The Competence Crisis, Or, Why Society Will Collapse For A Silly Reason

“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy

Biden was in three states today – confusion, unconsciousness, and disorientation.

I’ve written about Idiocracy before. It’s a good movie, and Mike Judge has a great sense of humor and timing. I would probably pay money to listen to him to read his phone list in Butthead’s voice. Unless Disney® got the money.

Anyway, Idiocracy was a funny movie. Unfortunately, it has proven to be prophetic in more ways than one. Recently, and article is making the rounds on /places/ about the topic of Idiocracy titled Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis (LINK). It’s by Harold Robertson, who I assume is not related to Robert Haroldson.

His bio on Palladium lists him as an “asset class head and institutional investor at a multi-billion dollar pool of capital”. That makes me think he’s totally using a made up name or has all the money he can eat, since the thing he says in the article are so against The Narrative.

There are some difficult truths there. First, no matter how much everyone would like unexceptional people to be able to perform at exceptional levels, it’s simply not the case that that can happen. One of my favorite stories of Lee Iacocca was about his first day leading Chrysler®. Like most folks, on their first day, he was shown his office. Unlike most folks on their first day, he was informed that he had a personal chef, and he should request what he’d like to have for lunch.

Lee said, “Oh, I dunno. How about a hamburger?”

When you’re the boss, you can have a hamburger.

The hamburger was delivered, right on time. Iacocca took a bite. It was the very best hamburger that he had ever had in his life. He requested to talk to the chef. “This was the best hamburger that I’ve ever had. How did you do it?” The chef smiled, pulled a ribeye out of the fridge, and put it into the meat grinder.

It’s silly that people have been turning plants into burgers. Cows have been doing that forever.

I love that story. What you get depends on what you start with. Sure, you could grind up an old catcher’s mitt or that opossum that roots around in the garbage and cook it into a burger, but it wouldn’t be great chow.

The material that you start with determines the end results.

In that article by Harold Robertson, he discusses a point I’ve been trying to make for years here – complex systems and societies are exceptionally fragile things – the more complex, the more fragile. Civilization is a house of cards – it takes millions of people doing their jobs exceptionally well every day just to keep it going.

It’s like the Red Queen and Alice from Through the Looking Glass.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Someone told me I should stop drinking, but then realized I shouldn’t listen to some drunk who talks to himself.

The people running the complex systems we depend upon every day have to run, looking out and maintaining just what we have installed to make it work. Miss a scheduled maintenance? An entire city can have a power outage.

An example in real time is South Africa. Currently, many locations have no electricity for sixteen hours a day, and regular supplies of fresh, clean water are a dream of a distant past.

Can’t happen here? What about California with the nearly annual cascading power outages? What about the city of Jackson, Mississippi being mis-managed to the point of collapse? What about Flint, Michigan, making the water acidic and leaching the lead out of the pipes? Or the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio?

None of these technologies are under 100 years old. Sure, there have been advances in the way that they are done, but trains have been around longer than your mom, and clean drinking water has been around every since we figured out that we should keep the lepers with typhoid away from the wells.

I started growing herbs because I heard that thyme is money.

As the article notes, for a long time in the 20th century there was a relatively ruthless winnowing process in life for competence and intelligence. The young men who ran NASA in the 1960s were young, sure, but also amazingly competent. Gene Kranz, the “failure is not an option” guy, was only 35 when he was the Chief Flight Director for Apollo 11. The “Kranz Dictum” is simple: Tough and competent.

That was another time. Tough is replaced with Trigger Warnings and Competent is replaced with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Now we find ourselves in Idiocracy. Promotions aren’t based on competence, they’re based on . . . other factors. The armed forces of the United States, for instance, is top-heavy in white men. That is, people who were actually born men.

Since there are too many of them, regardless of competence, the new officers that will be promoted will be promoted by criteria other than competence. This is why I advised both The Boy and Pugsley to avoid .mil. Incompetence at a Pizza Hut® ends up with really crappy pizza delivered poorly. Incompetence in the military results in everyone being killed. The use of low IQ troops in Vietnam (at the time called the “Moron Corps”) resulted in triple the death rate, despite what Forrest Gump might indicate.

We’re now doing the very same thing. We’re pulling the spark plugs from the engine, and wondering why it doesn’t run. Don’t believe me?

Looks like there’s no IQ test to get into Congress.

Look at Fetterman or Feinstein, who have the mental function of a three- or four-year-old. Yet? They’re Senators. Look at AOC, who thinks that, if Congress passes a law that defies the law of physics, like making electric cars mandatory, that water will run uphill, dropped plates will unbreak themselves, and everyone will have prosperity.

