Experts vs. Common Experience
Not knowing what to do in times of trouble can give so called experts the upper hand, especially when consensus prevails over the freedom to say what we know to be true at any one instant in time. For example, experts say pouring a lot of cement in a post hole will keep that post straight and true. Well anyone who’s ever strung a fence knows that won’t work when four strands of barbed wire are pulling on it through a few wet and dry spells.
In these times of COVID, fear can get us grabbing for something, anything that seems like it will keep us safe. When that something comes from the personal experience of thousands of people with similar fears and consequences — people who have tried many somethings and then experienced a result — experts denigrate this as “anecdotal,” as though not having our personal realities blessed by a local high priest of social or scientific norms makes them inferior to their “official” homilies on high.
Often the practical result of this inevitable clash of expert proclamations and the laity’s common knowledge is more trust for the latter while the former shapes a vague expectation of what might be possible. Today experts tell us “the vaccine” for COVID, in its various manifestations, is very safe and highly effective. One serious conversation with a doctor who trusts you won’t be using his name when relating his comments, can leave anyone with a more grounded measure of their effectiveness and safety. Mine said he will, as will most every healthcare worker, be getting the vaccine soon. But he says it will not be without his understanding that effective emergency treatments for a bad allergic reaction are immediately available if needed.
The danger for us here and now is the growing controls being placed on the free speech that empowers our common knowledge to distill and grow, and be useful. The impact of enforcing consensus over reality is painfully clear in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. Even justices on the nation’s highest court are fearful of the repercussions of a “fact” hearing of any kind that would aggravate the public danger from a political tinderbox of clashing opinion over what is real election fraud and what isn’t. Most of the national media is grievously operating in a similar fear fog, albeit based more on China Communist Party (CCP) pandering, tech firms controlling their ad revenue than on science or fact. Call it selling out country and professional credibility for economic survival.
I’m not criticizing the Chinese people or their culture. Some of the most useful healthcare information I’ve ever received came from a Chinese practitioner of acupuncture whose Bellaire office was located on one of my regular routes through Houston. This was augmented by more information I gleaned from an herb shop and a tea vendor in the same area. There’s a term for this kind of information in China. It’s called Chinese Traditional Medicine (CTM) and its been tested by trial common knowledge gleaned by millions for more than a thousand years.
When Western medical science was introduced to China, the Chinese government declared it superior to CTM. There were even attempts to ban any further use of CTM. That’s no longer the case in China, and ironically, here in the “West” CTM is being considered for its superior effectiveness in treating many things, and studied for its advanced concepts such as Chi, or the balance of sensory channels that interact all over the body and allow an acupuncture pin in your ankle to significantly reduce your stress.
The bottom line here is that practical knowledge and research derived from a multiplicity of voices and experiences is what made the United States the world’s leader in scientific research and economic productivity. When we as a people lose sight that bottom up is almost always the better path for discovery and enlightenment than is one of top-down proclamations, we will have lost the secret sauce that once was in every bottle of American Excellence.
Never let fear of what others may think of it to keep you from speaking what you believe to be true — unless it’s an answer to the inevitable question: “How does this look on me, dear?”
Carpenter lives in Schulenburg.