The Democratic Question That Expertise Cannot Answer

Why choosing what we want is not a technical problem requiring expert solution

This is, after all, a philosophy blog. And sometimes philosophy requires clarification—not because the argument is unclear, but because the implications cut so against the grain of contemporary thinking that even sympathetic readers struggle to hear what’s actually being said.

Some readers have suggested that my recent critiques of technocracy make me sound anti-expert, perhaps even feeding into the dangerous anti-intellectualism that’s corroded our capacity for collective sense-making. I understand the concern. When people are demanding ivermectin to treat COVID despite overwhelming evidence it doesn’t work, when confidence has replaced competence across our information landscape, when algorithmic manipulation masquerades as independent thought—the last thing we need is another voice undermining legitimate expertise.

But that’s not what I’m doing. And the confusion itself reveals something crucial about how deeply we’ve internalized a category error that makes democratic breakdown almost inevitable.

Here’s the distinction that matters: Expertise answers how to achieve what we want; it cannot answer what we should want. When technical analysis substitutes for democratic choice about ends, we evacuate citizen agency and sow the anti-expert backlash we then blame on “ignorance.”

Let me be absolutely clear: if I get cancer, I’m going to an oncologist. If my house needs structural repairs, I’m hiring an engineer. If I want to understand climate systems, I’m reading climate scientists. If there’s a novel respiratory virus spreading globally, I’m listening to epidemiologists about transmission dynamics, treatment protocols, and public health interventions. This isn’t about rejecting expertise. It’s about understanding what expertise can and cannot do—and recognizing that the most important questions we face together cannot be answered by experts at all.

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The Ivermectin Problem and What It Actually Reveals

The ivermectin controversy during COVID perfectly illustrates both sides of this distinction—and why confusing them is so dangerous.

On one side, you had people demanding ivermectin despite the evidence showing it didn’t work against COVID-19. They rejected expert consensus, trusted podcasters over epidemiologists, insisted their “research” (reading conspiracy websites) was as valid as clinical trials. This was genuinely dangerous anti-intellectual nonsense that got people killed.

But on the other side, you had something more subtle and more important: legitimate questions about values that got treated as if they were purely technical questions requiring expert determination.

Epidemiologists could tell us—and should have been trusted to tell us—how the virus spreads, what interventions reduce transmission, what the mortality rates look like across different populations, what the side effects of various treatments are. This is expertise doing what expertise should do: informing our understanding of reality.

But then came the questions expertise couldn’t answer: How much economic harm are we willing to accept to reduce deaths? What priority does keeping schools open have relative to reducing transmission? How do we balance individual liberty against collective safety? Do we treat pandemic response as primarily a medical problem or primarily a problem of maintaining social cohesion? How much inequality in health outcomes will we tolerate?

None of these are technical questions about virology or epidemiology. They are, in fact, value questions about what kind of society we want to be, what trade-offs we find acceptable, what we’re willing to sacrifice for what gains.

Yet these value questions are routinely presented as if they were technical questions with expert-determined answers. “The science says we must lock down.” “The data demands school closures.” “Public health expertise requires vaccine mandates.” Notice what’s happening in each formulation: a normative choice gets disguised as an empirical necessity.

Science could tell us what different interventions would achieve. It could estimate how many deaths would be prevented by various policies, what economic impacts to expect, how much transmission occurs in different settings. But science alone couldn’t tell us whether preventing X deaths was worth Y economic damage, whether keeping schools open mattered more than reducing transmission by Z percent, whether individual liberty or collective safety should take priority when they conflicted.

Those are value judgments. They require normative choices about what we prioritize, what we’re willing to sacrifice, what kind of community we want to be. Expertise can inform those judgments—but it cannot make them for us without evacuating the democratic content from democratic governance.

