Download The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters AudioBook Free
Folks are now subjected to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every degree of education. These societal gains, however, also have helped gas a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled educated debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone understands everything and all voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols shows this rejection of experts has happened for most reasons, including the openness of the web, the introduction of a person satisfaction model in higher education, and the change of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine. Paradoxically, the progressively more democratic dissemination of information, somewhat than producing an informed public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and irritated people who denounce intellectual achievement. Nichols notes that whenever ordinary citizens assume that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic companies themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or even to technocracy - or in the most severe case, a mixture of both.
