Experts—yes. A word that has been following me around for years, occasionally pinned to my lapel as though it were a badge of honor. I never quite knew what to do with it.
Because it never fit.
My instincts were forged elsewhere, in a very different ecosystem. Small workshops, small risks, small margins. Artisans who did not have the luxury of abstraction. People who built things, fixed things, sold things—who lived or died, economically speaking, by whether their work held up under pressure. Entrepreneurial to the bone, not by ideology but by necessity.
That was always the horizon for me.
The entrepreneur as a kind of apex figure—not in the vulgar sense of wealth accumulation, but as a person who could stand on his own footing. Independent. Self-directed. Free in the only way that really matters: responsible for his own outcomes.
That was the aspiration.
Not “expert.”
Even early on, the category felt… off. Inflated. I watched the so-called experts move through rooms, through institutions, through conversations, and something did not quite add up. There was a transactional quality to it, a flexibility that seemed less like intellectual openness and more like… availability.
Hired guns.
That was the uncomfortable conclusion, even back then. People who, given the right incentive, could be persuaded to frame almost any argument, support almost any position, provided the compensation justified the effort. At the time, I assumed I was being overly cynical. That I was missing the deeper layer where rigorous, incorruptible expertise resided.
I was right about one thing.
There is a deeper layer.
It just doesn’t look anything like what is commonly presented under the label.
True expertise exists, but it tends to operate quietly, almost reluctantly. It is built over years, often decades, in narrow domains where repetition, failure, adjustment, and persistence accumulate into something solid. These people rarely introduce themselves as experts. They do not need to. Their competence is visible in the work itself—in the consistency, the precision, the absence of theatricality.
They are cogs, if you like, but reliable ones. The kind you build systems on.
They do not write op-eds about their own brilliance.
They solve problems.
And then there is the other category—the one that has, over time, come to dominate the public imagination.
The visible experts.
The ones with polished language, clean narratives, and a remarkable ability to translate complexity into certainty on demand. They move easily between media appearances, corporate engagements, advisory roles. They are, in many ways, performers—skilled, articulate, highly presentable.
And often, highly sponsored.
Because visibility at that level is rarely accidental. It is supported—by institutions, by corporations, by political interests that have a stake in the message being delivered. The expert, in this configuration, becomes less a seeker of truth and more a vehicle for it—or, more precisely, for a version of it that aligns with the objectives of those footing the bill.
This is not a conspiracy.
It is a business model.
I have seen it from the inside. Not as an observer, but as a participant in the mechanism. Running a segment of one of Austria’s largest companies gives you a certain vantage point—one that strips away the comforting distance between theory and practice.
We hired experts.
Not one, not two, but many, over time. Consultants, analysts, specialists—each carrying the appropriate credentials, the right vocabulary, the reassuring aura of authority.
And the process was… instructive.
They would arrive, well-prepared, professionally curious. They would ask questions—good ones, often. They would map the terrain, identify variables, outline possibilities. And then, at some point—sometimes explicitly, sometimes through more subtle cues—the critical piece of information would be established.
What is the desired outcome?
Not the truth in some abstract, Platonic sense.
The result.
The direction in which the organization wished to move, the conclusion it needed to support, the narrative it intended to present—internally or externally. Once that was clear, the machinery engaged.
Reports would follow. Data would be arranged. Models constructed. Language refined. Not fabricated out of thin air—rarely that crude—but selected, weighted, interpreted in ways that converged toward the predefined endpoint.
They wanted the cheque.
So they found the words. They found the numbers.
Not necessarily what is.
But what pays.
And this is where the term “expert” begins to lose its innocence.
Because in a system where incentives are aligned toward delivering a particular answer, expertise becomes less about discovery and more about justification. Less about asking whether something is true, and more about demonstrating—convincingly, persuasively—that it can be presented as such.
It is, in the end, a very human arrangement.
We like to think of knowledge as something clean, detached from the messier aspects of motivation and reward. But the two are intertwined more often than we care to admit. Where there is money, status, influence—there will be a market for opinions that support them.
And there will be suppliers.
This does not mean that all expertise is compromised.
But it does mean that the label, on its own, is insufficient.
It tells you nothing about who is paying, what is being asked, or how the conclusions were reached.
And perhaps that is the only useful takeaway.
Not to reject expertise outright—that would be as foolish as accepting it uncritically—but to look past the title. To examine the incentives. To ask, quietly and persistently, what sits behind the confidence, the clarity, the apparent certainty.
Because sometimes, behind the polished surface, there is not a deeper truth waiting to be uncovered.
There is a contract.