The Truth About Expertise Or: Why Everyone Claiming to Know How to Run Civilization Is Full of Shit

A Meditation on Collective Ignorance, Emergent Complexity, and the Sound of Children Who Know They Don’t Know

Photo by Roman Mager on Unsplash

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And nobody—absolutely nobody—knows how to run human civilization.

This is not an anti-intellectual statement. It is perhaps the most intellectual statement possible: an admission that we are all passengers on a plane that no one actually knows how to fly, operated by people absolutely convinced they’ve figured out the controls while the machine does things none of them predicted or understand.

We are, all eight billion of us, experiencing contemporary technological civilization together. Some of us have greater perspective—historians who see patterns, technologists who grasp possibilities, philosophers who perceive structures. But claiming expertise in running civilization is like claiming expertise in conducting a symphony that’s composing itself while being played by musicians who are also the instruments.

The machine we’re in has never existed before. It changes faster than anyone can study it. It has emergent properties no one predicted. It’s made of conscious components that modify themselves while running. And we’re discovering its operating principles by crashing into them.

The Fundamental Pretense

Every “expert” on civilization is engaged in a particular kind of performance art—the confidence game of pretending to understand something that cannot be understood because it’s still becoming what it is.

Consider the tech oligarchs who claim they can optimize civilization through artificial intelligence. They’re like mechanics claiming they can fix a car that’s transforming into an airplane while driving down a highway that’s becoming an ocean. Peter Thiel thinks civilization is a company that needs better management. Marc Andreessen thinks it’s code that needs debugging. Elon Musk thinks it’s a rocket that needs better fuel. They’re all wrong, not because they’re stupid, but because they think civilization is a thing rather than a process—a machine rather than an emergence.

The fascists are no better. They claim they can return civilization to some previous stable state, like trying to unburn wood or ungrow a tree. They point to traditional arrangements that never actually existed—imaginary golden ages when the gene-meme tension was resolved, when men were men and women were women and children played freely and nobody had to think about what any of it meant. But tradition itself is a meme about genes, a story we tell about a past that exists primarily in our collective imagination.

The liberals, meanwhile, pretend that procedural democracy can manage eight billion people’s colliding desires through careful institutional design. They’re trying to direct a murmuration of birds using Robert’s Rules of Order, creating elaborate frameworks for governing something that operates by principles they haven’t discovered yet.

Even the Marxists, with their “scientific” socialism and historical materialism, are cosplaying as engineers of a machine they’ve never seen. They’ve identified some patterns in the smoke but think that means they understand the fire.

The Velocity Problem

What makes our current moment uniquely impossible to understand is velocity. Memetic evolution now happens faster than human comprehension. By the time you’ve studied what civilization is, it has become something else.

Consider: it took humans roughly 300,000 years to go from emergence as a species to agriculture. Then 10,000 years from agriculture to industry. Then 200 years from industry to computation. Then 50 years from computation to global networking. Then 20 years from networking to artificial intelligence. The acceleration is exponential, but our brains are still basically the same hardware that was trying to figure out fire.

We’re experiencing decades of change compressed into years, running modern software on ancient hardware until the system crashes. Every generation before us could learn from their parents because the world changed slowly enough that wisdom could accumulate. Now the memes mutate faster than we can metabolize them. Your children know things you’ll never understand, using tools that didn’t exist when you were their age, preparing for jobs that haven’t been invented yet.

In this context, “expertise” becomes almost comedic. It’s like claiming you’re an expert on waves while you’re drowning.

The Gene-Meme Tension Nobody Controls

There’s a fundamental tension between genetic and memetic evolution that no one designed and no one controls. Genes optimize for reproduction and survival across generations—they’re conservative in the deepest sense. Memes optimize for transmission across minds—they’re progressive, constantly mutating, spreading horizontally, evolving at digital speed.

This tension isn’t a bug we can fix or a problem we can solve. It’s the engine of human development, the creative friction that makes us something more than just biology or just culture. But we’ve reached a point where memetic acceleration has outpaced genetic capacity to adapt. We’re built for the savanna but living in the feed. Our threat-detection systems evolved for lions, not algorithms. Our social bonding systems evolved for tribes of 150, not parasocial relationships with millions.

The “experts” who claim they can resolve this tension are like surfers claiming they can control the ocean. The tech accelerationists want to escape into pure meme—upload consciousness, merge with AI, transcend biology entirely. The traditionalists want to return to pure gene—blood and soil, natural law, biological determinism. Both are impossible. You can’t have memes without substrate any more than you can have waves without water. You can’t stop memetic evolution any more than you can stop teenagers from inventing new slang.