Competence is crucial to our way of life, and it is, sadly, not evenly distributed. I won’t opine as to why, because I don’t know why. But to doom civilization because the idea that competence and intelligence can be created because we really, really, really, want competence to be there?

That’s Idiocracy in action.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

66 thoughts on “The Competence Crisis, Or, Why Society Will Collapse For A Silly Reason”

  1. An example in real time is South Africa. Currently, many locations have no electricity for sixteen hours a day, and regular supplies of fresh, clean water are a dream of a distant path.
    Distant past perhaps?

    2. You all know this quotation. I’m writing this more for myself. As a reminder to where we are.

      “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create easy times. Easy times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.”

  3. You know its fuxxored when a guy has to use a pseudonym just to point some things out and not get cancelled. (honk!)
    I tell my Ace Boon Honky in Pineland that when him and his peepette retire, he actually did in 2020 but returned to work due to the increase in cost of living out there, that society will go tits up.
    We’re going to live the South Africa dream courtesy of the CPUSA (D) and there won’t be any vote or free pack of fweedom fwies.
    Sad trombone is always so sad.
    At least we’ll be equal at the egalitarian slit trench latrine after digging for donuts in the dumpster behind the Sack-N-Save.
    Other places will build a wall around the dumpster and someone painted crime stats matter on one here locally. (honk!)
    Forward! Si se puede!

    1. Yup, voting will be allowed, but only for the candidate on the Left, who promises the light will come back on.

  4. It is foolish to expect that we can replace the people that created our complex system with people that have proven to be incapable of creating or even sustaining such a system, and not see that system implode. All the flowery rhetoric in the world cannot overcome simple biological realism.

    1. It was foolish, yes. But it is exactly what would be expected to happen once the masses believe that everyone is equal. And that is precisely what would happen once you destroyed the theological underpinnings of society required to understand “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are CREATED equal…”

      Biology matters. Demographics matter. We’re on the wrong side of both, staring down that horrific double-barreled shotgun. There is nothing that will stop what is coming.

      Get your soul right with God. It’s the only thing you have a prayer at keeping.

      2. Upvoted but one note, God does not create all men equally. Women either, for that matter.

        My guess is the founders used that pretty lie to advance cohesion ‘mongst the states and populations. Such men should stick to politics.

    2. I must object, however, to the notion that Fetterman, Feinstein, et al. are at the level of 3-4 year olds…Many of kids that age are, in my experience, far smarter and more aware of reality than either of them..And I have taught 7 year olds who are smarter than 90% of Congress, at least…The genes are still there, waiting to be used….

  5. As Hemingway noted about how personal bankruptcy occurs, “Gradually, then suddenly”. This article is the preamble to the USA’s collapse. Following are several examples witnessed recently.

    Bought food at Publix, $19.24 total. Handed the young cashier $20.04, she was perplexed. Thought I’d be handed three quarters & a nickel. No, she counted out eight dimes, counting each out.

    Grabbed a burger & bloody at a new place, never there before. Came to $20 & small change. Handed the bartender $26, asked only for the change. “Sorry, we don’t do change here.”

    Finally, let’s get started on misspelling. “Cesear” Salad.

  6. Things seen/experienced lately…,

    Handwritten on menu boards. “Cesear” Salad. “Crewtons”. Restaurants that don’t “make” change, bills & plastic only. Publix™ cashiers that don’t know what to do if you give them a penny w/ a $20 when the bill is $19.01.

    When the “end” comes, it’ll be like Hemingway said – “Gradually, then suddenly”. Suddenly is coming soon to a theatre near you.

    Oh, grew up in Jackson, MS back in the 50s-60s. It pains me to see what it’s become.

    1. Good point about making change…You can save at those places by paying cash, since they round the bill down to avoid making change….

    2. I remember back in the 80’s we would try to pay the highway tolls with pennies, and they would just wave us through with a “we don’t have time to count all that”

    3. I grew up in Jackson area too. Went back to see family in 2016 and the city is unrecognizable. Everything important has moved to Madison and Rankin counties.

      1. Hey, my good ol’ MSU college friend Mark Jordan (college Kappa Alpha – I was a Pike) made a sh*t pot of $$$ in Mad/Ridge. As has Richard/Mark Shapley’s son as a restatranteur. (bad SP?)

        We’ll never leave Charleston & Beaufert.Tell Mark Tom Robertson visits Beaufert each Bebruary.

  8. John,
    I just would mention one turning point that you need to touch on, and whole articles can be written on the resulting decay it has brought. The change from the Personnel Dept. to the Human Resources Dept.

