Here we are, staring down civilisational challenges that desperately need rigorous scientific thinking – climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse, technological disruption – and yet we’re witnessing a growing rejection of expertise in favour of gut feelings and Facebook wisdom. It’s as if humanity has decided to throw away the instruction manual just as the system starts beeping erratically.

The idea that class tensions drive our political divide isn’t exactly new – plenty of people have written about how university degrees now predict voting patterns better than income brackets. Dan Williams’ essay ‘Status, class, and the crisis of expertise’ takes this further by showing how status competition has made our entire relationship with knowledge performative and competitive.

“People strive to show off their intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom. They compete to win attention and recognition for making novel discoveries or producing rationalisations of what others want to believe. They often reason not to figure out the truth but to persuade and manage their reputation. They often form beliefs not to acquire knowledge but to signal their impressive qualities and loyalties.”

When scientists or academics share their knowledge, they’re not just offering helpful information – they’re making symbolic claims about who gets to know what, which can feel threatening. On a smaller scale, this plays out in our daily lives all the time:

“We sometimes recoil at the thought of admitting someone has discovered something new, or – even worse – that they know better than we do. When that happens, we are not sceptical of the truth of their ideas, although we might choose to frame things that way. Rather, their offer of knowledge carries a symbolic significance we want to reject. It hurts our pride. It feels humiliating.”

This dynamic scales up dramatically in the political arena:

“When voters are asked to ‘trust the experts’ or ‘follow the science’, these requests have symbolic significance. They ask some humans to grant prestige to other humans – to acknowledge that others know better than they do.”

Williams believes that the populist love affair with ‘common sense’ should be seen through this lens – it lets ordinary folks reclaim intellectual authority from the fancy-degree establishment:

“The populist celebration of ‘common sense’ over expert authority also enacts an exhilarating status reversal. It frames ordinary people – those without educational credentials – as the real source of knowledge and wisdom. It creates the conditions for epistemic equality. It says that there is no need to accept assistance from fancy intellectuals with fancy degrees – and so no need to grant them status.”

This is why you can’t fact-check your way out of a political downward spiral that’s essentially about status and dignity. As long as accepting expert guidance feels like admitting intellectual inferiority, there’ll always be a thriving market for demagogues peddling more ego-friendly narratives.

The challenge becomes figuring out how to offer knowledge without accidentally stepping on people’s pride – a delicate bit of choreography when expertise has never been more essential to keeping our civilisational life support systems running. – Kai