John Konrad tries to explain the apparently universal intellectual snobbery of progressives, which has brought pretty much every western country into the era of the expert:
Why is the left so arrogant?
Because they put their trust in a global elite. Not directly, but through the media and the universities the elite manipulate.
My dad always said it the other way around: privilege comes with responsibility. But responsibility is hard. Responsibility requires knowledge.
And in a world growing more complex and unpredictable by the year, understanding what’s happening around you takes more and more of it.
Twenty years ago you could walk through Manhattan around noon on a Sunday and watch half the city reading the Times. The thing was massive, but a fast, educated reader could come away with a decent picture of the whole world in a few hours.
Then two things happened.
Craigslist gutted newspaper revenue, and DEI mandates swapped great reporters for morally indignant j-school hacks. The quality and accuracy of information cratered.
At the same time, the internet roared to life and the world got radically more interconnected overnight.
So the elite grew less informed exactly as complexity exploded.
To cope, they borrowed a trick from NASA. There aren’t enough hours in the day to be the best rocket scientist and the best navigator and the best flight surgeon all at once. So mission control compartmentalized. The best person in each silo got a desk. Thruster problem? Everyone turns to the engine expert. Someone’s hurt? Everyone turns to the flight surgeon. The rocket guy never had to learn a thing about medicine.
The elite copied the model. They switched their brains off for anything outside their lane. Everyone specialized inside their own bubble.
But compartmentalization runs on trust. Put one bad actor in mission control, and the moment everyone turns to him, bad things happen.
To guard against that, they doubled down on credentialism. They learned to trust only the experts minted by certain colleges and blessed by certain think tanks.
And the bad actors had a field day. Fraud, disinformation, theft, all of it could happen inside a silo, unseen. And it did.
Then came a mission control director who told them not to worry. Everything was fine. They didn’t know what was going on, but he did, and he was smarter than all of them. He said so, right there in the meetings.
Everyone loves a brilliant, competent boss, especially a charismatic one who seems kind, because it means they no longer have to worry. He’s got it handled. Just trust him.
And trust Obama they did.
But he had nothing handled except his own aura. And he let Marxist actors run loose inside the silos that mattered, education and HR chief among them.
The right was skeptical, so they kept reading, kept hunting for alternative sources, kept trying to make sense of the complexity themselves. Nobody cracked it completely. But they started seeing the big red anomaly lights blinking across the dashboard.
So the smart people on the right kept building broad knowledge while the left stayed siloed. Ten years passed, and the left’s elite fell far, far behind.
They’re starting to see that Obama was a fool. But they’re stuck. You can’t cram ten years of missed homework into a few months. And they’re rich and powerful and have no interest in going back to school.
They have two options. Admit they were wrong and put in months, maybe years, of hard work to take responsibility for their actions. Or keep acting like sheep. If the rewards weren’t there, some might choose the work.
But the system is so riddled with fraud, so many hollowed-out silos kept on life support, that there’s more than enough money sloshing around the NGOs to fund their posh lives.
They have the privilege with none of the responsibility. It’s a comfortable place to sit. They don’t want to change.
But holding that position requires one thing: they have to believe their mission control director has it all under control and is smarter than anyone on the right.
The bottom line is the have to be arrogant. Or the whole house of cards comes down.
Perhaps professional compartmentalization has developed over the last three decades in most areas of business and government, but that is not where the “progressive” left demonstrates its real arrogance. No, they most arrogantly demand that you believe that their supposed area of expertise also gives them the ability to interfere in field where they have no expertise or understanding.
I give you the famous and glittering herd of uneducated, illiterate perpetual children who inhabit your movie and TV screens, the Hollywood actors. Most, with GED equivalent diplomas awarded by production companies, are barely literate enough to read the scripts they are given, and there is no escaping that these people are good only at pretending to be someone much more interesting than the blank canvass of their own personalities and intellects. But, regardless of their obvious shortcomings, US actors routinely preach at their audience on subjects well outside of their very narrow area of expertise.
Politicians are almost universally prone to try to act on issues outside of their area of expertise, and that applies to almost all professional Democrats or Republicans.
Comment by B Dubya — June 24, 2026 @ 01:04
Remember when it was a laugh line on TV talk shows to point out that Ronald Reagan was nothing but an actor? Good times, good times.
Comment by Nicholas — June 24, 2026 @ 09:25
This pretty much corresponds with my own observations. So…yeah, seems right. I read somewhere that the Left is so upset by the Right not because the Right has different ideas, but because the Right threatens the status of elite opinion makers and those they validate. This, also, rings true.
Comment by Chris — June 24, 2026 @ 01:58
I guess a more accurate headline might have been “Causes of elite status panic”.
Comment by Nicholas — June 24, 2026 @ 09:26
It all started with “peer review” decades ago. It got worse with the embrace of p values. Peer review is not a quality process. Yet, academics treat it as if it were. They fool themselves.
The second step was society confusing correlation and causation with respect to education. That’s been even more disastrous than it was with home ownership.
Comment by stan — June 24, 2026 @ 08:34
As specializations get ever narrower, even publications that make an honest effort to find qualified peer reviewers may (will) find that the only people qualified and willing to review papers are, in effect, competitors to the author. Concealing the author’s name and institution only works so well when there are only a few dozen people working in that exact field … and grant money flows more readily to those whose papers get glowing peer reviews.
Comment by Nicholas — June 24, 2026 @ 09:36