Have You Had Too Much to Think?

Back when I were a young’un, there was a Melbourne newspaper of some notoriety, Truth. Not unlike it’s late NZ cousin, Truth specialised in salacious sensationalism that would make a Street of Shame hack blush.

In its heyday in the 50s and 60s Truth also ran a good line in hard journalism, breaking stories on Agent Orange and its effects on soldiers, the Maralinga atomic bomb tests and, most famously, the scandal around the collision between the aircraft carrier Melbourne and the destroyer Voyager.

But by the 80s, sex and sensation were its stock-in-trade. Page 3 girls, and the now-legendary headline Snedden Died on the Job – Police Seeking Deathbed Girl, announcing the death of former Liberal Party leader Sir Billy Snedden, who died of a heart attack in cloudy circumstances in a Travelodge.

The thing is: no-one took Truth too seriously. Everyone knew it was a sensationalist scandal rag. In the underground music circles I moved in at the time, getting a sensational story in Truth was something of a badge of honour.

Then there were the American rags like National Enquirer (which, like Truth, sometimes broke legitimately big stories) and its whackier sister, Weekly World News: brimming with stories of alien abductions, Elvis sightings, and “Bat Boys”. Saddam & Osama Adopt Shaved Ape Baby, Alien Bible Found! They Worship Oprah! In Australia, the weekly mag The Picture peddled a mix of soft porn and ridiculous sensationalism.

Did anyone really believe this? I doubt if many did. Some did, I’m sure, but what can ‘ya do?

For as long as I can remember, I never took this stuff seriously. Sometimes I’d read them for a laugh, but I was always well aware that they were ridiculous nonsense.

No government agency told me I was not allowed to wonder if something was “true” or not. I figured that out on my own. Why is this good? Well, for one thing, you would have to be a nutcase to allow the government, or any authoritative power, to tell you what you were allowed to wonder about. Secondly, wondering is healthy. It hones your senses; you figure stuff out on your own. There is nothing more powerful than having to figure something out on your own. It takes something called “thinking”—which seems to be in low supply these days.

Nowadays, though, we’re supposedly too damn stupid and dangerous to be allowed to think for ourselves. Now, the government tells us that we need to have “experts” tell us what’s what. Lest we, y’know, start believing that Elvis is flying his saucer around, sticking anal probes up the jacksies of lone hillbillies.

The standard retort from the Lords of Opinion, of course, is: would you trust your neighbour or an expert to do your open-heart surgery? The thing is, though, even experts can be very wrong, while lay-men can grasp essential truths.

I have a real life experience similar to that little story. When my first wife was dying of cancer, something went horribly wrong with her Port-A-Cath (a device surgically placed in your chest for easy administration of chemo). She got very sick, and had some rather obvious symptoms. I scoured the Internet for clues, and thought I had figured out that the Port-A-Cath was plugged up with a blood clot.

We went to see her Harvard-educated oncologist who immediately diagnosed her condition as accelerated cancer growth at the site of the Port-A-Cath. I said, “no way!” and was told, albeit in different words, “shut up idiot! You are not an expert!” I realized what I was dealing with and to make a long story short, I manipulated my way around his ego and got him to change his diagnosis to “blood clot on the Port-A-Cath.” And I made it seem like he came up with it himself, not me. It saved her life.

So…never underestimate a non-expert idiot.

That doesn’t mean that experts are worthless, or, as Isaac Asimov once put it, “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”. But it doesn’t justify today’s state-mandated Cult of Expertise, either.

The people who most often deploy the Asimov quote in order to shut up mouthy commoners are usually completely ignorant of what he wrote in the conclusion of that column:

I believe every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and can be surprisingly intellectual

Isaac Asimov, A Cult of Ignorance

The point of Asimov’s column was not that ordinary people are inherently stupid and need to be led by the nose. In fact, it was quite the opposite: people are generally pretty smart, but there is a self-interest on the behalf of certain groups to try and keep them ignorant.

Yes, there ARE experts, and then there is just useful insight. I believe we have been maliciously trained to ignore the latter, and pay attention only to the former. But it gets worse. Who determines who the experts are? You guessed it. The “state.” Yahoo…now we’re happy.

“Science” has also been made into the state’s impenetrable god figure that only certain “experts” actually understand. Fauci is one of these “Science Priests.” Only he, and a few like him with a similar appointed position, can determine what science is. So rather than yelling “Fauci-denier” we hear “science denier.” Definitions of certain words, such as “vaccine” and “immune” among several others, have been conveniently changed in order to fit the “New Science.” So now no one can utter anything, no opinion, no alternative insight, nothing, if it disagrees with the hierarchy now set in place.

It is interesting how much disdain is projected on “normal people” making comments about sacrosanct “determinations” handed down from the priests on high.

Not even “normal people”: consider the screeching vitriol poured on eminient biologist Richard Dawkins by an academic nobody gurgling in the flatulent bowels of New Zealand’s universities. Thousands of fully qualified doctors and scientists were likewise silenced and shouted down as “deniers” and “conspiracy theorists”, simply for suggesting that there might be better alternatives to government-mandated Covid policies. Rightly, as we now know.

Yes, there are things in the world that are far too complex for us to figure out on our own. But you might be surprised those examples account for a very small number of things we personally have to deal with. And for the most part, our concerns about complex systems like microwaves, 5G, jabbing with strange medicines, among many others, more often than not turn out to be correct.

Shew Views

No, we are told, the very existence of non-state-approved opinions is “dangerous”. Opposite opinions are not just disagreements, they’re existential threats. “Violence.” As if anyone who simply asks not to be forced to undergo a medical procedure is but one step away from opening fire with an automatic weapon.

Anyone who doesn’t want you to ask questions is someone with something to hide.