The ivermectin people were wrong about the facts. But they were responding to something real: the systematic exclusion of their values from decisions that profoundly affected their lives. They just lacked the conceptual framework to articulate what had been taken, so they reached for conspiracy theories and rejected expertise entirely.

This is the pattern that liberal elites need to understand: when expertise oversteps from informing value choices to replacing them, it generates backlash that risks taking the form of rejecting expertise altogether. The response to technocratic overreach becomes anti-intellectualism, not because people are stupid, but because they correctly perceive that their agency has been usurped even as they misunderstand how.

Hume’s Insight: The Structure of Human Decision-Making

David Hume identified something fundamental about how human beings actually make decisions, something we’ve spent two centuries trying to obscure with increasingly sophisticated rationalizations.

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” Hume wrote, in a line that’s been misunderstood ever since. People hear this as advocating irrationality, as suggesting we should just feel our way through life without thinking. But that’s precisely backwards.

Hume’s point is about the structure of practical reasoning itself. Reason is a tool—indispensable—but it cannot set its own goals. Passion aims; reason steers. Your passions, your desires, your values, your sense of what matters—these provide the direction. Reason helps you navigate toward what you care about, helps you distinguish effective from ineffective means, helps you recognize when your beliefs conflict with reality or with each other.

But without passion to provide motivation and direction, reason has nothing to work with. A purely rational being with no desires, no values, no emotional responses would have no reason to do anything at all. It would be paralyzed not by an excess of feeling but by its complete absence.

This leads to what Hume called “the is-ought problem,” sometimes known as Hume’s Guillotine because it cuts cleanly between two different domains of understanding: you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” No amount of factual observation about how the world works can tell you how it should work.

Science can tell us that humans experience pain when injured, that societies with certain institutions tend to be more prosperous, that climate patterns are changing in specific ways. But science alone cannot tell us that we should care about pain, that prosperity is what we ought to pursue, that we have obligations to future generations.

The gap between “is” and “ought” isn’t a problem to be solved by better logic or more complete information. It’s the space where human values, human meaning, human purpose must be constructed through the exercise of our faculties—reason, yes, but also emotion, imagination, moral intuition.

This isn’t philosophical abstraction. It’s the most practical distinction imaginable.

Should We Go to Mars?

If you want to go to Mars, you need experts. You need scientists and engineers to figure out propulsion systems, life support, radiation shielding, landing mechanics. The technical challenges are immense, and solving them requires specialized knowledge accumulated over decades of training and research.

But one must first choose that you want to go to Mars. And that’s not a question of expertise.

An expert in orbital mechanics can tell you what’s possible, what it would cost, what we’d have to sacrifice to get there. An expert in human physiology can explain what the journey would do to the human body. An expert in economics can calculate what we could achieve instead with those resources. But no propulsion model tells you whether Mars is worth more than universal pre-K. That’s a choice.

That’s a question of values. What do we care about? What are we trying to achieve as a civilization? How do we weigh the romance of exploration against immediate human needs? How do we balance long-term species survival against present suffering? These aren’t technical questions. They’re questions about what we collectively value, what future we want to build, what kind of civilization we want to be.

Expertise can inform this choice. It can help us understand the implications of different values, the trade-offs involved, the likely consequences of various paths. But it cannot make the choice for us. That’s not expertise failing—that’s expertise working exactly as it should, providing information that citizens can use to make informed decisions about the direction of their collective life.

The confusion happens when we treat choosing our goals as if it were the same kind of problem as figuring out how to achieve them. When we let experts decide not just how to get to Mars, but whether we should try. When we transform questions of values—what do we want?—into questions of technique—what is optimal according to expert analysis?

This is what I’ve been calling the analytical frame: a mode of thinking that treats value questions as technical problems requiring expert solutions rather than as ongoing tensions to be navigated through democratic engagement.

