By Charlie Johnston

I have been working deeply on what I think is a key project. We are in perilous times, but like Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” it is very much both the best of times and the worst of times. I think we are on the verge of having the fulness of the battle before us revealed – and that it will likely not resemble much at all what we thought the battle would be.

The great evils, in their death throes, are making a lot of noise. Despite that, they are discrediting and dismantling themselves as we speak. Things are getting better despite all the noise. The thing is that God is not prepared to settle for just “better.” He insists that we become a truly Godly people before we can get true renewal. Oh, how far from God we have drifted!

What we think is not the only problem nor is it even the fundamental problem. How we think is the fundamental problem. We have imbibed a host of assumptions that are both toxic to our own well-being and contrary to God. I wrote recently about the “full armor of God.” Most of what I write in the immediate future is going to be about how to assemble and put on that armor. We cannot approach events around us as mere spectators, giving or retaining assent to and from the people actually in the arena as if we were dime store Roman emperors. We are – and must be – participants. We do not have to win major battles and cover ourselves with glory, only do the little we can that is right before us. But we must act.

We have gotten sloppy, undisciplined and often incoherent. We decry the absurdities of the anti-God left (and well we should) without even noticing that much of our own rhetoric is full of holes. We are driven more by appetite than by truth and reason. At least the appetites of most who read this are geared towards building each other up and having a culture that nurtures, rather than feeds on, others. But it is not enough. We must be intellectually coherent; we must want the good, not just some good; we must take actions that flow directly from our considered discernment of what is true; and we must do all this in full awareness of both how little – and how vital – our contribution to the whole is. We must act in ways that earn us admiration from the heavenly host, not just acclaim from our fellows here on earth. Ah, how much easier that is said than done, though. To pander to the latest cultural enthusiasm to win approval is the mark of a wormy sort of man. On the other hand, to alienate all around you with self-righteous cant is to make yourself utterly irrelevant – and that does not win plaudits from heaven. It has not escaped me that most people who pride themselves on their “brutal honesty” are more interested in the brutality than the honesty.

I hope to illuminate, in modern terms, a better way. When God chose to unveil Himself in the incarnation, He did not browbeat much of anyone save, ironically, many of the religious authorities of His time. Who can listen to Christ’s interactions with so many Pharisees and the Sanhedrin and not hear echoes of God telling Job’s pious friends, “You have not spoken rightly of me as has my servant, Job!” We cannot worship a god whose image we have mounted in our own minds of what He MUST be. We must interact with the Living God, accepting rebuke and correction, being rigorous with ourselves and charitable with others while completely solid in His foundation of revealed truth.

Everything I write the next few months is geared towards that. I hope to be of some help to some. Below is an extended fragment from a piece I first published on May 3, 2023, under the title, A Path to Wisdom. It is the prerequisite to everything that follows from here. Please, don’t just read it. Make an heroic effort to incorporate it into your entire outlook going forward:

(Fragment from A Path to Wisdom)

I am primarily an autodidact, someone who is self-taught. I have some formal training, primarily in history and economics, but in most everything else my work is entirely the result of my own constant study since nearly the time I began to read. The virtue of an autodidact is that he often comes up with marvelously original and innovative ways to solve problems that are completely outside of the box of formal establishment thinking. The vices of an autodidact are, first, that he tends to have gaps in his knowledge of a subject because of the haphazard way he acquires learning and second (and far worse), that he often tends to have contempt for those who have disciplined formal training.

The first vice can be ameliorated by either establishing some formal pattern to a subject he wants to focus on or consulting regularly with people who have substantial formal training in that subject. The second vice is utterly foolish, a product of both vanity and insecurity that prevents him from covering the gaps in his knowledge.

A big vice among both autodidacts and formally trained intellectuals is the conceit that their brilliant expertise in one field automatically confers expertise in all fields to them. You get no expertise without the work.

Second-rate minds start with a conclusion based on their emotions or some very limited experience and can build a convincing case by cherry-picking data that seems to support the conclusion they started with while ignoring, or not even noticing, data that contradicts that conclusion. While their work can be very detailed, it is more likely to be wrong than it is to be right. If they are dishonest as well as second-rate they will include quotes from notable figures to confirm their own premise when the notable figures’ actual conclusions contradict them.

Third-rate minds are just a throbbing grievance looking for any crackpot nostrum to relieve the desperate dysfunction surrounding them. Surprisingly, some can write pretty detailed screeds. Unfortunately for them anyone with even an ounce of sense can discern the fevered heat radiating from those screeds. If they use source documents at all they make specious interpretations that are overly broad or overly narrow to fit their obsession. If they can’t get any supportive material, they just make it up – including made-up citations.

Ordinary consumers of information and news need not be at the mercy of whoever they are reading, nor do they need to become professional researchers themselves, nor even do they need to rob their families and vocations of significant time to discern what is credible and what is not. It does take some work and mental discipline, though. Following are four techniques you can use to effectively discern the credibility of any source. They don’t require any special or technical expertise, just basic logic and common sense. While they won’t filter out all nonsense, they will clear your head of a good 90 percent of it. But they must be rigorously applied every time. If you skip over them because you are reading something you want to believe you are simply deceiving yourself. Here, then, these basic techniques:

