To Question Authority and Knowledge

January 14, 2012 in Authority, Belief, Business Ethics, Egypt, Ethics, Experts, History, Knowledge, Philosophy, Reason, Science, Truth, World Issues

Edvard Munch's "Scream". Image via Wikipedia

Every time we turn around we are confronted with individuals whom we are told are experts or are otherwise authorities in any given realm of experience. Over and above those experts in fields like finance, science, home repair, nutrition, education and medicine; we even have experts in such things as prison survival these days. These authorities will tell you what you ought to do in this situation or that: they will tell you what school is best, or what wine you should be drinking, or even that this religious faith is true while all other traditions are merely mistaken. Experts are consulted by governments for such pursuits as military engagements, economic strategizing, and even social planning. But like most people, I am sure that you, the reader, can think of at least a handful of examples of times when experts or authorities gave advice or said that x is the case, but were shown to be completely wrong.

Over the past few days I have watched a few different documentaries on issues such as authorities and what we can legitimately consider to be knowledge, and two in particular stand out as being particularly helpful for analyzing these issues. The first comes from CBC’s DocZone called The Trouble With Experts and the other is written and directed by Dr. Carmen Boulter of the University of Calgary titled The Pyramid Code: the first documentary demonstrates why you should be skeptical of those people who are labeled as experts or authorities in any given field, while the second documentary uses the issue of Egyptology (and in particular the study of the pyramids and other archaeological evidence) to demonstrate how what we are being told by Egyptian and other authorities about Egyptian and human history may be intentionally falsified. Each of these documentaries can be found below.

The Trouble With Experts

This documentary is 43:15 long and is hosted by Ann-Marie MacDonald. This doc looks at a handful of different types of experts in specific situations in order to ascertain whether or not these people are actually worth listening to. What the documentary shows is that you are probably better off taking your own advice, or the advice of some other ‘lay person’, not an expert. The types of experts that are analyzed in this doc include those in the fields of wine tasting, art appraisal and business management. I will briefly discuss each of these below.

Wine Tasting

Many of us have been told that if you would like to bring a bottle of wine to a friend’s house, or keep a bottle of wine in the house that will impress these friends or other company, that we have to be willing to spend a pretty penny; inexpensive wine, we are told, is cheap wine and not worth buying. But is this the case? Need I spend $100 or more on a bottle of vino, not $20, in order to enjoy a great grape experience? You might be surprised to learn that expert wine tasters are by and large not worthy of that title, for it seems that these experts experience precisely what they expect to experience, which is to say, if a wine expert samples a $25 and a $100 bottle of wine, they will expect the $100 bottle to be better, and so end up proclaiming the $100 wine to be better when the test is over. This is demonstrated time and again in experiments conducted by Professor of oenology (science of wine) Frédéric Brochet from Bordeaux University. The experiments he has conducted in the past, many of which you can find by doing a Google search for his name, were designed to demonstrate the fallibility of these vino experts.

In one experiment he takes two bottles of red and tells a bunch of experts that in one bottle is an inexpensive table wine and in the other is an expensive Bordeaux, when in fact both bottles contained the same wine. However, when the experts reported back to him, 54% preferred the wine in the expensive bottle.
In another experiment he takes a $30 bottle and a $500 bottle and swaps their contents. In the tasting, someone who works at the store snootily proclaimed the wine in the expensive bottle to be the better wine, while a lay woman who also participated rightly determined that the wine in the less expensive bottle was actually the better wine.
In another one he takes a bottle of white wine, pours two glasses per professional taster, but in one he adds a drop of red food colouring and then asks the professionals to indicate which wine is better or more preferred. Not one professional was able to discern that the two wines were actually the same.

So the next time you want or have to go and purchase a bottle of wine, how will you decide what bottle to get? Are you going to go and drop a couple of hundred dollars because you were read a review, or will you decide on a bottle that suits your preferences or the preferences of the person you are buying it for?

Art Appraisal

I have never had the money to go out and purchase a masterpiece of art, though I would thoroughly love to have the original of Edvard Munch’s Scream hanging on my wall. Until such time comes that I do have the money to make such a purchase I have to be content with settling for obvious copies in the form of a poster or wallpaper for my laptop. For many people, not to mention all the museums around the world, only originals will do, and these people and organizations are willing to spend big money on expert appraisers whom they rely on to determine if the piece of art in question is authentic or a forgery. Yet despite the millions of dollars that are spent on hiring these experts, forgeries are passed off as authentic on a regular basis. To exemplify this, the documentary looks at Dutch artist John Myatt, who was charged with painting forgeries and spent one year in jail as a result.

