Who needs experts when they are the enemy?

Let's dispense with this now: Some folks will take offense at what Tom Nichols and like-minded intellectuals are saying.

They're saying no one is an expert in everything, even though many people believe they are. 

They're saying no one is omniscient, although it's understandable that people would think so in a period that could be called the Information Age Run Amok — the era of fake news, "alternative facts" and the self-centered, selfie-obsessed insatiable ego.

Nichols, a Naval War College and Harvard Extension School professor, dissected this cultural development during a recent interview and at length in his new Amazon bestseller, "The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters," from Oxford University Press. Yes, Oxford, that 800-year-old place where expertise is still revered.

Nichols offers many examples of foolishly self-proclaimed expertise. A favorite is what physicians often hear when patients arrive in their offices:

"Doc, let me tell you what's wrong with me and here's what you should do."

"Paging Dr. Google," it's known inside the world of medicine. Rather than listen to someone with a medical degree and years of professional experience and then ask informed questions, as once was routine, some patients today have made themselves the experts.

Nichols describes this as the "remarkably insane arrogance of people lecturing to experts in their own field."

And, he says, "It's not just arrogance and narcissism. This is all tinged with a certain amount of paranoia — a paranoia that comes from being overloaded with information you cannot understand."

Medicine is not the only victim. Nichols argues that "the campaign against established knowledge" and the professionals who nurture it has undermined the public discourse and American democracy itself.

"The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance," the War College professor of National Security Affairs writes in the preface of his book. Worse, he declares, many citizens today are "proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue."

It springs, in part, Nichols argues, from a societal narcissism with roots in the 1960s and 1970s, when Tom Wolfe famously described Baby Boomers as the "Me Generation." Subjected now to the relentless presence of the internet, cable news and radio talk shows, Nichols says, many of them — and more of their children and grandchildren — are drowning in endless information.

"I've been asked, do I really think people were better-informed when there were only three television networks," Nichols says. "And my answer is emphatically 'yes,' in part because there was a filter on the news. Arms-control treaties with Russia were not competing with which Kardashian is pregnant. It was not a constant stream."

Joseph W. Roberts, Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Roger Williams University, places himself in Nichols' camp.

"The perception is that because anyone can Google anything, that constitutes knowledge or expertise: 'I read it, therefore it must be true,'" he says. "We have lost our ability to analyze and critically think about the world around us."

"Whether this is 'narcissistic intellectual egalitarianism' or something else, I'm not sure," says John Pantalone, chair of the University of Rhode Island's Department of Journalism.

"Clearly, however, the internet and the 24-hour cable 'news' cycle provide a platform for everything from temperate and thoughtful to ridiculous and intentionally disruptive speech.... Anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism have been around for ages, but like everything else, they are magnified and amplified by those who use the internet and other platforms to create an environment in which knowledge becomes foggy and knowledgeable people become demonized. The current administration has perfected this."

Vance Morgan, a Providence College professor of philosophy, agrees.

"This phenomenon helped produce the Trump presidency, and the president and his inner circle are now taking full advantage of it," Morgan says. "Trump recognized early in his campaign that whatever he said loudly enough and with enough conviction would be believed by his committed followers with an intensity that fact-checking and intelligent debate could not reduce."

Nichols places some blame on parenting and education. 

The system, he says "has produced generations of Americans who hate being told they're wrong — because they've never been told they're wrong. It's a cliché to talk about the every-kid-gets-a-trophy generation, but this is the upshot."

Nichols criticizes the manner in which many universities today attract students — and what is taught when they enroll.

"College is no longer education but mostly 'client servicing,'" he says.

The pitch to prospective students?

"'Come to college. We'll give you a good experience,'" he says. "Colleges are marketed the way cars are marketed now: 'You'll love the interior decor.'"

He also points to a "reinterpretation" of the republic after  the 1960s.

"People no longer understand democracy as a system of political rights in which we are all equal. People now have a radical idea of democracy" in which they believe they are equal with everyone in every way.

"Well, it's demonstrably not true that we are all as good as each other," Nichols says.

Only in sports, he asserts, do the masses still acknowledge that not everyone is equal in every regard.

"People can accept the idea that they are not seven feet tall and can't play basketball. [But] They hate the idea that anybody is smarter than they are and should be better compensated than they are. This is a radical egalitarianism that is completely nuts."

Nichols says he is honest about his own strengths — and limitations.

"It used to be that Americans could accept everybody is good at something. I still believe that. I've said many times that the electrician who rewired my house — as far as I'm concerned, what he does is indistinguishable from magic.

"You want to ask me about nuclear weapons? Fine. You want to ask me about what kind of amperage I should have in my house? Forget it. That terrifies me."

Nichols acknowledges that experts are fallible. He devotes a chapter of his book, "When the Experts are Wrong," to this topic and suggests that some of them must cast aside hubris for the sake of truth. "Professionals must own their mistakes, air them publicly, and show the steps they are taking to correct them," he writes.

Luigi Bradizza, associate professor of political science at Salve Regina University, makes a similar point: "There has been a selective repudiation of expertise in recent years, fed in part by the rise of the internet, and in part by the colossal and visible failure of many of our so-called 'experts.'"

But failure is more exception than rule, Nichols asserts. And he finds irony in the fact that certain experts are derided while others are always trusted, if unconsciously.

"You put your life in the hands of an expert community all day long. Every time you take an aspirin or an over-the-counter medication, every time you talk to your pharmacist, every time your kids go to school, every time you obey the traffic directions of a police officer or go through a traffic light.

"When you get on an airplane, you assume that everybody involved in flying that airplane from the flight attendant to the pilot and the ground crew and the people in the control tower knows what they are doing."

So what now?

On the micro level, Nichols urges selectivity.

"My advice, if you want to get ahead of this problem, is approach information the same way you approach food: portion control and healthy choices."

Regarding the macro, the professor turns dire.

"Unfortunately, I think it's going to take a crisis of some kind," he says.

The Great Depression reset America in the 1930s. Then, people turned to experts to lead the way out, Nichols says.

War in the 1940s produced a similar effect. Led by experts in politics, economics and diplomacy — not the average Joe — America restored order to a world nearly destroyed.

"Without any evidence that it's really unhealthy, people will keep arguing with their doctors about vaccines. Without any real foreign threat, people will keep telling experts in diplomacy and foreign affairs that we don't know what we're talking about because everything seems fine," Nichols says. "Nobody thinks about a pandemic until there's a pandemic. Nobody thinks about how a war begins until there's a war underway."

Nichols talks about his book in a video at providencejournal.com: http://www.tout.com/m/11vopu