In the middle ages priests could intimidate the laity with their complex theological arguments — spoken in Latin — and their knowledge of elaborate rituals to be performed at particular times according to a complicated church calendar.

Today we laugh at all this priestly nonsense, and instead put our trust in experts who intimidate the shit out of us with complex concepts spoken in specialized jargon and mathematical formulas, who have mastered elaborate techniques for performing their professional functions orchestrated in intricately complicated project plans.

Every age has its shibboleths of authority, and it rarely occurs to anyone to question the basis of the authority. They just hear something mystifying and scary and decide to retreat from confrontation out of fear of looking ignorant. But ignorant of what? If we are ignorant of inconsequential bullshit running around in self-referential circles, who cares about knowing it?

The trick is calling bullshit on the whole thing, and demanding to see the fruits. What does all this quantification of angels dancing on heads of pins amount to?

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The most socially intelligent people I know would not be able to sell you on their social skills, if they were forced to do so by the normal methods of establishing credibility in the business world. They wouldn’t be able to outline their techniques for putting people at ease, promoting harmony, making everyone feel included and valued, for making people feel good about who they are. Nor could they create an action plan to take a group of individuals from feeling so-so to ecstatically happy, with set milestones where progress can be measured and with a fixed outcome of a particular level of well-being and pre-defined perceptions of themselves and the group.

If someone were to interrogate one of these socially intelligent people on how they would meet these very reasonable expectations and demand answers on their techniques, their success metrics, their high- and low-level plan. They would look like they didn’t know what they were doing.

Fact is, the interrogator would be the one who did not know what he was doing — but nobody would notice.

This happens constantly — and nobody notices.

This is what is fucking up our world.

This is how most decisions are made in the business world — and the larger the organization the more this is the case. Increasingly in education and also in government, decisions are made in this way, because we think business knows the best way to get results. When we when we apply businessy techniques and get really shitty results, it doesn’t occur to us to question the techniques themselves.

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We don’t know how to think about intuition, tacit knowledge, tacit know-how, aesthetics, or moral values. We subject them all to the same idiotic kind of interrogation, never inquiring into the legitimacy of the interrogation.

Then we wonder why, with all our fantastic quantitative analytic tools, with our amazing technical sophistication, with all our training and expertise we can’t seem to improve our lives.

It’s because, despite all our factual and technical mastery we don’t pay attention to 90% of our experience because we don’t know how to win it intellectual legitimacy — and this is in fact, precisely the part of our experience that matters. It is the cornerstone of our flourishing.

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There’s incredibly little correlation between shibbolethic fluency and the capacity to win real results. It’s time we start judging trees by the fruit, and not on the pedigree of the seed, or the soil, or the cultivation technique. Further own tongues should serve as witnesses. Devices that measure the chemical composition of substances will not do.

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A quote to meditate on: “Blessed are those who possess taste, even though it be bad taste! — And not only blessed: one can be wise, too, only by virtue of this quality; which is why the Greeks, who were very subtle in such things, designated the wise man with a word that signifies the man of taste, and called wisdom, artistic and practical as well as theoretical and intellectual, simply ‘taste’ (sophia).”