Robert M Pirsig is famous for having written Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), but to my mind he wrote a much more powerful and significant book called Lila (1991). The premise of the book is basically this: why would you trust an expert’s opinion over your own direct experience?
This book had a huge effect on me, because when I read it I was in the middle of my battle with mental illness and addiction. There was no end of experts, either in books or in person, telling me how to “fix” the problem. I consider myself to have been bred with a healthy dose of distrust for such figures, and that in the end this trait turned out to be of great benefit to me.
When I look around today, I see a “crisis of experts”. From the government regulators who were supposed to be overseeing the investment banks, to the economists who “never saw it coming”, to a body of work called “science” that is proving to be as incomplete as the religions it seeks to usurp.
If I hadn’t learned it already, I would be learning it now: “expert facts” make a weaker brew of reality than “anecdotal evidence”.
