"A crucial function of academic research is to produce knowledge that informs our collective decisions in a democracy.

"To live in hopeless times is not only subjectively to feel hopeless. It is for that feeling in a real way to reflect the way things are."

"Methods of thinking and observing are tightly implicated with wellbeing – not just for the human entity but also the non-human world."

"We don’t know not because we can’t know but because we don’t want to know."

This essay examines the uneasy return of expertise during Covid-19 and asks how much epistemic trust a democracy can sustain without sliding into expert domination. Using the figure of the “Free Nose Guy,” it explores tensions between epistemic self-reliance, equality, and authority, arguing that distrust in experts is inseparable from social inequality while also highlighting the political effects of epistemic hierarchies.