Dear Friends,
It seems to me, most people who have an innate drive to run everything, have no idea how anything works. Their ignorance allows their hubris to believe they can do a better job than those running it today. This applies to machines, businesses, and nations. Moreover, the less knowledgeable someone is, the more confident they are in their ability. This is an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. From a position of ignorance things look easy. How hard could it be to run an excavator? The same logic applies to a firm, running a fortune 500 company must be easy. Government is the simplest of all. Just order it done and it gets done, how hard is that? Except it isn’t that easy. Someone who doesn’t know what they are doing is a force of destruction, especially in business and government.
Other jobs look easy when viewed from a distance. A good carpenter makes framing a wall look simple. They rip through the job fast, efficiently, and with near perfect fit. The drywaller’s job is another one that appears to be simple. Slapping mud on a wall can’t be that hard, can it? Especially since most drywallers are stoned on pot all the time. Try it though. Framing a wall is not as easy as it appears. The truth is, mudding a wall is frustratingly harder. This is because they are skills that take a long time to master. The unskilled can believe themselves already masters… until they pick up a hammer, tape measure, and speed square. That’s when the job becomes tougher than it looked. This applies to all jobs, careers, and positions.
Someone inexperienced on an excavator or bulldozer can cause a lot of damage quickly. Tens of thousands of dollars in damage can accumulate by the second. This isn’t because an inexperienced operator is malicious. Quite the opposite. Someone who thinks running a machine can’t be that hard, then gets on one, will find out it’s not as easy as it looked. One swing of the boom the wrong way can cave in a house, a turn the wrong way in a dozer can obliterate a bridge, and don’t even get me started on a chain saw. This tells us that when the ignorant get their way, they can become agents of destruction, despite all the noble intentions in the world. If this is the case in operating a mere machine, imagine how much worse it is when an ignoramus gets political power.
An excavator even in the hands of a malicious actor is limited in the damage it can do. True enough the damage can be catastrophic locally, but the damage must be localized. When someone ignorant of how things work gets political power they can destroy on a global level. An inexperienced operator might turn the wrong way and smash into a bridge, but an ignorant despot can start a war, destroy an economy, or lead a nation into chaos. Moreover, someone who has no idea how things run will make stupid blunders, resulting in the opposite of their goals. Their inflated egos can’t admit they made a mistake. Cognitive dissonance ensures that. So they blame everyone else. This triggers a cascade of disasters caused by a blundering angry despot who has no idea how the world works.
In most cases, those who want to rule are always the ignorant. Meanwhile, the wise eschew ruling, as did Numa Pompilius, Solon, and George Washington. People who know how things work are always reluctant to step in and run them. This is because they understand the difficulties, as well as the consequences of getting it wrong… and their conscience hounds them should they fail. This brings us to a fundamental tension in human society, that those who are ignorant want to rule with unlimited power, even as those who are able to wisely rule stay as far from it as possible. The result is that we get people in charge who have no idea how the world works demanding to run the world. Is it any wonder then that the world is in the shape it’s in? Run by the arrogant ignorant it can be no different.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
