Noam Chomsky's gigantic error during the virus scare is a bit of a puzzle. How could a man who've spent a lifetime describing and identifying ways in which the elite manipulate us into fallacious thinking fall for the most blatant example of what he had been warning against? At the very moment Chomsky needed his clear thinking the most, he failed to apply it. Instead, he came out very much on the wrong side of history.
The key to this mystery can be found in studying his philosophy more carefully, because it reveals that he's a progressive. He believes in experts, and he believes that more government rather than less government is the solution to most problems in the world. Chomsky is a man of the progressive era, and his ideas are decidedly progressive in nature.
This means that Chomsky values expert opinion above liberty, and he values big government over individual liberty. Faced with experts that assured him that we were facing an existential threat, he promptly went along with their advice. Seeing himself as an expert in his own field, he gladly parroted advice from other experts. In the great council of experts that he imagined himself a part of, he came out in support of what other experts were talking about.
This is where another weakness in Chomsky's thinking became evident. The man holds in high regard the language of experts, and he's positively disdainful of people who don't use sophisticated language. He's also disdainful of anyone holding opinions about subjects that are outside their particular field of expertise. If you're no expert on what you're talking about, you should shut up and simply take orders.
The progressive idea is that experts should rule, and it follows from this that only people who are experts on topics under discussion can hold meaningful opinions. But this negates much of Chomsky's own thinking which has to do with the way the elite manipulates us into erroneous thinking, because experts are themselves part of the elite.
The fact that Chomsky fails to see how his analysis negates the very premise of his progressive thinking should have been a red flag from the start. I was never very impressed by the man because of his lofty view of himself and his endless belief in experts and big government. However, it wasn't until Chomsky disgraced himself during the virus scare that I realized that all this aloofness and pandering to experts and government was in fact an error that goes contrary to his own analysis.
The only logical conclusion we can draw from Chomsky's societal observations is to embrace liberty. More experts and more government is not the way to go, and the virus scare will for ever remind us of this, because every expert and every government agency got the entire thing wrong every step of the way.
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| The Emperor's New Clothes |
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