    2. Excellent point. On Gab, someone also mentioned when Bill Clinton said, “I feel your pain.”

  9. Unfortunately, the Not-Smart are not being given good feedback on their deficiencies, and how to correct them. It’s considered to be ‘hateful’ to tell the truth.
    As a result, unlike previous generations, who learned some hard lessons, AND WERE BETTER MEN AND WOMEN FOR THAT, today’s kid not only knows very little, but is arrogant about his ignorance. They will argue that an answer “isn’t true for them” or “You can’t know that, it’s just your opinion”.
    I taught the physical sciences, including Physics and Chemistry. Trust me, I wasn’t teaching them “my opinion”, but well established facts. Pointing that out didn’t make a dent in their thick skulls.
    I’m retired now, which definitely had a good effect on my blood pressure, as well as my after-school headaches.
    On the positive side my kids and grandkids (one of them after a lot of Hard Knocks by Reality) are both smart and supporting themselves.
    On the other hand, they skew Liberal. Not on Core Things, but on too many ‘compassionate’ topics.
    They seem to be raising good kids, though, and – over time – I have some confidence they’ll continue their intellectual growth.

    1. Kids I have taught (chess) are not a random sample by any means, almost all from good middle class families, but many were not only highly intelligent, but were both kind and well behaved…Our own kids, the same…So some great young people are out there, they just need to be given the chance to show what they can do…DEI is destroying our country….

    2. That is a problem, because if no one tells the “not-smart” the truth, they’ll think the only reason they’re not successful is because of some other reason.

      Raise your children (and grandchildren) well. The future belongs to those who show up.

  10. You mention Jackson MS I lived there briefly 20 years ago and it was nicer than nice.

    What you are describing as a breakdown starts with MORONS, but that is not the worst to come. We will shortly see a mass of truly insane sexual freaks begin to attempt to run complex systems. These are “people” that cannot understand that chanting “we are coming for your children” is terminal.

    1. >These are “people” that cannot understand that chanting “we are coming for your children” is terminal.

      Of course they understand it. They don’t care. They aren’t interested in saving themselves. They are damned souls, if they are even people and not just demons in human form. A damned soul doesn’t look for salvation. A damned soul looks to take more souls with them to hell.

      They hate themselves even as they worship themselves, but they hate everyone else more. Destruction of the innocent is their goal. That this may result in their destruction is irrelevant, superfluous. They have already destroyed themselves.

      2. You hit it! I think there’s several variations of “meat sacks”. Demons in human form is just one of them. Everyone without empathy is suspect.

  11. Reminds me to look up Marching Morons by Kornbluth I believe.
    Very prescient.

  12. Incompetence was one of the reasons I retired. Too many ignorant people were in charge, and the goal was to increase their numbers. I’m guessing it shows that in a blind society, a one eyed man is king.

    1. No, they’ll do anything they can to destroy the one-eyed man, since the reason he’s that way is obviously Evil.

  13. The most obvious recent example of incompetence in action is the Titanic tour sub on the bottom of the sea because the woke company that built it doesn’t hire old white men with experience.

  15. Thanks for two great articles, yours and the one linked at Palladium. Mr. Robertson nailed it. Thomas Sowell also saw this coming back in the 60s, and has written much about it since then. I’m thankful every day I’m no longer in the business or public world. If I were, and was very lucky, I’d last about two days before telling someone to have anatomically impossible sexual relations with themselves.

    1. He did nail it. And it is coming. And the incompetent will blame . . . anything but themselves.

  16. I will say agree with all here but there is another problem,not all but many would not take a new bird under their wing and teach the basics so they could pursue and become excellent in say a trade.Many I met thru the years said was easier/cheaper to just bring on another say plumber then have a learning helper(guess they came out the womb excellent plumbers and didn’t feel they owed their trade taking some time to help a newbie get on their feet.

    Our military also had some decent training but now/don’t bother unless you for some reason need to paint rainbows.

    As someone said Mike Rowe can help and supporting your local trade highschools can help at least in the trades,getting cert.s licenses ect.is not a prison sentence,one can still go to college if they wish.

    All the industries/business ect. need some in house training to your specs.

    1. I’ve been in construction for 35 years, and trust me there are very few under age 30 that know what work really is. They think they can wave the paint brush with one hand while downloading toonz on their phone with the other, show up late and leave early and then cop an attitude when you ridicule them for it.
      And this isn’t new; it’s been getting progressively worse for at least three decades. In ten years I would expect almost all building to be done by immigrants who no habla ingles. We’ve been hiring the low IQ in the construction biz for a long time without teaching them why they are doing things the way we do them.