The Difference Between Complicated and Complex

Complicated: Many parts, predictable relationships → expertise can optimize (building bridges, developing vaccines, calculating orbital mechanics)

Complex: Irreducible value tensions → only citizens can choose (liberty vs. security, equality vs. efficiency, tradition vs. progress)

Error: Treating complex ends as complicated means → technocracy → democratic collapse

Complicated problems—like building a bridge or calculating orbital mechanics—have many parts but predictable relationships. You can understand them by analyzing components and how they fit together. Expertise accumulates. Better analysis produces better solutions. There are right answers that experts can discover.

Complex problems—like how to balance liberty and security, or how to weigh present needs against future obligations—don’t work this way. They involve irreducible tensions between values that can’t be optimized away. They require ongoing navigation rather than final solutions. They demand normative judgments that no amount of empirical analysis can resolve.

When you treat complex value questions as complicated technical problems, you get expert-designed solutions that optimize for the wrong things. You get policies that make perfect sense according to the metrics experts chose to prioritize, while systematically ignoring the values citizens actually hold.

This is why so much expert-designed policy fails in practice. Not because the analysis was wrong per se, but because it was answering the wrong question. Citizens didn’t need better optimization according to expert-selected criteria. They needed their values to be part of determining what criteria matter in the first place.

The Democratic Deficit

Democracy isn’t just about voting for representatives. It’s not even primarily about procedural legitimacy, though that matters. At its core, democracy is about who gets to decide what we collectively want—what values we’ll pursue, what future we’ll build, what kind of community we’ll be.

When these decisions get remade as technical problems requiring expert management, democratic agency disappears—not because anyone explicitly denies it, but because the questions citizens are competent to answer (what do we value?) get replaced by questions that require specialized knowledge (what solution optimizes for these expert-determined criteria?).

Consider healthcare policy. Experts can tell us how different systems affect health outcomes, how various financing mechanisms distribute costs, what organizational structures produce efficiency. This expertise is valuable. We should absolutely consult it.

But the fundamental questions aren’t technical: How much inequality in health outcomes will we accept? What priority does healthcare access have relative to other social goods? How do we balance individual choice against collective responsibility? Do we treat healthcare as a human right or a commodity?

These are value questions. They require normative judgments about what kind of society we want to live in, what obligations we have to each other, what vision of human flourishing we’re pursuing. Experts can inform these judgments by explaining implications and trade-offs. But they cannot make these judgments for us without evacuating the democratic content from democratic governance.

Yet this is precisely what happens when we treat healthcare reform as a technical problem requiring expert solution. The policy gets crafted by people with specialized knowledge, justified through economic analyses most citizens can’t evaluate, passed through legislative processes most people can’t follow. When citizens object—not to the technical details but to the values embedded in the proposal—they’re told they don’t understand the complexity.

But they do understand. They understand perfectly well that their values are being excluded from decisions that affect their lives. When citizens push back on a 900-page bill, they’re usually not rejecting actuarial math—they’re asking who decided what we’re optimizing for.

This is the democratic deficit. This is the vacuum that authoritarian populists fill. This is why technocratic liberalism keeps losing to fascist demagoguery even though technocratic liberalism is better on every conceivable policy metric.

When Expertise Pretends to Answer Value Questions

The most dangerous form of this confusion isn’t when experts openly advocate for their preferred values—that’s honest enough that citizens can reject it if they disagree. The danger comes when expertise presents value judgments as if they were technical conclusions, when normative choices get disguised as empirical necessities.

“The economy requires these structural adjustments.”

“Efficiency demands this organizational reform.”

“Evidence-based policy leads to this conclusion.”

Notice what’s happening in each case: a value judgment (we should prioritize this conception of economic health, this understanding of efficiency, this definition of successful outcomes) gets presented as a technical necessity discovered through expert analysis.

When analysis decides ends, citizens don’t hear “rigor”; they hear “overrule.”