The Shared Ignorance

Here’s what we’re all experiencing together, with equal bewilderment:

• The first globally connected civilization in human history

• The first generation raised on screens instead of soil

• The first encounter with potentially superhuman artificial intelligence

• The first time memes spread faster than speech

• The first moment we could actually end ourselves as a species

Nobody has done this before. There are no experts because there’s no precedent. We’re all making it up as we go, but some people are better at pretending they have a map.

It’s like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, except the elephant is the size of a planet, it’s moving, we’re inside it, and it’s made of us. The economist feels the tail and declares it’s a marketplace. The programmer feels the trunk and insists it’s a network. The politician feels the leg and promises to make it walk in the right direction. The philosopher feels the ear and writes about how it listens. Nobody can see the whole elephant because the elephant is bigger than human comprehension.

Why Children Playing Matters

I miss the sound of children playing—not as nostalgia but as evidence of the only honest relationship with complexity: admission that you don’t understand it but engaging anyway.

Children playing don’t need experts. They make up rules, break them, make new ones. The game emerges from the playing. No child thinks they understand civilization—they just run around, make noise, fall down, get up, and keep playing. They’re doing what we’re all actually doing, but without the pretense of comprehension.

The playground works because it operates at human speed, at genetic pace, in embodied space. It’s complex without being complicated. It has emergence without ideology. Children of different temperaments find ways to play together not because they understand each other but because they don’t need to. The careful child and the wild child, the social butterfly and the quiet observer—they all navigate the same space through trial and error, through adaptation rather than expertise.

When that sound disappears—when playgrounds empty, when children stare at screens instead—we lose the last honest relationship with complexity. We lose the proof that you can navigate emergence without understanding it, that you can participate in civilization without pretending to run it.

The Comedy of Control

There’s something cosmically funny about people having serious debates about how to “fix” civilization. It’s like ants debating how to fix the weather. We’re affecting it, sure—pumping carbon into the atmosphere, splitting atoms, editing genes. But control? Understanding? Mastery?

Curtis Yarvin writes lengthy treatises about replacing democracy with monarchy, as if civilization were a company that just needs a better CEO. But he’s like a cell in your liver writing a business plan for your entire body. The scale mismatch is so absolute it transcends error and becomes comedy.

The effective altruists calculate how to maximize utility across all future generations, as if you could optimize jazz while it’s being improvised by eight billion musicians who are also making up their instruments as they play them.

The techno-optimists promise to solve everything with artificial intelligence, not realizing they’re creating new forms of complexity that make the current complexity look simple. It’s like trying to simplify a knot by adding more rope.

The Honest Position

The only intellectually honest position is this: “I don’t know how civilization works, but here’s what I’m noticing.”

Not: “Here’s how to fix democracy.”
But: “Here’s what seems to be happening to democracy.”

Not: “Follow this blueprint for society.”
But: “Look at these patterns emerging.”

Not: “I have the solution.”
But: “I can describe part of the problem.”

This isn’t anti-intellectual—it’s the deepest intellectual tradition. Socrates knew he knew nothing. We know less than that because the thing we’re trying to know keeps changing while we’re thinking about it. It’s evolving faster than we can evolve thoughts about it.

The Expertise That Matters

If traditional expertise is impossible, what remains? Perhaps a different kind of knowing:

Pattern Recognition Without Prediction: Like a jazz musician who can feel where the music might go without claiming to control it. You can notice tendencies, rhythms, recurring themes without pretending you can conduct the whole orchestra.

Local Knowledge Without Universal Claims: A teacher might understand their classroom without claiming to understand education. A parent might know their child without claiming to understand children. A citizen might grasp their community without pretending to comprehend civilization.

Embodied Wisdom Without Abstract Mastery: A farmer understands soil through hands, not theories. A nurse understands suffering through presence, not philosophy. This knowledge doesn’t scale, doesn’t transfer, doesn’t universalize—and that’s precisely its value.

Navigation Without Maps: Like sailing by stars you don’t fully understand toward a destination that keeps moving. You can get better at reading currents, at trimming sails, at sensing storms, without claiming to command the ocean.

The Wire We’re All Walking

We’re not walking a wire we understand. We’re walking a wire that’s being woven as we walk it, by our walking it, along with eight billion other walkers, and nobody has the pattern. The wire exists because we’re walking it, but our walking also changes what it is.

The gene-meme tension creates the wire—our biological inheritance pulling one way, our cultural evolution pulling another, creating a dynamic tension that’s both the source of our development and the threat to our survival. We can feel the vibration approaching destructive resonance, but nobody knows how to dampen it because nobody designed the system that’s vibrating.

