Competence is a moral issue
June 29, 2024 1:44 AM Subscribe
The first and most important lesson of the past few years is obviously the fact that competence is a moral issue, rather than simply a practical one. It is the mechanism that allows you to act in the world, to impose yourself on it. There can therefore be no meaningful morality without competence. Without it, we cannot secure the good. We can only wish for it. And that wish will be forlorn, deprived as it is of the measures by which it could be asserted.
In my experience, there is a massive overlap in the Venn diagram of Competence and Accountability. Accountability, even in it's simplest form of stick-with-it-ness, is the engine that leads to competency.
posted by Silvery Fish at 3:52 AM on June 29 [12 favorites]
posted by Silvery Fish at 3:52 AM on June 29 [12 favorites]
The challenge is that this bumps up against egalitarianism. Some people are much more competent than others. I hope that this doesn't sound like trolling because I both believe that everyone deserves decent treatment and we need for things to get done well.
Not only is skill unequally distributed, but to the extent that skill is rewarded, people can be biased when they try to judge skill.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:20 AM on June 29 [5 favorites]
Not only is skill unequally distributed, but to the extent that skill is rewarded, people can be biased when they try to judge skill.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:20 AM on June 29 [5 favorites]
Some people are much more competent than others
consider the capability approach: "freedom to achieve well-being is of primary moral importance and, second, that well-being should be understood in terms of people’s capabilities and functionings" [Stanford]
posted by HearHere at 5:29 AM on June 29 [2 favorites]
consider the capability approach: "freedom to achieve well-being is of primary moral importance and, second, that well-being should be understood in terms of people’s capabilities and functionings" [Stanford]
posted by HearHere at 5:29 AM on June 29 [2 favorites]
It’s not about their competence and their resulting personal wellbeing. It’s about politicians and administrators, leaders and plan makers, whose competence directly influences everyone else’s wellbeing. The moral imperative is to ensure the incompetence cannot be the ignored in favour of popularity. That’s the fundamental issue in the UK, and the UK too: it has become acceptable to be in a leadership role despite (or even because of) being functionally useless at the job. The vilification of expertise will destroy us all.
posted by DangerIsMyMiddleName at 5:44 AM on June 29 [5 favorites]
posted by DangerIsMyMiddleName at 5:44 AM on June 29 [5 favorites]
Politicians are not incompetent. They are (largely) subjects of the moneyed class. Doing what they are paid to do.
“Incompetence” is a double bladed lie to make you believe that the bad governance ruining your life is 1) unavoidable, ergo voting is pointless; and 2) that no one is really responsible for what is happening, ergo class revolution and general strikes would be pointless.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Especially if it’s been doing it for decades.
You are being robbed of your money, health and livelihood by billionaires, facilitated by laws enacted on their behalf by corrupt politicians. This is intentional.
Vote, every election, for the least corrupt, and throw sand (or rocks) in the gears of capitalism. It’s the only way to change things.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:58 AM on June 29 [25 favorites]
“Incompetence” is a double bladed lie to make you believe that the bad governance ruining your life is 1) unavoidable, ergo voting is pointless; and 2) that no one is really responsible for what is happening, ergo class revolution and general strikes would be pointless.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Especially if it’s been doing it for decades.
You are being robbed of your money, health and livelihood by billionaires, facilitated by laws enacted on their behalf by corrupt politicians. This is intentional.
Vote, every election, for the least corrupt, and throw sand (or rocks) in the gears of capitalism. It’s the only way to change things.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:58 AM on June 29 [25 favorites]
Some of the comments are discussing competence in abstract, rather than the article itself. The core point that contemporary politics is obsessed with electioneering instead of governing is a good one, and relevant across all western countries.
posted by tinlids at 6:35 AM on June 29 [11 favorites]
posted by tinlids at 6:35 AM on June 29 [11 favorites]
Dunt:
The result was the same as it always is in organizations of any size: marketers, being predisposed from the get-go to act with an almost complete lack of self-reflection, internalize at least some of the horseshit they make their living by ladling out. So once they're allowed to seize the reins of power, they can do nothing with it but act upon that internalized horseshit as if it had some kind of grounding in reality. Eventually, the cracks between what needs to be done and what actually gets done become so wide that the whole enterprise collapses.
Conservative governments are particularly susceptible to this failure mode because there is nothing more or else to conservatism than the marketing of injustice.
posted by flabdablet at 6:54 AM on June 29 [12 favorites]
This is a core reason for the breakdown in competence. It is because competence simply isn't what you are trying to achieve. You are trying to achieve electoral victory on the basis of voter-identification, division and gut-instinct political propositions. It's not that the Conservatives failed at being competent. It's that it ceased to even feature in their requirements.Seems to me that the issue is mainly about what people choose to be competent at. Marketing, for example, is all about competence at lying and psychological manipulation at the expense of every other competence. I don't think Brexit brought on a collapse of competence per se so much as the temporary ascension of marketing as the only politically relevant competence, that ascension itself largely due to the sheer volume of private-sector marketing noise with which actual representative competence is now forced to compete for voter attention.
