Reply #23: I agree, credentials & expertise deserve some respect. But credentialed [View All]

[Hannah Bell]

experts can & have been seriously wrong about many many things, & have serious biases. Everyone deserves the courtesy of having their arguments & not their personal psychological profiles debated, or being told to "go educate" themselves, etc.

I come from a working class background but wound up getting 3 degrees, & spent enough time in academia & the professional world to know those folks as a group are no smarter or capable than the folks i grew up with. The difference = money, power & sense of entitlement = confidence & ability to intimidate or mystify those further down the money/power scale. Some of the most prejudiced people i ever met were upper-middle class liberals who didn't even recognize their own prejudice & the nastiness in the way they expressed it. You could not express a different opinion in that environment without very careful parsing, anymore than you could say nice things about MLK at a klan rally.

and like you say, it creates huge political blind spots.