Consider the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Experts told us that bank bailouts were necessary, that allowing major financial institutions to fail would cause unacceptable economic harm, that TARP was the only viable option. Maybe all of that was true as economic analysis. But embedded in that analysis were value judgments: that preserving the financial system as structured mattered more than punishing irresponsible actors, that systemic stability outweighed distributional justice, that the pain of working people who’d lose jobs in a deeper recession was worth more than the moral hazard created by rewarding failure.

These are legitimate value judgments. Reasonable people can disagree about the right balance. But they’re not technical conclusions that follow inevitably from economic expertise. They’re normative choices about what we prioritize, who we protect, what kind of economy we want to have.

When expertise presents these choices as technical necessities rather than value judgments, it doesn’t just make a category error—it systematically excludes citizens from the decisions that most profoundly affect their lives. It tells them: this is too complicated for you to understand, trust us to manage it for you.

And after decades of this, working people stopped trusting. Not because they’re stupid or irrational, but because they correctly perceived that the system was making choices for them under the guise of technical necessity, that their values were being systematically excluded from governance, that “trust the experts” meant surrendering agency over their own lives.

On Immigration

Consider immigration policy, since it’s so contentious and so often presented as requiring expert management.

Experts can tell us how immigration affects wages in different sectors, what fiscal impacts immigrants have on public services, how cultural integration happens or doesn’t across generations, what enforcement mechanisms are more or less effective, what economic benefits immigration provides. All of this matters. We should absolutely consult expertise when making immigration policy.

But the fundamental questions aren’t technical: How much cultural change are we willing to accept? What obligations do we have to people not yet in our community? How do we balance economic benefits against cultural anxiety? What priority does maintaining existing community character have versus extending opportunity? Do we see America as defined by geography and history, or by principles and values?

Again, these are value questions. They require normative judgments about identity, obligation, community, and the kind of nation we want to be. No amount of economic analysis can tell you the right answer. No demographic study can resolve these tensions. No expert can determine what you should value.

What happens instead is that people with certain values—usually cosmopolitan, educated professionals who benefit from immigration and don’t experience it as cultural threat—design “optimal” immigration policies according to their values, then present those policies as technical necessities discovered through expert analysis.

When working-class citizens who hold different values object, they’re told they’re being irrational, xenophobic, or insufficiently educated to understand the complexity. But they understand perfectly well. They’re not objecting to the technical analysis. They’re objecting to having someone else’s values imposed on them through expertise that claims to be value-neutral.

Calling a value disagreement “misinformation” is how you radicalize a neighbor who merely wanted a say.

This is the pattern that repeats across every major policy domain: experts with particular values design optimal solutions according to those values, then present the solutions as technical necessities that follow from expertise rather than as value judgments that embedded normative choices citizens might legitimately contest.

The Cancer Analogy, Extended

So let’s return to the cancer example, because it clarifies everything.

If I get cancer, I’m going to an oncologist. The oncologist has specialized knowledge I lack about tumor biology, treatment options, side effects, survival rates. I need that expertise. I would be foolish not to consult it.

But here’s what actually happens in that consultation if it goes well:

The oncologist explains what kind of cancer I have, how aggressive it is, what my prognosis looks like without treatment. Then the oncologist presents options: surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, various combinations. For each option, the oncologist explains what the treatment involves, what the likely outcomes are, what the side effects will be, what the trade-offs look like.

The oncologist might even have a recommendation based on clinical experience and statistical outcomes. But the choice remains mine.

Because the choice isn’t purely technical. It involves value judgments the oncologist cannot make for me: How much suffering am I willing to endure for how much chance at more life? What quality of life matters more to me than quantity? How much risk am I comfortable taking? What matters most to me in whatever time I have left?

These questions require normative judgments about what makes life worth living, what I value, what trade-offs I’m willing to accept. The oncologist can inform these judgments by explaining implications and likely outcomes. But the oncologist cannot make them for me—not because the oncologist lacks expertise about cancer, but because these aren’t questions about cancer. They’re questions about what I value, what kind of life I want to live, what matters most to me.