The result was the same as it always is in organizations of any size: marketers, being predisposed from the get-go to act with an almost complete lack of self-reflection, internalize at least some of the horseshit they make their living by ladling out. So once they're allowed to seize the reins of power, they can do nothing with it but act upon that internalized horseshit as if it had some kind of grounding in reality. Eventually, the cracks between what needs to be done and what actually gets done become so wide that the whole enterprise collapses.
Conservative governments are particularly susceptible to this failure mode because there is nothing more or else to conservatism than the marketing of injustice.
posted by flabdablet at 6:54 AM on June 29 [12 favorites]
Here's some actual representative competence competing for voter attention.
posted by flabdablet at 7:11 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]
posted by flabdablet at 7:11 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]
I will say that what has struck me about the Tory-dominated politics of the past years has been the apparent love of stupidity. Americans give the impression that they hate intelligence and forethought and the result is stupidity; from the outside, the UK gives the impression that it loves stupidity and the result is a hatred of intelligence. We all seem to be circling the drain but the vibe is different in each place.
It was shocking that Windrush and the post office scandal and the carer benefits payback scandals happened while it was actively understood that they were errors and still weren't fixed. I didn't get the impression that even most conservatives really wanted to deport, eg, a Jamaican British woman who had spent the last sixty years in the UK working and paying taxes just because the government screwed up the paperwork. And the carer benefits overpayment thing is so incredibly stupid that it just beggars belief, but apparently there is literally no way to fix it, or maybe it will be fixed ten years from now when half the people involved have died in poverty.
I'm not trying to set up some kind of "look at the amazingly competent US government" argument, because god knows our government really actively does want to deport anyone they can and really does want people to die in poverty for want of a tiny amount of government assistance. It's the shock of seeing something well known to be so stupid and pointless and de facto against what the government wants and yet there is no mechanism to fix it. I thought Windrush would be, like, a week of scandal, "oh my god we're doing this incredibly dumb thing by mistake, we'll rush through a waiver", and it really shocked me when it just went on and on and cruelly on for years.
posted by Frowner at 7:45 AM on June 29 [5 favorites]
It was shocking that Windrush and the post office scandal and the carer benefits payback scandals happened while it was actively understood that they were errors and still weren't fixed. I didn't get the impression that even most conservatives really wanted to deport, eg, a Jamaican British woman who had spent the last sixty years in the UK working and paying taxes just because the government screwed up the paperwork. And the carer benefits overpayment thing is so incredibly stupid that it just beggars belief, but apparently there is literally no way to fix it, or maybe it will be fixed ten years from now when half the people involved have died in poverty.
I'm not trying to set up some kind of "look at the amazingly competent US government" argument, because god knows our government really actively does want to deport anyone they can and really does want people to die in poverty for want of a tiny amount of government assistance. It's the shock of seeing something well known to be so stupid and pointless and de facto against what the government wants and yet there is no mechanism to fix it. I thought Windrush would be, like, a week of scandal, "oh my god we're doing this incredibly dumb thing by mistake, we'll rush through a waiver", and it really shocked me when it just went on and on and cruelly on for years.
posted by Frowner at 7:45 AM on June 29 [5 favorites]
incompetant government and obeidiant tools of violence is the perogative of your owners. The torries/republicans/liberals (aus) /conservatives (can) are honest about it, the labour/democrats/labor/liberals are the ones caught selling the opposite to the plan
Never ascribe to incompetance that which is better ascribed to the well documented malice of the ruling class.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 8:21 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]
Never ascribe to incompetance that which is better ascribed to the well documented malice of the ruling class.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 8:21 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]
On the other hand, if the current crop of Tories weren't such blithering incompetents then the ruling class wouldn't have needed to bother installing their own mole to lead Labour.
posted by flabdablet at 8:43 AM on June 29 [4 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 8:43 AM on June 29 [4 favorites]
In '08, when Obama said "[i]t's like they take pride in being ignorant," he said it with a tone of disbelief. Now it's just a day ending in a Y.
posted by whuppy at 9:07 AM on June 29
posted by whuppy at 9:07 AM on June 29
What's the system of government where a council of decision makers is elected by a large quorum (20% of the population, filtered positively for intelligence and compassion with a max cutoff for wealth) , but every few years a fully public plebiscite is conducted on whether or not they should be replaced?
