Politicians (Boris and Biden among the latest) are going down in flames but that’s just the beginning. Just as Henry Kissinger predicted on April 3, 2020, an aggressive response could and would lead to a wholesale loss of legitimacy for everyone involved. His warnings – born of his experience in watching Vietnam lead to a similar disaster – were ignored. Instead we ended up with his worst-case scenario: “a world on fire.”
The word credentials is derived from Latin for “believe” as in “Credo in unum deum” meaning “I believe in one God.” To have credentials is to have credibility, which is to say that people can and should trust you.
We saw this throughout the pandemic. If you did not have the right piece of paper – if you just wanted rights and liberties – your opinions did not count. Actually, even if you did have the right piece of paper and you disagreed with the professional consensus, you also did not count. And through this method, only one opinion prevailed. Those willing to say what Anthony Fauci wanted said rose to the top. Those who disagreed were cast aside.
So the credentialed elites had their way. And here we are with results about which no one seems pleased. Indeed, the long knives are out for all those people in whom we believed.
Perhaps we need another word, because credentials are being discredited by the day. They have led us down a destructive path. This applies not only to epidemiologists but also economists and public health officials and nearly every other field of expertise, particularly that which tied its credibility to the government’s pandemic response, which has ended in calamity for the world.
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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-crash-and-burn-of-credentialism/