A bad oncologist would say: “The data clearly shows this treatment protocol is optimal. You should do this.” This presents a value judgment (we should optimize for maximum survival time regardless of suffering) as if it were a technical conclusion that follows from medical expertise.

A good oncologist says: “Here are your options. Here’s what each one involves and what outcomes we’d expect. Here’s what I’d recommend and why. But the choice is yours, because only you can decide what matters most to you.”

The good oncologist respects the distinction between technical expertise (how cancer works, what treatments do) and value judgments (what kind of life is worth fighting for, what trade-offs are acceptable). The bad oncologist collapses that distinction, presenting value judgments as if they were technical necessities.

A healthy polity works like the good oncologist.

Now scale this up to society. Democratic governance should work like the good oncologist. Experts explain options, implications, trade-offs. They might even make recommendations based on their understanding of likely outcomes. But the choice remains with citizens, because the choice involves value judgments about what kind of society we want to live in, what we’re willing to sacrifice for what gains, what matters most to us as a political community.

Technocratic governance works like the bad oncologist. Experts determine what’s optimal according to their values, then present it as a technical necessity that follows from expertise. When citizens object, they’re told they don’t understand the complexity—not that they’re making different value judgments, but that they’re insufficiently educated to grasp the technical analysis.

This is the confusion that’s destroying democracy. And it’s a confusion that benefits experts, because it expands their authority from informing democratic choice to replacing it.

The Motivation Question

Why does this confusion persist? Why do smart, well-meaning people keep collapsing the distinction between technical expertise and value judgments?

Part of it is genuine confusion. When you spend your life developing specialized knowledge, when you’ve internalized sophisticated frameworks for analyzing complex systems, it becomes genuinely difficult to see where analysis ends and values begin. Your values shaped what questions you asked, what you studied, what frameworks you found compelling. They’re baked into your expertise in ways you may not even recognize.

Part of it is professional incentive. If policy questions are purely technical, then experts should make policy decisions. If policy questions involve value judgments, then experts are just advisers to democratic choice. The first position grants far more power and authority than the second.

Part of it is class interest. The people with credentials and specialized knowledge tend to share certain values—cosmopolitan, meritocratic, optimizing, progressive in the contemporary sense. When expertise claims to answer value questions, it systematically privileges the values of credentialed professionals over the values of everyone else.

Part of it is sincere conviction that ordinary people will make bad choices if left to their own devices. Many experts genuinely believe that citizens lack the knowledge, sophistication, or rationality to make good decisions about complex policy. They see expert management not as usurpation of democratic authority but as necessary stewardship of people who can’t govern themselves.

This last motivation is especially pernicious because it’s often well-intentioned. These aren’t would-be tyrants seeking power. They’re smart people who’ve concluded that democracy doesn’t work, that ordinary people are too ignorant or irrational to make good choices, that the complexity of modern governance requires expert management whether citizens like it or not.

But this conclusion mistakes disagreement about values for insufficient comprehension of facts. When citizens reject expert recommendations, it’s usually not because they don’t understand the technical analysis. It’s because they have different values, different priorities, different judgments about what trade-offs are acceptable.

The technocrat sees citizens choosing policies that won’t optimize for the outcomes the technocrat values, and concludes that citizens are making mistakes. But citizens aren’t trying to optimize for what technocrats value. They’re pursuing their own values, making their own judgments about what matters, exercising their democratic right to be wrong by expert standards.

The Way Forward Requires Intellectual Honesty

Here’s what I’m asking for: intellectual honesty about the distinction between technical questions and value questions, between expertise that informs democratic choice and expertise that replaces it.

When you’re advocating for a policy, be honest about the values embedded in it. Don’t present value judgments as technical necessities. Don’t hide normative choices behind claims of empirical analysis. Say clearly: “I think we should prioritize X over Y, and here’s why, and here’s what expertise tells us about how to achieve X.”