• Truth will stand the test of examination: One of America’s foremost founding principles was that the only proper or safe way to counter errant speech was to fight it with better and more persuasive speech – and then pay attention to the results. Anyone trying to control speech through coercion rather than persuasion is a liar. They may, like the blind hog, come up with an acorn of truth from time to time, but they are unreliable liars. The whole nonsense of “misinformation” and “disinformation” needing to be controlled is an effort, like modern tyrants and kings of old, to control what you may think. Certainly, the establishment media and the government have NO business complaining of misinformation, as they have been the primary purveyors of it. If someone tries to shut down what you can speak of, I dismiss them before I even examine their position – because they are fundamentally power-mad liars.
• Track record: Nobody is right 100 percent of the time. Frankly, if you are on target more than 80 percent of the time you are hall of fame material. But everyone, both prince and pauper, develops a track record. Those who are usually right – and are quick and candid to let you know when they have erred – are the most reliable. Those who try to hide or memory-hole their errors are despicable, intellectual con men. Those who frequently get it wrong may have insights, but are unreliable and their work must be checked. By this metric, climate change activists are the worst “experts” ever, for not a single one of their dire pronouncements has ever come to pass. They should be laughing stocks taken seriously by no one – and any institutions that granted them credentials should be examined for how they can so easily give out such certifications to people who obviously lack any expertise. The establishment media should also be a laughing stock by now, considered reliable by no one, for they have fallen for – and often intentionally peddled – lie after lie, reporting them as certain fact and established science. But they jump from hoax to hoax like Indiana Jones as the ground crumbles beneath them, never taking the time to assess why they get it so wrong so often while accusing those who disagree with them of misinformation. If you rely on people or institutions who are demonstrably wrong most of the time, you discredit yourself.
• Credentials: Contrary to what modern popinjays think, a credential does NOT mean you do not need to justify your assertions: it means you should be able to easily and competently justify those assertions in an area of your credentialed expertise. If someone says they have a Ph.D. in a subject and will brook no questions, ignore them for they are a liar and likely incompetent. On several occasions I have had someone, in discussion, tell me they are an authority on a subject. Every time, I tell them that is all the more reason they should know the material and be able to justify their point. If they do not, they are simply a fraud – and usually an arrogant, incompetent fraud, at that.
• Never reveal all you know: Incompetent goofs love to pretend to more knowledge than they have. You can easily discern them by not being foolish enough to try to impress them with your own knowledge. Ask all who might have genuine expertise honest and serious questions, sprinkling your questions with some you already know the answers to. If their answers to the questions you know are on target, it lends credibility to their assertions that you do not know the answers to. If they just make it up as they go along to try to impress, dismiss them, even if they have some genuine expertise. Rely on them and sooner or later they will lead you off a cliff.

Follow these four rules to determine who you should not pay attention to. Those who well surmount these criteria may still not be right, but truth matters to them. Discussion with them and consideration of their insights will help you find your way.

History is replete with brilliant autodidacts. Among them are Abraham Lincoln, Elon Musk, Blaise Pascal, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gustave Eiffel, Noel Coward, Mark Twain, Leonardo DaVinci, Thomas Edison…the list goes on and on in every field. Those who made a lasting impact had a healthy respect for those who went through the disciplined process to gain credentialed expertise – after ascertaining that the credential represented solid knowledge. You might think that autodidacts and credentialed intellectuals make strange bedfellows. You would be, at least in part, right. However, even this is a useful filter. For those sincere in the search for truth, the credentialed enjoys the autodidact’s originality and the autodidact enjoys the credentialed’s structured foundation. The only ones who get bent out of shape are those in either camp who are insecure or filled with resentment that his counterpart didn’t get knowledge the same way he did.

Do not be fooled by an expert in one field pretending to expertise he does not have in another. Remember, authentic expertise will stand the test of examination, not demand that everyone bow before a credential. No matter how brilliant someone is, he cannot attain expertise without doing the hard, deep work to gain it. God save us from modern “Google intellectuals,” people who think by reading title pages they become experts. They have no context or depth. They are like a man who has a French-English dictionary and pretends to be a fluent speaker of French. He can only peddle the fraud to people who are not native speakers – and not even to most of them.

I certainly have the autodidact’s cockiness that I can develop real expertise in almost any subject. When I was doing radio, it always tickled me when academic guest experts (primarily in economics, history and literature) would ask me off the air where I taught – and their surprise when I told them I didn’t. One of my most delicious moments was when a prominent microbiologist who I asked to vet a paper for me asked me where I taught. She thought I must be lying when I told her I had no background in microbiology, whatsoever, that I just had to get up to snuff to write that vitally important paper competently. But I have a healthy respect for the depth of work involved in gaining real expertise in any subject, so while it is possible to gain the knowledge in any field, it is not expedient. If I have enough basic knowledge to judge the expertise of those who know things I do not (using the four criteria I noted above, among others), then I can gather experts we can trust while focusing on my own areas of interest. The division of labor is crucial to solid, efficient performance in an organization.

Do not be intimidated by people with more attitude than knowledge attacking you. It is borne by their own insecurities and neurotic obsession with being seen as superior. I recently had a silly man inform me that I did not know anything about geo-politics like he did. I knew the man, someone who has endless opinions and little knowledge. I did not bother to remind him that high-ranking officials sometimes ask me for my take on the subject. What you devote yourself to, you can know if you constantly challenge your own assumptions. Don’t let the dogs that bark at you on your way distract you.

If you are an intellectual, do NOT pretend to expertise in a field you don’t have. It does not make people think you are smarter; it dilutes or destroys their confidence in the areas where you actually do have expertise.

At CORAC we have the benefit of a multitude of people who have deep, actual expertise in a multitude of fields. When you get on the website, looking under the material that each of the teams provide, you get the benefit of that genuine expertise. Mutual respect and proper discernment, using the techniques I offered, will give you the confidence to know that you don’t need to be an agricultural expert to avoid buying a pig in a poke. And you don’t need to be a biologist to know what a woman is.

Do not neglect the pieces of armor I have outlined here. Much of it will pinch. You will find yourself eschewing a lot of self-congratulatory, triumphalist rhetoric. But you will be a better servant of God and a sign of real hope to your neighbor because of it.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.” – William Shakespeare

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

Find me on X at @JohnstonPilgrim

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