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Only the Experts Can Save Us
One of the most pompous, elitist concoctions ever produced is now available at The Lancet titled “The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change: The Lancet Commission Report.” Instances of not enough food, too much food, or the wrong food combined with climate change means that we must surrender almost every consumption choice to the planners lest we all die. Highly credentialed dung beetles have rolled it all into a single giant threat ball.
All eating habits and choices, the production and distribution of all food items, all energy use, and any other product or choice related to such must henceforth spring from the foreheads of our betters. The very existence of market choices of unhealthy foodstuffs, market-driven decisions regarding food production, and energy-consuming vehicles used for unapproved economic purchases must be banned.
If you have an agribusiness-related occupation or work in a bakery and you have ever driven an SUV to McDonald’s they are coming for you.
One expects our betters to exaggerate various risks and problems in order to sell us some statist solution but the scope of this project is breathtaking. Everything we grow, eat, make or buy must be planned by internationally sanctioned technocrats lest we all die. They call it a “syndemic” so it has to be true on account of #Science.
What is wrong with our educational systems such that we crank out bright, technically qualified people with advanced degrees who have complete amnesia about the planet’s political and ideological history, total ignorance of economics, amnesia about their own class’ mistakes and policy choices (anybody remember how we were already doomed 40 years ago by overpopulation), and a total lack of humility or self-examination.
Oddly enough, the millions of people who actually make our lives better, who produce, innovate, serve, and provide never ask us to surrender political power in exchange for what we receive. The apparent invisibility of the happy realities of free markets is a stunning intellectual defect. How well-educated does one have to be miss both the trees and the forest?
Published in General
Robert Heinlein’s take on this has been posted here too many times for me to repeat it, but it applies.
I was watching something last night that couldn’t have drawn much of an audience (on our public station) but it got more interesting the more it unfolded. It was a show about what used to be called “exterminators” who now prefer to be called “pest control” experts. It turns out they have evolved much more awareness of the need to craft targeted treatments without trying to blast everything, (i.e.. heat treatments, electric currents etc.) and gentler chemicals such as one that can be put into termite traps that only keeps them from molting, so that scout termites will transfer it back to the main hive and affect the rest of the tribe. Point being, science enabled the steps (probably industry-funded in part) and consumers wanted help (but not excessive human exposure)…and all of them were educated mostly in public schools and universities….
BUT it’s hard for me to believe that the political class would ever have researched the actual solution,s or apprenticed as workers in the field testing the new methods (which created jobs and led to consumer satisfaction). Yet they love to jump into or in front of such innovations almost suggesting THEY drove all this, or at least with their superior minds, could have done if not so busy trying to fine tune their regulations (which might not have been needed at all) ; next step: on to editing the narrative to prove their superiority by molding history to fit.
When I was but a wee guy, my Dad told me that the definition of an intellectual is “Anyone who says he is.” The definition was spoken with a fair amount of contempt, so I have never claimed to be one and never will, even though I like thinking-type stuff. That having been said, the importance of intelligence is vastly overrated. I have worked for a lot of people who were luckier, more focused, better trained, more committed, crookeder, or harder working than me, but very very few who were smarter. They all were more successful than me, though.
Your day may still be at hand. The guy who invented “Sponge Daddy” and got picked up by Laurie at the Shark Tank probably thought his life wsn’t going anywhere either. For a while it was the Tank’s most successful product.
Where there is life, there is hope, right?