When you’re consulting expertise, be clear about what you’re asking experts to evaluate. “Given that we value X, what’s the most effective way to achieve it?” is a legitimate question for experts. “What should we value?” is not.

When you’re making democratic arguments, distinguish between “this policy won’t achieve what its proponents claim” (an empirical critique that requires expertise) and “this policy pursues the wrong goals” (a value critique that requires democratic deliberation).

When you’re designing institutions, create structures that force the distinction between value questions and technical questions into visibility. Don’t let experts make decisions that embed contestable value judgments without explicit democratic authorization of those values.

This isn’t about diminishing expertise. It’s about properly understanding what expertise can contribute to democratic life and what must remain democratic choice regardless of expert opinion.

Restoring Democratic Navigation: Concrete Proposals

We need institutional reforms that respect the distinction between means and ends, between technical analysis and value choice. Here are some concrete proposals:

First, establish deliberative assemblies—citizens’ juries drawn by lottery from the general population—to set ends, with expert panels advising on means. These assemblies would deliberate on questions like “what priority should healthcare access have relative to other social goods?” or “how should we balance economic growth against environmental protection?” Experts would present options and explain trade-offs, but citizens would make the normative choices about what we’re optimizing for.

Second, require that policy white papers include a “value choices made” section distinct from “evidence consulted.” This would force policymakers to be explicit about the normative judgments embedded in their proposals rather than disguising them as technical necessities. Citizens could then contest the values chosen without having to master the technical analysis.

Third, mandate option sets: experts must present two to three feasible pathways keyed to different value prioritizations. Rather than presenting “the optimal policy” as if there’s only one right answer, experts would show what different policies would achieve if we prioritize efficiency versus equality, individual liberty versus collective security, short-term benefits versus long-term sustainability. Citizens would then choose which set of trade-offs aligns with their values.

These proposals maintain respect for expertise while returning value choices to democratic deliberation. Experts retain their proper role—informing citizens about what’s possible, what different paths would achieve, what trade-offs are involved. But citizens reclaim their proper role—deciding what kind of society we want to build, what values we’ll pursue, what future we’ll create together.

The Normative Harmony Between Democracy and Expertise

There’s a way to hold these together—to respect both expertise and democratic choice without collapsing one into the other. I’ve called this a normative harmony: the productive tension between different values that generates better outcomes than either value alone.

Democratic choice without expertise becomes mob rule, populist irrationality, confident incompetence making catastrophic decisions. We’ve seen this. It’s dangerous. It leads to people who don’t understand basic epidemiology making public health decisions, to people who can’t read a balance sheet managing the economy, to people rejecting vaccines based on conspiracy theories.

But expertise without democratic choice becomes technocratic tyranny, rule by credentialed elites who answer to no one, decisions that optimize for values citizens never chose. We’re seeing this too. It’s equally dangerous. It leads to policies that work perfectly according to expert metrics while failing to serve the people they’re supposedly designed for.

The harmony comes from recognizing that we need both: expertise to inform democratic choice, democracy to ensure that expertise serves rather than replaces citizen agency.

Experts should tell us what’s true, what’s possible, what will happen if we pursue different paths. They should explain implications, identify trade-offs, challenge our assumptions with evidence, help us understand complexity we couldn’t grasp without their knowledge.

But citizens should decide what we value, what future we want to build, what trade-offs we’re willing to accept, what kind of community we’ll be. Not because citizens are always right, but because these are questions that require normative judgments that no amount of expertise can resolve.

When these work together—when expertise informs but doesn’t replace democratic choice—you get something more powerful than either alone: collective decision-making that’s both well-informed and democratically legitimate, both empirically grounded and values-responsive, both technically sophisticated and genuinely responsive to what citizens actually want.