  17. The more complex the system,, the more likelihood that it will breakdown.
    The world’s economic system is global and interdependent.
    The entire system is only as strong as its weakest point.
    Although redundancies exist, they’re not every where.
    For.example, the US is dependent upon long haul trucking. Sure the railway systems exist but without the trucks the US economy would quickly come to a hault, which would spread like a contagion across the developed world. A shortage of spare parts,.diesel tires, any number of things could start the cascade.
    That’s just one example.
    For example a cautionary tale.
    Many years ago, the old Boston trolley cars were PCC models, designed just after WWII, to operate the door the driver had to pull a lever, the whole mechanism had less than five parts. Simple and effective.
    They were replaced sometime in the late 70s early 89s by the LRVs Light rail vehicles. Rather than pull or push a lever to open or close the doors the driver simply had to push a button. Took something like 1400 parts to operate. If even one of which failed the LRV had to go into maintenance because the doors wouldn’t work. The new LRVs started to spend do much time in the maintenance barn that the MBTA had to pull the old PCCs out of retirement and return them.to service.

    1. Was the late 70’s,missed the old green/ white/red/ ect. cars,took the D-(green)line in for literally 100’s of concerts,plus it was like a cool low level roller coaster.

      1. Yes.
        Back when we were barley teens, sometime in the early to mid 70s my cousin and I used to ride the old El trains, before they were torn down, by North Station and Charlestown, and stand up front next to the little the conductor/driver’s compartment. When they went around corners it felt like they were going to fall over. And they moaned and groaned like they were going to fall apart.
        It was like a 10 cent roller coaster.
        Then when I got older and had to commute on them, being packed like sardines the trains sorta lost their charm.

    2. And generally, the more complex, the bigger the cliff. Imagine everyone going back to cash?

  18. I was going to say that I’ve been talking about the New Dark Ages coming for years, and went back to my blog to find a nice early reference to it.

    Now that I’ve skimmed a couple of pages of evidence they’re coming I’m too depressed to bother finding the date.

    “I don’t know that, but I do know this…” I started blogging in 2010. In the early ’90s we had a well put in that runs Artesian part of the year, because we could read the writing on the wall that this collapse of society was coming and we wanted to make sure we had water and a way to purify it. To put in a well like that around here means drilling over 400 feet down and it’s beyond what I think I could do after the collapse. Not to mention back then I was turning 40 then rather than nearing 70 like now.

    1. Kunstler had Neil Howe in his podcast, and Howe mentioned that he was moving to a rural area. Kunstler told him to put in a hand pump. Howe didn’t give a.response to that. Howe thinks that we will come back after the fourth turning, whereas Kunstler.doesn’t.

      I have a 1 1/4 inch new old stock USA made redwing hand/jug/pitcher pump. Anything under an inch and a half doesn’t require a permit. And since the water table is about 20 feet down that suffices. And I picked up and put back, some NOS USA made leathers,
      Potable water is the key to survival. Even if you can’t put in a well now because of some regulation, law or HOA rule, people need to buy the components, because when the time comes, it’ll be a lifesaver.

  19. John, the one thing I remember from Macro Economics is that modern economic systems are intensely complex and fragile and while no single strand is (usually) likely to bring the system down, multiple small strands can.

    In regards to complex systems maintained for the uncaring and ungrateful: at some point, those that maintain such system will simply quietly leave. Those that are the most vocal about how the system should work for them (while carefully ignoring those that maintain them) will be shocked when their power no longer works or their organic fruit is no longer conveniently available for them in their local grocery store.

    1. My sister told my Brother’s wife that she should stock up, because there could be a time when Wal-Mart and Publix would run out of food.
      My sister in law, said, in all seriousness…that in that case she would just go.to Aldis.
      But since then she’s been triple jabbed so it’s probably not going to matter anyway. Not in the long run.

      1. Got some 4Patriots food stashed away for my Dad and I. May God sustain and encourage us.

    2. The smallest thing can bring down a very complex system, down to a single hard drive, or a single switch. And . . . it will.

  20. “Let it fall down, let it fall down, let it all fall down.” – H/T to James Taylor.

    1. I think that’s the direction. The good news is we have time to prepare if we have the will.

  21. As the recently deceased Titanic Sub (and diverse occupants!) illustrates, everything America and the West needs to restore and regenerate already is in place and available, Elijah inclusive. Ring a ding ding! K-Mart shoppers. These offers are about to expire.

    ‘Course such restoration relies on acceptance of merit and hierarchy, same condition obtaining heaven-ward. Because God said so. Meaning Evil White Males (including 50-year-olds! sorry!) must be returned to rightful positions of leadership, influence, and authority, across the cultural spectrum. Immediately.

    A la Titanic sub, the Coalition of the Permanently Inferior ain’t into I Was Wrong, instead feverishly thrilling to power for forty years. Rather than allow even one concession, they’d prefer their nations sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

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