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:51 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:51 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]
the one comprised entirely of robots?
posted by philip-random at 10:08 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]
posted by philip-random at 10:08 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]
Yeah, phrasing this as a competence issue is a bit misleading. The Tories (and similar governments in other countries) have been very competent at facilitating wealth transfer to the rich and to corporations.
Similarly, the cultural thing around anti-intellectualism isn't so much about intelligence or competence, but around what one values being competent at. Like performing dominance or masculinity vs mid century Western standard of rationality.
posted by eviemath at 11:00 AM on June 29 [5 favorites]
Similarly, the cultural thing around anti-intellectualism isn't so much about intelligence or competence, but around what one values being competent at. Like performing dominance or masculinity vs mid century Western standard of rationality.
posted by eviemath at 11:00 AM on June 29 [5 favorites]
Dunt is usually right on the money, so I'm willing to read this argument about competence as referring specifically to competence at performing those functions that people generally expect a government to provide rather than competence in general, and ascribe the ambiguity to the hangover.
There's a wide range of competencies on display at present. Farage, for example, nails weaselling and grifting to an extent that Truss or Dorries could only dream of. But I struggle to identify anything that Rees-Mogg or Braverman might actually be good at.
posted by flabdablet at 12:15 PM on June 29 [2 favorites]
There's a wide range of competencies on display at present. Farage, for example, nails weaselling and grifting to an extent that Truss or Dorries could only dream of. But I struggle to identify anything that Rees-Mogg or Braverman might actually be good at.
posted by flabdablet at 12:15 PM on June 29 [2 favorites]
This article makes perfect sense if you read an implied "...at governing" with competence. I don't know why this is so hard.
Beyond that, in a certain sense all governments are competent at campaigning and being elected, by definition, or they wouldn't be the government. But what's interesting about this UK Tory government is that by having given up on competence in governing entirely, they are about to prove incompetent at being elected too.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 3:02 PM on June 29 [2 favorites]
Beyond that, in a certain sense all governments are competent at campaigning and being elected, by definition, or they wouldn't be the government. But what's interesting about this UK Tory government is that by having given up on competence in governing entirely, they are about to prove incompetent at being elected too.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 3:02 PM on June 29 [2 favorites]
This article makes perfect sense if you read an implied "...at governing" with competence.
That merely pushes the question off to: at whose idea of governing? If you think that the purpose of government is to uphold private property, further enrich those who already have significant wealth, further empower those who already hold great power, and keep everyone else down, then arguably the Tories have some competency at governing. If you think that governing is the process of enforcing penalties on people you don't like, and you happen to find yourself on team Trump, then arguably the Trump administration had some competency at governing - that is, if "governance" looks, to you, like establishing and enforcing' Christian nationalism, the US Supreme Court demonstrates that Trump did a bang up job.
The above is all completely antithetical to my idea of or goals in governing. But the idea of a values-neutral, objective idea of governance or competency in governance is very much a centrist Liberal notion from last century that also doesn't align with my values (though isn't quite a strongly antithetical as the UK Conservatives or the Trump party in the US).
posted by eviemath at 3:36 PM on June 29 [1 favorite]
That merely pushes the question off to: at whose idea of governing? If you think that the purpose of government is to uphold private property, further enrich those who already have significant wealth, further empower those who already hold great power, and keep everyone else down, then arguably the Tories have some competency at governing. If you think that governing is the process of enforcing penalties on people you don't like, and you happen to find yourself on team Trump, then arguably the Trump administration had some competency at governing - that is, if "governance" looks, to you, like establishing and enforcing' Christian nationalism, the US Supreme Court demonstrates that Trump did a bang up job.
The above is all completely antithetical to my idea of or goals in governing. But the idea of a values-neutral, objective idea of governance or competency in governance is very much a centrist Liberal notion from last century that also doesn't align with my values (though isn't quite a strongly antithetical as the UK Conservatives or the Trump party in the US).
posted by eviemath at 3:36 PM on June 29 [1 favorite]
(And I can't speak for the UK, but assuming that we're all working from the same set of upper middle class, white, kind of secularly-Protestant or Christian set of goals or values for government, and focusing on competence within that unspoken framework instead of on shared values and how to meet those values in ways that the status quo framework was failing to do so, has made the centrist Democratic Party in the US not so competent, or at least successful, at the marketing and campaigning tasks.)
posted by eviemath at 3:40 PM on June 29
posted by eviemath at 3:40 PM on June 29
It just seems so pointless to make of competence a moral issue. The more science learns about our brains and behaviour, the less choice we seem to have in our behaviour. I'm not impatient because I am a depraved and vicious individual, it's because my ADD brain wants this Right Now!!! Feeling guilty and flawed about being impatient didn't make me a more patient person. But learning that my brain predictably behaves in a certain way in certain situations lets me see through the ADD demands, or at least helps me put on the brain brakes earlier in the outburst. Taking the morality out of a situation can help de-escalate the situation and make space for learning and adapting. All the morality talk does is allow you to conclude '...and that is why the (insert enemy of the day) are immoral. And the squabbling continues.
posted by SnowRottie at 3:41 PM on June 29
posted by SnowRottie at 3:41 PM on June 29
> The purpose of a system is what it does.