With the assistance of a partner, Myatt produced over two hundred forgeries, from Monet‘s to Matisse’s, which he sold to private collectors and museums around the world, using modern canvases, household paints and KY jelly. While he is still surprised that so many of his pieces were accepted as authentic originals, he believes it is for one reason alone: these high-paid experts are told what they are going to see and thus they expect to see it. A museum curator interviewed in the doc agrees with Myatt, adding that art experts, as with expert in many other fields, are eager to make the next great discovery, and in this eagerness they may fail to ensure all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed, resulting in mistakes being made. In one example shown in the film, an expert mistakenly accepted a piece of art as being an authentic masterpiece, when in reality it was painted by a chimpanzee.

It seems that even with a high paid expert by your side, you might fare better simply by rolling the dice than taking their advice.

Business Management

When I am not blogging, I work as a values and ethics officer, which means I work within the organization to promote a new way of doing business, one which places a greater emphasis on the values of the organization than on the rules of the organization. The reason for this shift in focus is that rules tend to be ineffective in prohibiting or discouraging inappropriate behaviour in the workplace. People tend to treat rules and laws as obstacles to be overcome, ignoring the spirit in which these were originally crafted, and trying to identify loopholes. Another challenge with rules or laws is that they are reactionary in nature: we cannot anticipate every type of wrongdoing or undesired behaviour we will encounter in the future. As such, new rules are always bound to follow anytime already extant rules or laws are ineffective or when the fail to anticipate the behaviour in question. Another challenge with rules and laws is that there are just so damned many of them. While we tell people ignorance of a rule or law is not an excuse, who can honestly expect anyone to know the totality of every law or rule to which they are subject? These are the reasons that there is an increasing trend for organizations to have an ethics program in place and why there is a shift towards focusing on values rather than rules. The challenge for this area of business management, as with all others, is deciding if you want to do this for your organization, and if you do, how to best implement these new business processes (this is also a subject brought up within the field of business ethics). In other words, which professionals do you turn to for expertise in this or that field of business management?

The documentary turns to former business management consultant turned author Matthew Stewart (The Management Myth: Why The Experts Keep Getting It Wrong), who with only a philosophy degree (not that I am in any way discounting the value of a philosophy degree) and a three week management course, traveled around the world providing businesses and governments with management advice. And Stewart says that anyone, even without any actual knowledge in one of these fields, can also become an expert, provided they are tall, wear lots of expensive clothes and accessories, drive the right cars, stay in the right hotels, and be able to master a set of keywords or jargon: maximize, minimize, proactive, total quality management, bottom line, and of course, who can forget about the ever powerful term synergy. Stewart says with these tools in mind, plus a winning attitude, you can be an expert.

The challenge with these experts Stewart insists, is that so many of them think that they have discovered some sort of secret formula for how all business should function, in the same way that physicists are trying to identify an equation that will encompass all physical laws of the universe. The reality is that there is no universal formula for how business should be conducting any aspect of their business. Every business is unique, facing their own challenges and with their own advantages, their own particular operating and business environments, which means that the approach used in one organization is not guaranteed to work in any other organization.

What, then, does all of this mean? Quite simply, it means that in business as with any other area of life, it is a very bad move to treat someone as an authority simply because they tell you they are an authority, or because others tell you they are an authority, or even just because they sound like an authority.

Conclusions of the Documentary

Regardless of the field of expertise, authorities should not be taken as infallible beings. This is not to say that all experts are frauds or that they are all ignorant or that all expert advice will lead you astray. It does give us exceptionally good reasons for treating all persons claiming any type of authority with a natural suspicion or skepticism. Do your own research on the person and on the subject matter in question. Determine what advice other experts in the field have to offer on different issues and see how they compare to the expert you are considering. In short, use your head and put those critical thinking skills to good use people. Never take any fragment of information or knowledge for granted. And if the only reason you have for believing x or taking a particular course of action is because Mr. Authority told you to, then you have only yourself to blame for your blunders.

On this note, of taking no knowledge for granted and treating no expert as infallible, I would like to turn to issues within the field of Egyptology: issues regarding archaeological evidence that is challenging recognized authorities and the story of human history that they present us with.

The Pyramid Code

As I indicated above this documentary is written and directed by Canadian researcher Dr. Carmen Boulter. The documentary is comprised of five parts, which brings it two approximately three hours and forty-five minutes long, and challenges the conventional claims of authorities in the field of Egyptology and human history, specifically with respect to how far into the past human civilization has existed. This conventional knowledge being challenged is that humanity is currently the most advanced it has ever been, and that it was only around 6,000 B.C.E. when humans were still only in the hunting and gathering stage. Boulter and some others that she interviews and follows in this doc believe that human civilization may have existed in a golden age upwards of 38,000 years ago (or approximately as far back as 36,000 B.C.E. In this section of this post I will discuss the evidence presented in the documentary that challenges these recognized authorities. I will also tie this discussion back into the discussion above of just why it is so dangerous to blindly trust any expert.

