Who Will Decide Whether The Guardians Need Some Guarding?

Imagine a society that regularly practices torture. What kind of person becomes a professional torturer? Let's just say that lots of people who were qualified for torturing will decide that's not how they want to spend their Saturdays, and go do something else instead. The profession becomes filled with the kinds of people who were psychologically and/or morally willing to do it.

Many years pass. The government and/or Cesare Beccaria decide they want to abolish torture. The torturers are not excited about this; sure, torturing has some problems, and there's a few bad apples in the profession, no doubt about it. But a lot of the bad press that torture is getting lately is (frankly) based on misapprehensions, and the thing about these anti-torture pamphlets is that they're all written by people who don't truly get torturing, because they've never actually been involved in it first hand. We need to listen to the experts, the men in the arena.

I'm obviously using the example of torturers to prime your intuition in a particular way, but I think it gets at a deep and genuine problem for many modern social issues. It can simultaneously be true that:

1) there are elements of most professions that you can only understand by practicing them yourself,
2) the only people who continue practicing a thing are the ones who can (at the very least) tolerate its flaws and failures

I'm not subtweeting any one profession here: at different times and places, this dynamic applies to doctors and lawyers and academics and hairdressers and bureaucrats and pharmacologists. (Basically the only people who are entirely beyond reproach are bloggers).

To me, this is a genuinely difficult problem with no easy answer: experts really do have knowledge that lets them see why things are not as simple as outsiders think; however, to become an expert in a given field means being the kind of person who was willing to put up with that particular field's particular BS for long enough to gain that knowledge.