Thread on a decaying world.
As the sectors of expertise built upon an outmoded framework for a now dead world hollow out, all people have left are thin bits they grasp ever more tightly. “No, only a JOURNALIST can conduct interviews!”; “But when WSB does it it’s baaad!, etc.
As the sectors of expertise built upon an outmoded framework for a now dead world hollow out, all people have left are thin bits they grasp ever more tightly. “No, only a JOURNALIST can conduct interviews!”; “But when WSB does it it’s baaad!, etc.
Much of the carcass that’s left of expertise/meritocracy is aesthetic-only now—rote habits or signs are all that’s left as the real thing dissipates. So everything from being called a Dr. to the style of scholarship or what signifies “intellectual” etc. today means A LOT to them.
This is also why virtue-signaling is so vital for them all. It’s not just the “I’m one of the *good* people because I parrot the right language and ideas of The Party” bit that motivates them—it’s the unspoken conclusion “*and therefore my expertise is real*” that drives them.
Paradoxically, of course, this dynamic is self-refuting: part of the reason expertise has hollowed out is precisely because increasingly one can attain expert status & be allowed to perform elite functions if you mouth the right words, actual talent and experience be damned...
So as it becomes clearer that the emperors suffer from lack of clothes, the desire to prove otherwise becomes more belligerent. They cling harder to what really amounts to aesthetics disconnected from actual meaning or effective action.
For many, the right symbols and buzzwords become existential necessities. It’s not just performative or to make people feel good, but the only way to keep status and job security by proving and displaying merit.
In their minds they *have* to cement their relationship to the rest of the knowledge class & the oligarchy that is now tightly uniting amidst their top-down revolution against their own disintegration. This is both psychological & personal but also practically political & public.
The problem is that this all forces the naked use of power, of course: if you can seize power definitively & publicly w/enough strength your actual qualifications don’t matter. *If* you can do this soon enough before the game is seen by enough people... And so far, they can & do.
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