Modern society in general and the academic institution in particular depend on systems and processes that allow perceived experts to control the context in which so-called facts are understood. Efforts to manage  the unexpected ways contexts change and the relevance of facts shifts is a powerful form of organised hypocrisy, writes Steve Fuller. 

When the late US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan quipped, ‘You’re entitled to your own beliefs but not your own facts’, he forgot to explain that it was because the facts belong only to the experts. The hidden conceit is Platonic: The plebs have ‘beliefs’, the experts ‘facts’. Moynihan’s mode of address is characteristic of experts. What the experts say may be true but it’s never the whole truth because they are hiding the context from you. In this sense, expertise is an especially potent form of organized hypocrisy.

To be sure, the experts themselves control only some of the relevant context. The part they control rests on everyone assuming that facts must be understood ‘properly’. This part makes the expert appear like a custodian of some intellectual commons. Higher education certainly reinforces this perspective, though it has been seriously eroded over the past quarter century by the internet. But generally speaking, modern societies are structured to make it relatively easy for experts to control that part of the context.

Experts want to be the first to announce that the context has changed, and therefore the facts are not quite as they had originally seemed.

The part that experts don’t control is that contexts change over time and in unexpected ways, which means that the significance of the facts also changes. Here the experts want to ensure that these changes are publicized only once they are ready to take full advantage of them. This leads experts to be ‘economical’ with the truth in the manner of my Platonic gloss of Moynihan’s quip. They want to be the first to announce that the context has changed, and therefore the facts are not quite as they had originally seemed. In practice, this means that most critiques, objections, anomalies are ignored, denied or otherwise marginalized – that is, until the time comes that the experts have got sufficient control of the situation to move forward in unity and strength.