In order to best present the information discussed in the documentary, I will divide this section into three parts: disabling the academic and scientific communities, high-level technology, and a new chronology. There are other aspects to the documentary that I will not touch on here, but that are absolutely fascinating and worth checking out.

Disabling the Academic and Scientific Communities

Though this issue is addressed throughout the different parts of the documentary, I consider it to be of sufficient importance to spend a moment or two discussing before engaging in the other aspects of the doc. Despite the importance of the pyramids to the history of all Egyptians, not to mention humanity, access to the pyramids and other important archaeological sites for scientific and archaeological research is being denied in nearly all cases by the Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA or the Ministry of State and Antiquities). The Giza Plateau is now surrounded by a twenty mile long, fourteen foot high security fence, and the pyramids and Sphinx are patrolled by approximately 100 military guards at night. Tourists are now restricted from taking photographs throughout the Egyptian Museum, which is further limiting the ability of anyone outside the inner sanctum from being able to study these remains. The SCA is currently denying all new applications for research at the Giza Plateau or in Upper Mountain (northern pyramid). In areas where research is permitted to take place, researchers must pay for and are always under the watchful eyes of a guide that reports directly to the SCA. For a complete understanding of restrictions placed on research by the SCA, please click on the link to their website above and go through the materials available there.

When the authorities that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo when it comes to the picture of Egyptian and human history restrict research that could challenge this worldview in any way, one must question why they insist on such secrecy. If they had nothing to hide, why would the SCA and other authorities be so concerned about legitimate research being conducted?

One can really begin to understand just how much information about our past we could be missing out on if they were to look at a map of Egypt. If you follow the western side of the fertile ground on the west side of the Nile, you will find a number of pyramids and other structures, many of which remain buried to this day. Then pan out on your map and look at how much of Egypt is unexplored. So much potential knowledge about the history of Egypt and humanity lies hidden beneath the sands, and the SCA is pretty much ensuring things remain that way.

High-Level Technology

We are led to believe by historians and the books they write that human civilization has never been as knowledgeable about the world and universe as it presently is, and it has ever as as technologically complex and capable as it is currently. But is this the case? Is human civilization currently sitting atop the greatest apex it has ever mounted? Or, might have at least some of the civilizations of our past been more intelligent and technologically capable than we are presently? As laughable as we are taught to think this is, archaeological evidence from Egypt and other ancient civilizations is revealing that we might have a large number of misconceptions about the past.

One of the plainest things to consider is that to this day we remain incapable of creating even a miniature version of the Great Pyramid, let alone a full-size version. Some of the blocks that were used in the construction of the pyramids weighed in excess of 250 tons, a feat for even most modern cranes, and they were positioned so closely together that not even a razor blade or a piece of paper will fit between them. But in addition to the sheer size of the pyramid, not to mention the skill required to build it, we must also consider why it was built.

Contrary to the belief that the pyramids were built as tombs, not a single mummy has been found in a pyramid. Also consider that tombs are also decorated and there are markings left to indicate who the tomb belongs to, but in the pyramids, like the Great Pyramid, the walls and corridors are plain, which suggests again that these pyramids were designed and built with some other purpose in mind. But what might this be?

There is evidence to suggest that the Ancient Egyptians had an advanced knowledge of the electromagnetic and telluric currents. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines a telluric current as a:

natural electric current flowing on and beneath the surface of the Earth and generally following a direction parallel to the Earth’s surface. Telluric currents arise from charges moving to attain equilibrium between regions of differing electric potentials; these differences in potential are set up by several conditions, including very low-frequency electromagnetic waves from space, particularly from the magnetosphere incident upon the Earth’s surface, and moving charged masses in the ionosphere and the atmosphere.

As with electromagnetic energy, telluric currents are stronger in some areas than they are in others, and the builders of the pyramids, not to mention those who built other megalithic sites, seemed to build the pyramids in one of these areas – areas or lines which intersect, one with a good ability to conduct electricity and one that has a poor ability to conduct electricity (also known as the disputed ley lines). Though the existence of ley lines is disputable, it is not difficult to understand that the energy produced by the earth not be dispersed across the globe in an even manner, but that the geophysical composition of different areas will affect such things as electromagnetism and telluric currents. I do find it interesting that many ancient peoples, separated in some cases by oceans, built megalithic structures at points on the earth where even today there are detectable surges in energy produced by the earth (the ancient Chinese referred to the ley lines as Dragon Lines).

Now, you may ask why it is important that I discuss these telluric currents. Well, as the documentary explains, there is evidence to suggest that pyramids like the Great Pyramid, were built to take advantage of this increased presence of energy – perhaps even to harness it. The Giza pyramids are built using dolomite, which is a calcium magnesium carbonate – and because of its high magnesium content it is a good conductor of electricity. The outside of the pyramid was sheathed in tura limestone, which is a poor conductor of electricity. This, in effect, amplified the energy within the pyramids while minimizing the amount that was leaked – in the same way that electrical wiring uses conductive metals internally and surround them with non-conductive (insulating) materials. The corridors of the pyramids were built using granite which is slightly radioactive and is capable or ionizing or electrifying the air around it. Then there is also the limestone aquifer found in the ground beneath the pyramids. And when rain or flood water passes through aquifers likes this, it generates electricity.

