I fully expect to come back to this post with plenty of Lemmy-tastic comments along the lines of "The people are tired of experts", but left-leaning instead of right.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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This is obvious bait, but I'll bite a little.
The real experts, that sound the alarm and call us to action, are largely silenced or ignored. These people are not in leadership or positions that hold any meaningful power or influence. Our actual leadership is mostly unqualified and playing team politics and tug of war while nothing gets done and the plane crashes.
Can you blame people for raising their hands and suggesting that the pilots, who are crashing the plane through their apathy and inaction, be removed?
Direct democracy would be a wonderful concept for humanity to explore. And the experts who are on the side of progress should be allowed to spearhead initiatives to solve the various crises our species and planet faces.
The "pilots" were chosen by pretty much the process depicted on that cartoon.
Choose people by being popular and saying the right things and you get salesmen types rather than experts.
This is why Education is so important to make Democracy work - well educated people can much more easily see through the bullshit as well as being more aware of the implications of the choice they're making, so tend to chose better "pilots" even thought the one weakness of Democracy in the modern age is that it's pretty much a choice based on perception and hence tends towards being a choice-by-popularity: the better educated are far from immune from bad choices but are a bit better at evaluating what candidates tell them and put some more effort into it because they're more aware of the importance of that choice.
Granted, for actual pilots one probably wants some kind of non-voting process that selects them, but if by "pilots" we mean "those leading a country", such methods are not Democracy, they're Authoritarianism and invariably they too do not select the "pilots" on competence at "piloting" the country, but rather on other personal abilities (like being the best ones at climbing the ranks in a Party, or at managing the support of violence specialists such as the Military)
I'd say a lottery based on merit would be appropriate to choose leadership in certain areas for a reasonable duration. Determining merit could be a sticky issue if misapplied though, and could lead to some of the issues we deal with now.
Perhaps people could vote on a pool of experts for the final decision, with each expert advertising the solutions or progress they hope to achieve during the term of their leadership. It could just amount to people voting on the methods each expert chooses to accomplish their goals, depending on how specialized the office is.
As for leading the country, I am unsure if such an office is necessary. I am personally not a fan of the centralization of power when society is this profoundly sick. We need to patch the leaks in our ship before we can worry about captaining it.
Yeah, but I'm not talking about people being dissatisfied with political leadership. I'm talking about the widespread rejection of experts themselves.
People voting against evidence-based policy and politicians are just a symptom of that more fundamental issue.
People just aren't buying appeals to authority anymore. They are demanding more.
In the US, people just don't seem to trust the status quo. The government is very, very corrupt and has been for a long time. Corporations are shady and many have been implicated in some pretty damning controversies that have affected our health with relatively little consequence. Regulation essentially doesn't exist.
If experts explained why certain "controversial" things are safe and laid out the science and reasoning, a lot of these concerns would likely vanish.
But, we generally don't address concerns, even concerns that seem fairly legitimate to the people that hold them. We attack these people, calling them names - effectively pushing them further down their rabbit holes.
Plenty stand to profit off of their fears and encourage their (potentially dangerous) perspectives. And we definitely don't address legitimate concerns properly (from experts or otherwise), which adds fuel to the fire (and adds legitimacy to these bad actors who are quick to point out these issues).
This is all a failure of media, government, leadership, and education. I reason that distrust in experts is a symptom of those failures.