The Contest for Competence
@15 January 2009If some people don't break the rules sometimes, then a normal society will cease to function. Breaking the wrong rules for the wrong reasons is like breaking legs though. And if everyone breaks the rules, then a society will disintegrate. A paradox? Yes. See how this cake is baked...
The vector in play is the scarce resource of competence. Most people doing most things are marginally competent at best, and this is in every area of human activity, taken in its aggregate. Any given individual may be good at one thing - cooking, music, his job, whatever - but the aggregate of people doing any of those activities will be indifferently capable. In fact, a significant number will be seriously incapable, and they may do damage out of proportion to their numbers. There will be a small number who are brilliant at this particular thing.
The scarcity of competence holds true in even the best educated societies and professions (e.g. doctors), but overall the balance will be more negative in those communities where education is devalued and opportunity is not equal.
The contest between societies and groups, ancient or modern, is not about 'capitalism' and 'communism', or all the other '~isms' . It is about the struggle to capture the scarce carriers of competence. They may be bought by cash or prestige. They may be kidnapped by civil powers or by organized crime. They may be lured into a closed system such as both classical and modern Chinese officialdom (i.e. as mandarins, in that case by examinations), and thereafter kept in a cage to service some elite. There are a myriad of other traps and lures to have the competent do what others lack the wherewithal to manage.
The best society is that where there is a free market to trade competence, a market constrained only by restrictions on intent to harm others, and leavened by values of trust, goodwill and generosity. It would be a market where every person was at liberty to maximise their own competence, and where their abilities attracted real respect, not simply according to their wealth or power.
We know of course that 'best societies' do not exist, even as we strive for them. In the meantime, and here's the rub, we have to deal with societies where the intent to harm others, physically or psychologically, is not only permitted but mandated in many forms. We have do deal with, and in, societies where conformity is imposed and propagandized for the purpose of keeping in power individuals and groups whose main nourishment is an addiction to power, however ruthlessly obtained and exercised. We have to deal with the world as we find it.
In dealing with the daily world, yet remaining true to our objective of valuing competence, it may well happen that we have to break this 'rule' or that. The judgement is not an easy one, and never has been. As the old saying has it, 'laws are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men'. Rules though are human creations, somebody's tool for enforcing their idea of a desirable reality. In 1987 I had just arrived as a new university lecturer in the small island state of Fiji when the military leader, Sitiveni Rabuka, walked into parliament and announced the end of democracy. "Accept the new reality", he advised, "go home". Well, not so quickly mister. There are times when we have to make our realities, or try to, and break some rules if necessary, even at risk. Rabuka himself had done just that.
Often it is not the codified laws, or the dictats of coup leaders, that are most difficult to accept or reject sensibly. More often we are entangled by those invisible bands of steel, the unspoken rules of behaviour that define ideas about what is 'right' and 'wrong' in every culture, or what works and what doesn't. It is our unexamined assumptions about accepted wisdom which bind us. Indeed, life is even harder than that. Above all, none of us now lives in a single culture. We switch roles. We are workers and investors, tourists and hosts, drivers, customers, voters, parents and students, who knows what else ... all at once. In some roles we feel personally competent and in some we do not. We travel in concentric as well as intersecting bands of cultures where black and white shift with the speed of a moving spotlight.
There may be times when the whole show falls apart. We get it wrong. Maybe an entire society gets it wrong. Spin fails. Confidence is lost, and we can't buy it back with a fist full of dollars. The chasm beckons. Then what? Our ancestors have been here before. Fighting paralysis and fear, instinctively we look around for the master of a weapon in which we can trust, a light sword of the imagination. Charletans may step forth, magicians, peddlars of faith and holy bones, populists and wannabe dictators. In the end, if our instincts serve us right, we will look for guidance to the teacher who offers competence and goodwill, for these are the skills and qualities we need so desperately to rebuild again in our own minds.
All opinions expressed in Thor's Unwise Ideas and The Passionate Skeptic are entirely those of the author, who has no aim to influence, proselytize or persuade others to a point of view. He is pleased if his writing generates reflection in readers, either for or against the sentiment of the argument.
"The Contest for Competence " © copyrighted to Thor May; all rights reserved 2009
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