When a crisis occurs people rush to pay the experts.

But a crisis is usually by definition a failure of the experts.

Let us say you are in combat. You only realize there is an enemy weapon in a particularly place because some of your men got killed by a shot from it. Obviously you need to know more about the location where that weapon was located, so you bring in your people who were scouting that area because they know more about that particular area than scouts reporting from a different area.

But you don’t give them a medal.

Highly paid and well-known experts in our society are usually those who have let the most casualties occur in their area..

I predicted on September 11 and 12, 2001 that not only would not one single intelligence officer even be personally criticized for what happened but that all of them would get a boost in rank and pay. At the time, when people were screaming about the intelligence failures, that seemed impossible.

Today, it is utterly forgotten that anyone ever asked for any explanation for the criminal failures of 9-11.

White agricultural experts and white farmers are considered about the least exciting people in our society. Nobody even knows that, for the first time in human history, there is more than enough food for everybody on earth and when starvation comes it is not accepted passively anywhere on earth.

Farmers and agricultural science have succeeded on a monumental scale. So they get no attention.

A crisis is a FAILURE. We treat failure, especially colossal failure, as the reason to promote people and increase their budgets and put them on talk shows and read their books.

Usually one of the greatest signs of success in a political system is when people don’t bother to vote. In our world where we worship the Root Canal a low turnout is seen as a disaster, a reason to have political experts write books on the failure of the system.

When the American political system was at its most stable commentators were constantly bitching about how few Americans voted compared to the Election Day March in Europe.

Europeans didn’t vote because they were concerned. Quite the opposite. Almost all Europeans considered voting a Duty. They went to the polls unanimously and cast the same vote for the same party.

Americans only bothered to vote when they didn’t trust the rest of the electorate.

Compared to the Communist countries, even the Europeans had too small an electorate. North Korea once reported that one hundred percent of its ballots were cast, presumably including by those in comas.

But no one questions whether heavy voting is a healthy sign. The scouts who didn’t find that gun that killed their comrades will not receive praise. But experts who do exactly the same thing have ensured themselves promotion and book sales.