With COVID-19 inducing so much turmoil here and around the world, I again refer to one of the most profound concepts for understanding political and economic manipulations, as I have multiple times in the past, the pretense of knowledge. Even though it might leave a great deal unknown and unpredictable, true knowledge is better than having a “pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”

We as a nation, as in the people, the organizations, and the government entities, frequently rely on experts and, as a general rule, that is a good thing. Experts often spend a great deal of time and resources building up their skills in particular areas of knowledge. They can give training for particular processes that they have mastered, they can give perspective on decisions that need to be made, and they can generate alternative ideas that might not otherwise have been advanced. What they can’t ever do is predict the future.

When a private business hires an expert for a particular process or project, the business owner gets the benefit if the advice is good and bears the cost if the advice is bad. Bad expert advice that leads to loss is not likely to be relied on in the future. The expert in this situation, while maybe not bearing any immediate cost from the failure, will likely soon be out of business if the advice is often bad.

Government entities are different. The politician, the bureaucrat, or the expert generally does not bear the costs of bad decisions. They are borne by taxpayers and citizens in general. The expert who came up with the dramatically overstated death toll from COVID-19 was the same one who had hyper-exaggerated the death tolls in every other pandemic over the last couple of decades. Experts often use mathematical models to analyze events, but what we all need to realize is that, in every case without exception, a model is built on assumptions, and those assumptions are based on the biases of the model builder. Modelers make guesses about what the future holds and use them to make predictions. There is no magic to it.

Some might object that, of course experts don’t always get it right, because there are so many variables and unknowns. The obvious answer to that is “Duh!!” Of course that is the case, and everyone knows it. They have no window into the future, and thus they should be very humble in their pronouncements, especially when they will affect millions or billions of people.

The model predicting 2.2 million deaths in the United States alone has been relied on around the world and was the source of panic and gross overreaction. Only a fraction of those deaths actually occurred, however, and that is not because of the lock downs. Deaths in most places plateaued and started to decline before the lock downs, even in Italy. Moreover, those countries that did not engage in draconian lock downs of economic activity show the same pattern as those that did. If the economy had been similarly shut down during the 1918 Spanish Flu, the death and destruction would have been much worse than it was. The experts are tragically wrong.

From another perspective, experts in one field are not experts in every field, and as the saying goes, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Even if the experts were right about the virus, death also comes from poverty and malnutrition, from suicide, and from violent unrest as populations riot against government-induced economic destruction and starvation. All of the various effects must be taken into consideration, not just the pet opinions of narrow interests. We are seeing the effects of such pretense of exact knowledge.

Dan McLaughlin is the author of “Compassion and Truth-Why Good Intentions Don’t Equal Good Results.” Follow him at daniel-mclaughlin.com.