False humility of experts

False humility of experts

The false humility of experts is how they hide their own lack of conscious living by avoiding certain subjects under the pretense that those are outside of their area of expertise. In some contexts this is appropriate. If we are exploring fields which are utterly dependent on precise, specialized knowledge, then yes what they are doing is the right thing to do. My knowledge of History is incredibly shallow and very likely biased, which means that discussing specific events such as how exactly Hitler or Mussolini rose to power would be incredibly dishonest, and it's better to admit that I simply don't know those things.
But. When we are talking about realities such as how to live fully, how to softly love those around us, how to commit to what is important and remove petty distractions, or how to be courageous and stand for the Truth even if it is unlikeable, these questions are not technical, the narrow kind that we delegate to specialized expertises. These are central questions which we must ultimately answer through our own lives. And to say that someone who answers those poorly, or avoids them at all, is a coward or a brain-in-a-jar is not an Ad Hominem, it's rather to say that an unhealthy tree rooted in poor soil produces bad fruits, or as Darren Allen would say, it's an Ad Radicem, reaching to the roots to see the whole.

Ad hominems can detract from an argument, for instance if someone points out a factual error in my writing, or an anatomical mistake in my drawing, and I answer by lashing out that they are dumb or have no taste, then clearly I am being emotional and am trying to find a way to not face my limited abilities, and clearly that deserves to be called out.

But to notice for instance that psychedelic people seem to only talk about psychedelics and don't seem very keen on putting in the work required to express the marvellous beauty they have supposedly seen, whether in art, poetry, music, or anything really, is not an Ad Hominem against psychedelics. It could be a sloppy generalization of course, but it is still an observation aimed at the entirety of someone's life and character, not just a few isolated pieces here and there which are convenient to pick apart. By and large, psychedelic people make for very trivial artists, and they are not interested by life as a whole.

Likewise to note that modern philosophers are joyless, loveless brains-in-a-jar who are more interested in abstract, obscure concepts more than for instance the human condition at large, or how to not go insane in our alienating world, or in loving their own wife, or frankly anything which regular people in the real world experience, is not an Ad Hominem against modern philosophy, it is rather the observation that a certain kind of writing could only come from certain people, which in this case are not worth listening to, because they only have ideas about life, but do not know of life itself.

Or as a final example, to note that the so-called "experts" consistently refer to the opinion of other experts, creating an echo chamber which only they have access to because it is convenient for their career and to their reputation, and because they do not care about the Truth, is an assertion not born out of pettiness, the need to drag other people down to one's level, but a conscious statement. How could the Truth be so narrow and be confined to the knowledge of a few people living in their castle in the sky? It can't be, they are in the business of mediation, of forcing regular people to come to them to obtain a bastardized version of the Truth, abusing their lack of discernment for their own profit. This is why they talk so much about faith, which in our times means "trust the Science", because they never want anyone to rely on their own direct experience.

Followers of those experts, whom we might call towerlings, likewise never judge anything based on conscious qualities or experience. They always go by their own self-biased measure: person A is better than B because he's a better Christian/Scientist/Occultist/Pagan/Atheist/Buddhist, or whatever identity they coalesce around. At no point do they reach the ground of their value statements and answer the fundamental question of why their faith, or belief system, or assumptions, are actually valuable. Why is Christianity valuable, why are Christ's parables valuable, why is the writing of the Saints that followed Christ valuable? Likewise with Buddhism, or "Science", or Occultism, or Atheism, or any ideology. Nowhere is this found in the writing of towerlings, they only refer away to more scriptures, or doctrines, or Christian principles, or peer-reviewed articles.
Less sophisticated people are worse at hiding this move of misdirection, of pointing people away to other experts, but it is the same trick at the end of the day, the self-informed mind hiding to itself and others its inability to interact with Reality, and selling its representations of it as the Truth.

The implicit work undertaken by towerlings, whether the ones at the bottom or at the top, is to convert all of Reality into something manageable, so that everyone is disconnected from their conscious experience and depend on a suite of experts to tell them what to do, think and believe, and so that they can create an internal hierarchy based on their (rootless) internal logic.
In other words, it's fundamentally a parasitical activity, one which lodges itself between you and your own curiosity, aliveness, love, and freedom, and instead gives you surrogate versions of those, or methods to reach them, which never work of course because the idea of Love is not the same thing as Love. This then prompts you to depend even more on the "experts" to "figure out" your life. Within the Tower, everything is a problem to solve, even life itself, but funnily enough, nothing is ever fundamentally solved, because "solutions" keep bringing in more problems.

Only the unity of perception provided by consciousness allows us to see a problem as it is, including and especially the parts that we can take responsibility for and which the ego, and the society built by ego, constantly shield us away from. 1 And only from that can we meaningfully solve the problems that we are confronted with in life.
Experts and managers do not sell this type of radical (to the root) solutions, they sell reassurance, they are very concerned with making themselves appear good, and to the extent that it benefits them, humble, but they are not so concerned with actually getting to the foundation and doing something about our problems, because they depend on the very same system which is at the root of so many of our ills, and because perpetuating problems is so much more profitable than the Truth. The only humility that matters is the acceptance of the situation, which is really the same thing as humility in front of God, everything else is part of a human racket.

Footnotes

1 Ever noticed how many ideologies boil down to "these are the things/people who are responsible for the bad things in life"? Ego loves to blame but hates responsibility, whereas conscious people do the exact opposite, they blame no one in particular but take responsibility whenever they can.


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2026-03-12