These days, you can’t go shopping for a pair of swimming trunks without expert advice. Experts in all and any area abound by the thousands, expounding their mostly contradictory advice to all and sundry. Even if you are not in the least interested in what somebody has to say, an expert will keep bleating it into your ears until kingdom come. There isn’t a television or radio program that is aired without expert advice while self proclaimed and media hailed experts expound their puny views in newspapers and all over the internet.

We are living in the age of expertism, where anybody with a half baked idea may proclaim himself an expert on just any issue, and if there is no theme you are feeling expert in, just invent a new theme nobody has so far thought of, thereby becoming quite logically the leading expert on a hitherto inexistent topic. And if you are already expert in an area that has become overcrowded, just rename the topic and proclaim yourself the only expert in existence.

This development is due to rampant expertitis, a bug that has infected just about any media in existence. As journalists are hit by the inability to think, let alone write in proper spelling, and as television journalists are chosen for looks not brains, others are called in to do the talking or writing for them. Usually, experts manage to say nothing on nothing much more eloquently than the resident flunkies. In government, the experts are there to advise the no brainers that are voted into public office on advice of these self same experts.

Media play a game of expertation, building up a person as a leading expert just as long as he says what they want and what they want people to believe in. Equally, we tend to listen to experts that propound in line with our already established believes and disparage those that say otherwise. But what the experts tell us in the end is nothing more than we already know or wan believe anyhow. So where’s their use?

Government, business, and international organisation play a game of experticity. Experts that say what they have on their agenda, and who say it in a way with the current policy, are exhorted, pushed, made professors at universities, invited for speeches and pushed on television and other media to a point of making you sick. Other experts extolling different views or divergent ones are just ignored, not published, shunted aside and if possible forgotten. A typical issue is global warming.

Many people I know will laugh at a superstitious person, disqualifying that person’s views on grounds of mere superstition. I don’t tell you to believe or disbelieve in Friday the 13th, but I don’t see a lot of difference to expertition. Superstitions are neither grounded in fact nor science, and the same goes for experts’ opinions, I am sorry to say. So if you want to be a believer or not is utterly up to you.

As you see, I am the leading expert in experts. Now I can sit back and wait for my (highly paid) appearance in Oprah, another expert.