Rambling Lemurian

It’s the perfect scenario for MLB this year. Dodgers versus Yankees. LA vs. NY. East coast versus West Cost. Shohei Ohtani versus Aaron Judge in the Battle of the MVPs. At least seven future hall of famers on two iconic teams going at it for the World Series. And literally the two best teams in baseball after 162 games. No fluky Cinderella runs or beneficiaries of multiple bad calls or injuries to opposing sides. It’s the best against the best by multiple definitions. MLB couldn’t draw it up any more perfectly than this.

And yet, so many of us hate it. So many of us, when faced with the choice of who to vote for, jokingly (or somewhat seriously) root for the meteor. Or claim we don’t care because we aren’t in New York or Los Angeles. And honestly, I’m one of them. I like the Cinderella and small-market teams going all the way. I’m a Cubs fan but I kind of root for the Brewers when they’re in the playoffs and feel a little bad for their fans when they inevitably bow out in the first round, despite the vitriol most of that fanbase has for the Cubs. Everyone likes a good underdog story, so it makes sense that so many fans would prefer a World Series which doesn’t feature the two biggest teams made up of the best players. Rookie of the Year, Angels in the Outfield, and Bad New Bears wouldn’t have been as popular if they were just about the most talented team winning. But is it just our love of underdogs that makes us dislike this World Series so much? I think it’s deeper than that.

I was one of the Smart Kids in school. It wasn’t because I was a bookworm or studied so much. I just retained facts pretty easily and did well on tests. Despite the fact that I was a kind of a teacher’s pet and would easily get A’s on tests, I wasn’t bullied much, if at all. I wasn’t one of the Cool Kids either. But I still felt some underlying pressure to not be Smart. Or least not Know-It-All-Smart. If another kid asked me a question that I 100% knew the answer to, I would often hedge my answer and pretend like I don’t know for sure, or that I don’t know at all. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe I just assumed I’d be perceived as more “normal” if I didn’t immediately know everything, and for whatever reason I aspired to be normal.

I don’t think I quite understood at the time though that the quest for normal was more prevalent amongst the population than I expected. And when you try to take a step back and look at our society right now and the things that get the most attention, I think you’ll how this sort of anti-elite sentiment has permeated throughout our collective consciousness. Elite used to be something to strive for. Afterall, that’s why ESPN and random schlubs like me online would have endless debates over whether Joe Flacco and Eli Manning were “elite” players. But now “elite” has sort of become a slur, at least in political parlance. Even the elite-level cognitive dissonance required to trust billionaires while you rail about conspiracy theories about “elitists” shows how desperately the population wants to distance itself from elite.

And I get it. Billionaires are inherently evil after-all. They shouldn’t exist. The amount of greed required to amass such wealth while the majority of people on the planet can barely pay for rent and medicine is astounding. But it feels more and more like this resentment against the idea of elite has seeped through culture, not just in political spheres. Look at the level of hate that top-selling musical artists get. Or how many people on Twitter say with apparent sincerity that Patrick Mahomes is “trash”. Caleb Williams is an elite level talent, yet there are so many Bears fans would honestly prefer to see Tyson Bagent play despite seeing flat out bad results from him last year.

And it’s not just sports and pop culture. Look at how the public responds to official warnings about public health and weather. The CDC put out a warning against drinking raw milk to try to stop people from getting sick. In response, raw milk sales exploded. There’s a national and global “debate” about vaccines. Hurricane and storm forecasters are facing threats from people angry about weather predictions. People would rather take lessons on history and science from non-educated people like Joe Rogan, Aaron Rodgers, and Graham Hancock than from actual experts and scientists. I think part of it is just the nature of social media and the lowering of the average attention span. It’s much easier to make a wild claim with edited video like “proof that Antarctica is an infinite ice wall at the edge of Flat Earth and not a continent, and is hiding a secret alien base” or whatever braindead conspiracy theory pops up on Instagram now, than it is to have someone watch an hour-long documentary on the exploration of the South Pole or read and digest any kind of debunking material. Everything that comes from the experts and scientific consensus gets downgraded while every hogwash idea from the edges of the internet gets upgrade to “real thought”.

But it’s also the idea of “doing your own research” that really exposes the mass rejection of expertise. It’s no longer good enough to read real research. People now have to both-sides everything and pretend that giving pseudoscience and mediocrity an equal voice next to established science and expertise is a valid form of debate. Kamala Harris is right that we aren’t going back. But in some aspects, we do. We need to go back to trusting science and trusting experts. We need to be able to trust that the best is the best and “alternative facts” aren’t a thing. We may not like the science that says the Earth is warming to dangerous, civilization-threatening levels. And we may not like that at this pace all major coastal cities could be wiped off the map in a few centuries. And we may especially hate the idea that it’s our fault. But it’s true. And we need to accept that. We can’t just automatically reject it for the sole reason that smart people provided us with these facts.

For multiple reasons I hope we can get back to trusting experts. And not just trusting experts, but celebrating them. I don’t want to see the “regular people” that somehow made it through the shitshow that is social media to rise to the top thanks to elite SEO skills and dumb luck. I’d love to see more real scientists and activists and the few good politicians become celebrities. It’d be great if we as a society can emotionally and financially invest in things like new scientific breakthroughs and elite-level art. I’d love to see astrophysicists, biologists, climatologists, sociologists and historians become the next generation of the elite class in this country and in positions of power. We need to celebrate the best and wisest people, not push them aside in favor of click-bait influencers.

It would take a huge shift in collective consciousness though. And it would take a long time. But maybe we can take a small step together. Let’s watch this World Series for what it is. The two best teams, with the two best rosters, with several hall of famers, in two of the best and biggest cities in the country. Freddie Freeman already provided an epic moment in Game 1. Let’s see what happens the rest of series. And let’s just enjoy it. Sports is supposed to be entertaining. It’s supposed to be a break from normal life. If you’re a Dodgers fan or a Yankees fan, of course root for your team like you always do. Feel anxious and ecstatic or devastated with every pitch. But the rest of us, let’s just root for good baseball and more elite moments. The meteor will come for us one day. But in the meantime, pull up a chair, open up a beverage, and let’s just watch.