Where the conflict-of-interest thing goes badly wrong is that the point of a Conflict of Interest Act is to create a firm legal basis for prosecuting people who lie, cheat, or steal in government. It’s not to tell us what lying, cheating, or stealing is, or why we shouldn’t do it, as though without experts we would be helpless. And where modernity increasingly goes wrong is in thinking everything we do, from cycling to sex, requires guidance from elite experts or we rubes would bungle it pathetically.
I file such things under the heading “The Illusion of Technique,” from recovering existentialist philosopher William Barrett’s opaque manifesto of the same name. And it’s so pervasive it’s hard to notice, as fish famously don’t notice water. I even have a file “Experts say” for countless times journalists employ this phrase to elevate their own preferred opinion to something the masses should revere, not interrogate.
Think of how the Kinsey Report changed attitudes toward sex despite being utter rubbish even as research. Or that government food guide telling us how to eat healthily where we do not, as a rule, sneer “How would you know?”
Whenever it is revised to admit the previous version was a load of dingo’s kidneys, if only metaphorically at least thus far, journalists and readers marvel at the new wisdom instead of watching the state try to renovate a building and thinking “Thank goodness it hasn’t gotten to my kitchen yet.” Which of course it has, mandating labelling almost nobody reads full of information almost nobody wants, most of which is irrelevant or wrong. Like how much salt you should eat daily.
Your body knows, and will tell you through revulsion or craving, whether you’ve had too much or too little. Justin Trudeau does not know. And even on our bodies’ tendency to lunge for calories because famine used to be a regular hazard, the more advice experts give us on how to be thin (for instance eat carbs not fat) the less thin we get. Just as the more government micromanages our economic affairs, the more we struggle to make ends meet. Notice a pattern here?
No, not the one where I’m off topic again. Because this delusion about expertise is pervasive, from trivialities like how to climb a ladder all the way up to how to be good. Not that we say “good” anymore. At best we now manage some piece of polysyllabic misdirection like “appropriate” or “validating.”
George Washington didn’t actually say “I cannot tell a lie” about a cherry tree. Whereas his successors would say different people experience felling timber differently. But ethics is a pale substitute for virtue and we’re living that reality every day, in government and outside it. Including that when some politician does something wrong, instead of punishing them we offer educational resources on the unimaginable complexity of not handing public cash out the back door to a buddy.
If they won’t impose sanctions on themselves beyond dreary PowerPoint expositions of “Subject to the approval of the Commissioner, a reporting public office holder is not required to divest controlled assets that are given as security to a lending institution,” we must vote them out for being low-down. If we won’t, no law or re-education can help.
To borrow a Ronald Reagan phrase, it’s not easy. But it is simple, provided you’re neither an expert nor a troll.