Some claim we need to slow the memes to save the genes. Others insist we must accelerate past biology entirely. But these are just guesses from people who can feel the wire shaking but can’t see what’s shaking it. We’re all trying to maintain balance on something that’s only stable because millions of micro-adjustments are accidentally canceling out rather than amplifying.

The Implications of Ignorance

If nobody actually knows how to run civilization, then:

Humility becomes the highest intellectual virtue. Not false modesty but genuine recognition that we’re all equally overwhelmed by complexity we didn’t create and can’t control.

Experimentation beats ideology. If you don’t know what works, you have to try things. But small things, reversible things, local things. Not grand experiments with eight billion unwilling participants.

Resilience beats optimization. You can’t optimize what you don’t understand. But you can build in redundancy, flexibility, multiple paths. Make it hard to break rather than trying to make it perfect.

Diversity beats uniformity. If nobody knows the right answer, we need lots of different answers. Different temperaments, different approaches, different cultures trying different solutions. The monoculture—whether genetic or memetic—is the path to extinction.

Local beats global. You can understand and affect your immediate environment. You can know your neighbors, improve your community, raise your children. The fantasy of global governance by expertise is just that—a fantasy that distracts from the real work of maintaining civilization at the scale where humans can actually comprehend it.

The Paradox of This Essay

I’m aware of the paradox: I’m writing about the impossibility of expertise while implicitly claiming some kind of insight. But there’s a difference between describing patterns and claiming to control them, between observing emergence and pretending to direct it.

I’m not saying how civilization should work. I’m noticing how it seems to be failing. I’m not prescribing solutions. I’m describing what I see from my particular position in the elephant—a position no more or less valid than yours, just different.

This essay itself is part of the process it describes—memes evolving, spreading, mutating, interacting with the genetic substrates of whoever reads it. I don’t know what it will do, how it will be understood, what it might catalyze or prevent. I’m throwing a pebble into a pond too vast to see across, watching ripples I can’t track, affecting patterns I’ll never comprehend.

The Children Will Play Again

The sound of children playing isn’t just nostalgic comfort—it’s the sound of humans engaging with complexity without pretending to master it. It’s the proof that you can navigate emergence through play rather than expertise, through adaptation rather than understanding.

When children play, they’re doing what we’re all actually doing—making it up as we go along. They’re just honest about it. They don’t claim to understand the game even as they’re inventing it. They fall down and get up without writing theories about gravity. They make friends and enemies without doctoral dissertations on social dynamics.

Maybe wisdom isn’t knowing how civilization works but knowing that nobody knows. Maybe the beginning of real expertise is admitting we’re all amateurs at being human in this particular moment that’s never existed before and will never exist again.

The Truth, Such As It Is

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And we’re all in this together, equally lost, equally along for the ride.

The tech oligarchs don’t know what they’re building. The politicians don’t know what they’re governing. The philosophers don’t know what they’re describing. The children don’t know what they’re playing. But at least the children know they don’t know.

The wire still holds, and nobody knows why. That’s not a bug—that’s the only reason it holds at all. If someone really understood it, they’d probably break it trying to optimize it. Our ignorance might be our salvation—it keeps us from doing something irreversibly stupid because we think we understand.

We’re smart enough to build something too complex to understand, conscious enough to know we don’t understand it, and arrogant enough to pretend we do anyway. That’s the human condition in 2025—surfing chaos while claiming we’re steering, composing symphonies we can’t hear, walking wires we can’t see.

The moment someone claims they know how to run civilization, you know they’re full of shit. Not because they’re stupid, but because the claim itself is stupid. It’s like claiming you know how to be the ocean.

The best we can do is describe what we see from where we stand, help each other not fall off, and hope the next generation figures out something we couldn’t. They won’t understand it either, but maybe they’ll be better at not pretending.

The sound of children playing will return when we stop pretending we know why it disappeared. When we admit that civilization isn’t a machine to be operated but an emergence to be navigated. When we recognize that we’re all equally ignorant of where this is going, all equally responsible for where it goes.

The wire holds because we’re walking it. We’re walking it because we have to. We have to because we’re human. And being human means pretending to understand things too complex for understanding while trying not to break them with our pretense.

That’s the truth about expertise: it doesn’t exist at the scale we need it most. And admitting that might be the beginning of wisdom.

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For it’s here, in this space between knowing and unknowing, between control and chaos, between the genes that made us and the memes that remake us, that the human experiment continues—not because we understand it, but because we’re still brave enough or foolish enough to keep playing even though nobody knows the rules.

The circus continues. Not because we’re good at it, but because we don’t know how to stop. And maybe that’s enough.