This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on June 1, 2020 - June 7, 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic has turbocharged the polarisation of everything, from US-China rivalry to generational divide. But underlying what looks like class war or identity crisis is the choice between trusting expertise or politicians in an age of huge uncertainty.

We are witnessing the biggest social experiment in history. US President Donald Trump is pushing for a faster opening of the US economy, against the advice of many of his medical experts. These experts fear that a second wave of infections would occur with a premature opening of the economy, which may necessitate more painful lockdowns. Recession is already a certainty, whereas a painful depression looms.

Why is politics overriding expert opinion?

So far, most of the economies successful in managing the pandemic, such as South Korea, Malaysia and Hong Kong, have left the decision on handling the pandemic to medical specialists. They have acted quickly to test, trace and isolate, and the population has been willing to wear masks and follow social distancing and quarantine disciplines.

Politicians can override experts if they feel the public prefers jobs over health or because a sufficient proportion do not trust experts.

In the age of technology and complexity, we basically need experts in almost every field. Blue collar workers have an inherent distrust of higher paid experts, whom they feel are overpaid. For example, health workers are far more valuable during a pandemic than financial engineers, but they are often paid a fraction of what the financial elite makes.

When we are overwhelmed by information overload, we respond in two ways — one is to rely on experts and the other is to trust our own judgement. The internet changed the game because anyone can Google for the answer to any question. The demand for speedy, simple answers to complex questions often misses the nuances and risks that experts learn to judge from experience. This is why experts such as Dr Anthony Fauci are so trusted, because they can express very complicated issues in simple, common sense terms.

But there is a trait that operates against expertise. The Google search engine you use is basically an algorithm that tries to find answers that are probabilistically the aggregate answer from the most “hits” or search views. Today, an academic’s status is related to how many academics “cite” his articles or books. This equates to the democratically popular view that the majority or market view should be the right one. According to the Efficient Market Hypothesis in modern finance theory, not even an expert can beat the stock market. This sounds most reasonable, except not everything has a market and markets can be manipulated and distorted.

All markets or decisions operate on the basis of information. If the information is wrong, incomplete or deliberately manipulated, then the decision will be wrong. Before the internet, most people relied on expert, fair and balanced opinion provided in printed media and/or radio or TV. Indeed, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandated in 1949 a “fair and balanced” policy where licensed radio and TV broadcasts must present balanced views and provide equal time to opposing views. After this policy was abolished in 1987, the US media became noticeably more partisan along political lines. Today’s biased reporting in social media only reinforces everyone’s echo chamber of prejudices, creating truly polarised societies.

In his 2017 book, The Death of Expertise, US Naval College professor Tom Nichols argues a fascinating point: “Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s.” In other words, in a world in which everyone is equal, any individual opinion is as good as the expert opinion. This explains the trait whereby Trump trusts his own judgement over his many medical and Deep State experts. His supporters back him because they made the right decision and they cannot be wrong.

Although Nichols attributes part of the distrust to the level of education and the fault of social media in which everyone’s attention span has been reduced sharply, the experts also cannot escape blame. Many experts “have abandoned their duty to engage with the public. They have retreated into jargon and irrelevance, preferring to interact with each other only”.

There is, of course, another trend pushing expert views to be focused in one particular direction. How many businesses and money interests pay for research that advances their special interests? For example, the tobacco, chemical and energy sectors are famous for their lobbying power that push the good side of their products, without fully spelling out the downsides, such as health, pollution and carbon emission costs. Scientists who work on climate change issues, for example, cannot understand why it is so difficult to find solutions to climate change, until they realise the power of lobbyists in stopping reforms. In short, experts can easily be “intellectually captured”, if not financially captured or corrupted. Many, but not all, simply find it easier to tell the bosses or public what they want to hear.

Why does a very significant portion of the American public continue to support Trump or any leader that seems to defy the view of experts? University of California psychology professor Thomas Pettigrew suggested in a recent review paper that five psychological traits explain why many American voters remain staunch Trump supporters. The first is known as an authoritarian personality syndrome. Self-made conservative people tend to support authoritarianism, advocating or enforcing obedience to authority rather than personal freedom. These people hark back to established ideas, with a hierarchical view of society and fearful of foreigners and immigrants that challenge the status quo.

Second, Trump supporters share a social dominance orientation (SDO) trait, which believes that high-status groups have dominance over the low-status ones, being tough-minded and driven by self-interest. This appeals to the right wing conservatives more than the liberals.

Third, a key trait dividing in-groups and out-groups is the issue of prejudice. Unfortunately, racism is surfacing in a polarised world, with religion, race and migrants all caught in the war on terrorism and geopolitical rivalry. Fake news and conspiracy theories fuel such prejudices.

Fourth, related to prejudice, is reduced intergroup activity, meaning that once a group moves into a “gated community”, they mix less with other people and views become more hardened or biased. Last but not least, Trump supporters may feel “relative deprivation”, where they consider that they are entitled to rights or benefits that are being eroded because jobs are being lost to globalisation. They may also think the government is biased against them, because welfare spending goes to people whom they consider are less deserving.

In sum, we live in a dangerous world in which even expertise and rational debate are no longer trusted. It is hard to imagine that this could happen in the age of science and technology. But Hyman Minsky was right — “stability creates its own instability”. Rationality for too long creates its own irrationality. And if we are irrational for the wrong reasons, that is why the world sleep-walked to two past world wars.

Tan Sri Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective

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