Incompetocracy
This week’s must-read article is from John Carter of Barsoom:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/how-to-kill-the-incompetocracy
There’s a misconception out there that the source of the ruling class’ legitimacy is the consent of the governed. … Others would say that it is ultimately money that is the source of power…. The ruling class ultimately derives its assumed right to rule from the prestige of academic institutions.
The idea is that the smartest kids are admitted to the best schools, where they’re taught by the top minds in the sciences, philosophy, law, medicine, and the arts. They therefore possess both the highest degree of natural aptitude, and have been provided with the best possible training, meaning that they are naturally the most suited to take society’s reins.
What universities really sell isn’t an education: it’s the credential.
Credentials are meant to serve a crucial social function. They’re supposed to be a guarantee that a potential employee or professional has mastered the skills for which his services are being retained.
At some point over the last generation, the ruling class shifted its emphasis from competence to ideological loyalty.
Now, entrance into the top schools depends far less on grades, which is to say far less on ability, and more far on ideological purity. The ruling class has prioritized loyalty above all else.
Since those being advanced through the system are being evaluated not on their intellectual ability so much as their emotional docility, the overall level of competence declines. Dull minds have a harder time mastering difficult material; therefore, the rigour of the curriculum is reduced.
The result is the incompetocracy: a ruling class exhibiting near perfect unity of rigidly disciplined ideological purpose, able to move in synch with one another like a school of hungry piranhas, but composed of unimpressive cretins who are individually incapable of doing whatever task is assigned to them.
Look at Biden’s train wreck of a regime. These people all attended the best schools.
I wrote that last sentence without actually knowing, I just assumed it was probably true, but sure enough: the new press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, went to a Long Island prep school, and has a master’s degree from Columbia. Despite that, she’s barely able to string enough coherent words together to form a half-convincing deception.
The mumbling non-entity of a Secretary of State Antony Blinken is a Harvard man, which is no defense against being regularly humiliated by his international counterparts.
Treasury Secretary Yellen attended Brown and got her PhD from Yale, which does nothing at all to stop shortages and inflation from nuking the economy.
Attorney-General Merrick Garland has a law degree from Harvard, and presides over a steady dissolution in the rule of law.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is a Rhodes Scholar.
And so on and so forth. They’re an impressively credentialed group of people, but the country is rotting like a dead raccoon on the highway.
My comment: The conceit of the C.M. Kornbluth story “The Marching Morons” (Galaxy, April 1951) is that low-IQ people, having less practical ability to plan for the future, will reproduce more recklessly hence in greater numbers than high-IQ people, leading to a catastrophic general decline in intelligence over the generations.
A small group of elite thinkers tries, by any means necessary, to maintain a crumbling world civilization being overrun by an ever increasing underclass of morons.
In this morbid and unhappy little short story, the solution to overpopulation was the Final Solution, that is, mass murder of undesirables followed by the murder of the architect of the solution.
The eugenic genocide is played for laughs, as the morons are herded aboard death-ships, told they are going on vacation to Venus. The government forges postcards to their widows and orphans to maintain the fraud, which the morons are too stupid to penetrate.
You may recognize a similar conceit from the film IDIOCRACY (2006), written and directed by Mike Judge. Unlike the short story, no solution is proposed for the overpopulation of undesirables.
No one seems to note the absurd self-flattery involved in entertaining Malthusian eugenicist fears: no one regards himself as a moron unworthy of reproduction. Margaret Sanger did not volunteer to sterilize herself on the grounds that she was a moral cripple suffering from Progressive mental illness, hence unfit.
It is only the working man, the factory hand, the field hand, who is unfit, and usually he is an immigrant from some Catholic hence illiterate nation, with a fertile wife and a happy home.
The happy Catholic with his ten children will not die alone, empty and unloved, in some sterile euthanasia center in Canada, like the Progressive will, and so the Progressive hates the happy father like Gollum hates the sun.
The self-flattery is absurd because, first, IQ is not genetic — if it were, average IQ scores for a given bloodline would not change over two generations. Darwinism allows for genetic changes only over geologic eras.
Second, education in the modern day is inversely proportional to intelligence. No intelligent man would or does subject himself to the insolent falsehoods of college indoctrination: we are too independent in thought to be allowed to pass.
Third, a truly intelligent man, if he thought his bloodline was in danger of being outnumbered and swamped, rather than trying to inflict infertility on the competition, would seek the only intelligent solution compatible with honesty and decency: lifelong monogamy in a culture that forbids contraception and encourages maternity. He would, indeed, become Catholic, and attempt to evangelize his neighbors likewise.
A truly intelligent man would accept rather than reject the divine injunction to be fruitful and multiply. The idea of overpopulation is and always was a Progressive scare tactic, meant to undermine and control the underclass. It is the tactic of making the poor feel poorly for trying to use resources and grow rich. It is the politics of enforced poverty.
Why else would billionaires on private jets fly to Davos to eat steak dinners over wine, in order to pressure peons to ride bikes and eat bugs?
Our salvation is that they cannot even do that right. These James Bond style villains who are committing slow genocides with experimental injections, with wars against farming, against guns, against police, against oil drilling, against nuclear energy, and against family life, have not sacrificed the billions their dark and ancient gods crave dead, but this is due only to their lack of skill and organization.
John Carter here coins a new term, INCOMPETOCRACY, which pierces to the pith of the matter. We are bedeviled by chuckleheads. These are not high-IQ elites whose greater intelligence and forethought allows and requires they rule over low-grade morons. They are low-grade morons credentialed and flattered and falsely painted as educated.
As if Quasimodo were given a mortarboard and a diploma on the Feast of Fools, but after the festival was over, was made dean of Notre Dame University.
They are not dipolomaed for education. In fact, the opposite: they are diseducated.
Whatever wit or sense these pliant sleepwalkers might once have had was scrubbed away by the brainwashing process.
They are not smart people. They are below-average people convinced that babbling idiocy is genius, trying to be geniuses, so they act like babbling idiots.
Whatever they are, they hate intelligent people, nonconformists, independent thinkers because they want to be like us and cannot be. Envy seeks to mimic what it envies, and to destroy what it cannot mimic.
Gnosticism is the pretense of having an inner, secret knowledge gained without effort, superior to scholarly attainments, and discovering a secret morality somehow more enlightened than the merely commonplace and vulgar Ten Commandment or Eightfold Noble Path.
Gnosticism is Rey from THE LAST JEDI, where one excels merely by dint of being who one is, not requiring sweat, sacrifice, training toil. Gnosticism tells each loser that she is a secret goddess, and if all worldly goods and glories come not easily and effortlessly to her, she is being cheated and oppressed by a secret cabal of deplorables only she is wise enough to see.
This applies to all Gnosticism, including Marxism and Cultural Marxism currently called Woke.
But all this is a tale for another time: the point is that envy tells the Woke that benightedness is enlightenment, depravity is morality, ignorance is strength, idiocy is genius.
Whether they are frauds or the victims of fraud is left as an exercise for the reader. (Me, I suspect most at least suspect they’ve been cheated by participation trophy sleight of hand: the impostor syndrome is a commonplace of modern life.)
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