This is what holding the center requires: refusing to let either democratic populism or expert technocracy win by eliminating the other, maintaining the creative tension between them, trusting that navigation of this tension produces better outcomes than final victory for either side.

Two Plus Two Equals Four

There are simple truths that withstand any amount of sophisticated argument:

Ivermectin doesn’t treat COVID-19. This is a fact that expertise can determine and citizens cannot legitimately contest.

But whether we should prioritize reducing deaths from COVID over preventing economic collapse—that’s a value judgment that expertise can inform but cannot determine for us.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. These truths don’t depend on what we want or value. Expertise discovers them, and democratic choice cannot unmake them.

But what we should do with our twenty-four hours, how we should structure our days, what kind of life is worth living—these questions require normative judgments that remain democratic choices regardless of what experts recommend.

The analytical frame confuses these categories. It treats value questions as if they were factual questions requiring expert determination. It presents contestable normative choices as if they were empirical necessities that follow from technical analysis.

Breaking this confusion requires intellectual honesty from everyone involved: experts admitting the limits of what their expertise can determine, citizens accepting that facts constrain what’s possible, democratic institutions creating space for genuine deliberation about values while still consulting expertise about means.

This is hard work. It’s much easier to let experts decide everything and call it rational governance. Or to reject all expertise and call it democratic choice. The analytical frame seduces because it promises to eliminate the hard work of distinguishing between facts and values, between technical questions and normative judgments, between what expertise can determine and what must remain democratic choice.

But there’s no shortcut. Democracy requires citizens capable of making this distinction, experts willing to respect it, and institutions designed to maintain it even when powerful forces would collapse it.

The Wire Still Holds

The center holds when we maintain the distinction between what expertise can determine (facts, implications, technical means) and what requires democratic choice (values, priorities, normative ends).

The center collapses when we let either side claim total authority—when we either reject expertise as elitist conspiracy or defer to expertise as if it could answer our value questions for us.

Walking the wire means holding this tension consciously: respecting expertise enough to let it inform our choices without respecting it so much that we let it make our choices for us.

If I get cancer, I’m going to an oncologist. But I’m not delegating to that oncologist the question of what kind of life is worth fighting for, what suffering I’m willing to endure, what trade-offs I find acceptable. Those are my questions to answer, informed by but not determined by medical expertise.

And if we want to build a civilization worth living in, we need experts. But we cannot delegate to experts the questions of what kind of civilization we want to build, what values we’ll pursue, what future we’ll create together. Those are our questions to answer, informed by but not determined by expert analysis.

The technocratic liberal establishment forgot this. They spent so long optimizing governance according to expert analysis that they forgot to ask whether citizens wanted what was being optimized for. They treated democracy as a complicated system requiring sophisticated management rather than a complex emergence requiring ongoing navigation.

And now we’re paying the price: legitimate democratic rage at being excluded from decisions channeled toward authoritarian demagogues, because we lack the vocabulary to say “experts should inform but not replace democratic choice” without sounding like we’re rejecting expertise entirely.

This is why clarity matters. This is why we need precise language for the distinction between technical questions and value questions, between expertise that informs and expertise that replaces, between facts that constrain and values that direct.

Not because I’m anti-expert—I’m not. But because conflating these categories is destroying both expertise and democracy, leaving us with neither good analysis nor legitimate governance, neither technical competence nor democratic authority.

The song is already playing. The question is whether we can learn to dance with both expertise and democracy as partners—neither dominating, both contributing, creating together something neither could achieve alone.

You can dance, if you want to. But first you have to understand what expertise can tell you (how to move) versus what you have to decide for yourself (where you want to go).

The wire still holds. But only if we maintain the distinction between means and ends, between facts and values, between what expertise can determine and what must remain forever a democratic choice.

For this is, after all, a philosophy blog. And sometimes the most important philosophical work is clarifying distinctions that power would prefer to keep collapsed.

Two plus two equals four. But what we should do with that knowledge remains our choice to make.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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