Incompetence - an egalitarian failure

They talk about ‘Above the Battle,’ but I think that it is really ‘Below the Battle’ — that just below all this noise and confusion and hatred the real life is continuous, always there waiting for us to find it.

Hugh Walpole - John Cornelius (1937)

We have always known how ruling elites cannot avoid a certain level of incompetence even though they make strenuous efforts to hide it. From bungled military adventures to incompetent industrial interference to inept social policies to fashionable environmental fantasies to imposing useless bureaucratic burdens, we have known about elite incompetence forever.

Even so, the whole business of rulers and ruled in a democratic society does require some kind of assumption that rulers must be broadly competent to rule. Why else are they there?

The corollary assumption is that those who are ruled are not competent to rule themselves. The trouble with this latter assumption is that within a just framework of laws and law enforcement, most of us are quite competent enough to rule ourselves. It’s what we do.

An example of this is going on now in what we hope but cannot assume are the latter stages of the coronavirus debacle. In spite of the most ludicrous elite incompetence, life still goes on ‘Below the Battle’. Which battle is that? Clearly there is a coronavirus policy battle between the incompetent intransigence of the ruling elite and competent critics.

Incompetence also seems to highlight a remarkable failure of the egalitarian ethos. Elites appear to feel that they are entitled to much more incompetence than anyone else. Their position also allows them to be incompetent on a grander scale, multiplying the inequality. Sometimes they manage to hide their wealth of incompetence, but not completely because they are not even competent enough to do that.

The outcome is obvious enough. Eventually elites try to engineer situations where it doesn’t matter if they are competent or not – their incompetence entitlement is unlimited. This is what they may be doing now with the coronavirus debacle. They may be drawing it out as long as possible to wear down criticism, hoping that a sense of relief when it is all over may damp down the inevitable verdict of hindsight.

Unfortunately this appears to be the most favourable interpretation but not necessarily the most likely. There are others where the elites intend to make themselves permanently immune from effective criticism. The internet is shining a harsh light on their incompetence and as official coronavirus policies have been so extraordinarily incompetent, permanent repression is not an unlikely outcome.