Were the Egyptians and other ancient peoples aware of how to harness naturally occurring energies and use them to their own advantages? Could a system such as the one being proposed here actually be capable of producing fields that affect the environment?

During the 1800′s Nikola Tesla was investigating alternative methods of delivering energy and information, and pursued a wireless approach. to do so Tesla made use of telluric currents (which had just before this been identified by modern science) and positioned the machine that would deliver the wireless energy and information directly above an aquifer like the one found under the Giza pyramids and other megalithic sites. You can read more about Tesla and his quest for free, wireless energy and information on my post Energy for Anything…Anywhere…Anytime? While I may not agree with the conclusions being reached for the ultimate purpose of the construction of the Giza pyramids, I do believe there is evidence to suggest an awareness of the energy being produced by the earth and an attempt to harness it for some reason.

Thus, while I believe we have zero reason to think the pyramids were designed as tombs, I also believe they are evidence that ancient Egyptians and those of other civilizations had awareness of natural processes that we have only recently become aware of or do not yet fully understand.

A New Chronology

We are told that the pyramids, such as those at Giza, were built at approximately 4,500 B.C.E., and a similar time frame is proposed for the Sphinx at Giza. But we have good reason for pushing this time frame back to at least 7,000 B.C.E. and perhaps as far back as 36,000 B.C.E. Part of the rationale for this proposed adjustment to the chronology of history in Egypt is that the Sphinx has endured water damage, caused by running water in the form of run-off from mountains and from rain water. One would have to go backwards to at least 7,000 B.C.E. to have environmental conditions present which would make this type of damage possible.

Then there is the placement of the Giza and other pyramids. The pyramids seem to have been designed to incorporate flowing water and there is evidence of a dried-up river bed suggesting that the Nile once ran right to the foot of the pyramids. The amount of time that would be required for the Nile to move from where the pyramids are to where it is located today – a distance of eight miles – could be in the span of thousands of years – such that the time frame of 36,000 B.C.E. for the construction of the pyramids and sphinx could actually be accurate.

Also consider artifacts such as the Palermo Stone, which traces the leadership of Egypt backwards in time to approximately 36,000 B.C.E. As the experts in the documentary state, it is surely a sign of the arrogance of modern scholars when they believe they have a better understanding of ancient Egyptian history than the ancient Egyptians themselves.

Conclusions of the Documentary

The SCA and government of Egypt seem convinced to stonewall research into the history of the Egyptian people and are even making it impossible to take photographic evidence of the array of historical treasures on display in the Egyptian Museum. This obstinate behaviour is made even more suspicious when one considers the evidence already available that suggests the history of humanity being pushed on his by established authorities may not exactly be accurate.

Conclusions

At least some of those who consider themselves to be experts are unworthy of that title. The Trouble With Experts discusses the reasons why experts tend to be mistaken so often, and this has to do both with the expectations or preconceived notions they have about any given subject or issue, as well as with the extent to which they are unable to deviate from what they perceive to be an established truth or formula. The documentary reinforced the need to treat all individuals and sources of authority with a healthy degree of skepticism. This point is also made by Nietzsche in his Thus Spake Zarathustra in part 3 of The Bestowing Virtue:

I now go alone, my disciples! Ye also now go away, and alone! So will I have it.

Verily, I advise you: depart from me, and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he hath deceived you.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.

One requiteth a teacher badly if one remain merely a scholar. And why will ye not pluck at my wreath?

Ye venerate me; but what if your veneration should some day collapse? Take heed lest a statue crush you!

Ye say, ye believe in Zarathustra? But of what account is Zarathustra! Ye are my believers: but of what account are all believers!

Ye had not yet sought yourselves: then did ye find me. So do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account.

The danger, then, is not simply that others might be intentionally deceiving you, or themselves, but that the deception might be taking place at a less than conscious level. You do no one, including yourself, any favours if you remain all of your days content to simply accept as truth what you are told is so. This makes you nothing short of a fool – and if we were all content to act so sheepish, we would as a species still be trying to figure out how the hell fire fucking works.

The case of the pyramids, Sphinx and the history both of Egypt and of all humanity, as presented in The Pyramid Code, demonstrates that even that information such as this which is regarded as being nearly sacrosanct by some of those in positions of historical authority can be mistaken. It reinforces the need to treat no one and no thing as being infallible – this is the only way in which we can confirm whether or not we know anything at all, or whether we are only knowledgeable in our imaginations.