kids in the school -- but the basis for that argument, well, I just make it up as I go along. How I get my way is Emotion. Repetition. Persistence. The techniques of the bamboozle. Breast-fed to me by reality TV.

It's not ignorance. Intelligent people, as many people have remarked through this crisis, digest 10 incompatible news stories with their breakfast. Actually the brain is a muscle. If you don't use it, you won't stay intelligent for long whatever piece of paper you got from college. That's OK.. because there's still ILLUSION. And illusion will carry us through. People appeal to scientism in place of religion. It is faith, hope and charity. Tell me how it's different? Say it ain't so.

There is little point in delving into philosophy or theology because that begins with the assumption that people are thinking. What if they're not? What if they're driven by psychology and specifically by that branch of psychology called marketing. A century of the self has trained us that opinions can be sold, attitudes adopted, like suits off the peg. Like Pavlov's dogs they respond to certain words, 'experts say, surveys prove (which they don't: surveys only suggest), the consensus tells us'.

This is circular logic: X must be so because the media tells me that all my neighbors think X and I must go along with them for fear of standing out. Except that it is not logic because YOU DIDN'T THINK THAT. SOMEBODY TOLD YOU THAT. Just as President Barack Obama ridiculed small business owners, saying "you didn't build that business", because they relied on infrastructure constructed by government, so we should ridicule people by showing them every thought in their head has been put there by government.

To show you who's boss, the government told you the opposite yesterday then made you change your mind today. Eat eggs, don't eat eggs. Cholesterol is bad for you. Unless it's good cholesterol. Potatoes make you fat. Potatoes are roughage. Don't go in the sun for more than 20 minutes or you'll risk cancer. Take vitamin D supplements because you didn't get enough sun. And on and on. Is there one area of public health advice on which the government has not changed its advice by 180 degrees? And you changed your mind as instructed. Spun on a dime.

Transmission of the virus is far lower outdoors so we can confidently allow more interaction outside,” says Boris Johnson. Err... what about staying indoors so we don't kill grandma? Wear masks, don't wear masks. Chloroquine is effective (CDC knew in 2005) chloroquine is not proven (Fauci 2020). Did you spin on a dime again?

All over people changing their votes
Along with their overcoats
If Adolf Hitler flew in today
They'd send a limousine anyway…

-- The Clash, White Man in Hammersmith Palais

Uh, he said 'white'... he said 'Hitler' ... trigger, trigger alert, stop thinking! Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate.


Lord Sumption warned of tyranny and was immediately attacked in the British press as a stuffy old judge. Yet he's an expert on the rights of the citizen by any definition. The media mocked him just as they mocked eminently qualified scientists who said the lockdown was a mistake, that Chloroquine was an available treatment and that a vaccine was unlikely or unnecessary.

You see, the appeal to experts is fake. The media don't put their faith in science at all -- only those experts promoting a government agenda or paid by corporations to sell a survey, in other words, a product. Experts are marketing. The appeal to science can be a simple sales pitch.

People have a DUTY to think for themselves in issues that concern them, their families, their property and their lives. The appeal to experts, to science, to authority is nothing more than laziness. I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take this anymore.



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