Trusting the Experts?

Does it make you a conspiratorial fringe figure if you reject the consensus of elite opinion? Many of the experts themselves believe so, hence the (thus far successful) move to silence opinions outside the mainstream on, for instance, the efficacy of lockdowns. Is it too cliché to point out that the consensus of experts was against Galileo and Copernicus? Or that the political and academic elites were the most zealous witch-hunters in 1690s Massachusetts? Or that the “best and the brightest” of the 1960s got us into Vietnam? Or that most elite institution backed the war in Iraq (those who denied that there were WMD could have been called “anti-science” on the same grounds that anti-lockdowners are called “anti-science” today). I’m afraid that always trusting the experts (however we want to define that), is a bad life strategy. The experts can be and often are wrong. They are at least as given to groupthink and social conformity as are the rest of us. Critical thinking, including a proper understanding of science, remains crucial in the 21st century and when one must choose between the science or the scientists, choose the science. The science, incidentally, shows that lockdowns are largely ineffective—will we recognize this with time the same way we now recognize the errors in Salem, Vietnam, and Iraq? It’s important to keep that in mind when experts tell us, for instance, there is no soul or that abortion is a human right—are these opinions the result of expert findings or elite conformity? Since both impulses are at work, a healthy skepticism of experts is in order.