> Marketing, for example, is all about competence at lying and psychological manipulation at the expense of every other competence... So once they're allowed to seize the reins of power, they can do nothing with it but act upon that internalized horseshit as if it had some kind of grounding in reality. Eventually, the cracks between what needs to be done and what actually gets done become so wide that the whole enterprise collapses.
> If you think that governing is the process of enforcing penalties on people you don't like, and you happen to find yourself on team Trump, then arguably the Trump administration had some competency at governing - that is, if "governance" looks, to you, like establishing and enforcing' Christian nationalism, the US Supreme Court demonstrates that Trump did a bang up job.
New pod:[1,2,3] "Under Project 2025, an army of Trump loyalists would deeply corrupt information gathering by the government and turn it into little more than pro-Trump propaganda."
> Marketing, for example, is all about competence at lying and psychological manipulation at the expense of every other competence... So once they're allowed to seize the reins of power, they can do nothing with it but act upon that internalized horseshit as if it had some kind of grounding in reality. Eventually, the cracks between what needs to be done and what actually gets done become so wide that the whole enterprise collapses.
> If you think that governing is the process of enforcing penalties on people you don't like, and you happen to find yourself on team Trump, then arguably the Trump administration had some competency at governing - that is, if "governance" looks, to you, like establishing and enforcing' Christian nationalism, the US Supreme Court demonstrates that Trump did a bang up job.
New pod:[1,2,3] "Under Project 2025, an army of Trump loyalists would deeply corrupt information gathering by the government and turn it into little more than pro-Trump propaganda."
MAGA personalities raged at CNN when it refused to allow a Donald Trump propagandist to smear journalists on air. They exploded again when CNN announced that the debate would be fact-checked. We think this provides an unexpected glimpse into what Project 2025’s implementation might look like. This thought was driven home by a must-read thread from writer David Roberts about Project 2025’s true aims. So we talked to Roberts about what MAGA’s hostility to neutral journalism portends for a second Trump term—one that wrecks the professional, fact-based civil service and transforms government into a tool for manufacturing propaganda.@drvolts: "Now, I'd like you to think about what will happen if Trump takes over, Project 2025 is implemented, & the entire federal bureaucracy (including law enforcement branches) is staffed with ideological MAGA cronies."
That will mean the end of anything like independence or expertise in the civil service. Crime statistics will be engineered to support Trump -- in his mind, and theirs, that's what the bureaucracy is *for*. The gov't is Trump's, devoted to Trump's glory...You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle - "Authoritarian Republicans, ineffectual Democrats, and a clueless media."
And you can broaden that out to economic statistics, trade statistics, GHG emissions, any & all information about the objective state of the country & the polity. It will all be pure propaganda under Trump, which will mean simply that *no one really knows* what's going on.
People lament the "post-truth" era we're living in. Misinformation. Epistemic bubbles. Algorithmic distortions. Etc. But I need people to understand that we really haven't seen anything yet... Take a peek at Russia or Turkey for a preview.
This is what keeps striking me over & over again as we wander backward into fascism, with scarcely any resistance: all the blessings we enjoy in America, the result of so much hard work that came before us, that we are taking for granted & casually frittering away.
In one corner, a party consistently ratcheting toward authoritarianism, refusing as a matter of bedrock principle—otherwise they are “Republicans in Name Only”—to compromise with adversaries they frame as ineluctably evil and seek literally to destroy.posted by kliuless at 8:17 PM on June 29 [1 favorite]
In the second corner, a party that says that, in a political culture where there is not enough compromise, the self-evident solution is to offer more compromise—because those guys’ extremist fever, surely, is soon to break …
And in the third corner, those agenda-setting elite political journalists, who frame the Democrats as one of the “sides” in a tragic folie à deux destroying a nation otherwise united and at peace with itself because both sides stubbornly … refuse to compromise.
And here we are.
All three sides of the triangle must be broken in order to preserve our republic, whichever candidate happens to get the most votes in the 2024 Electoral College. I have no prediction on offer about whether, or how, that can happen. All I know is that we have no choice but to try.
Politicians are not incompetent. They are (largely) subjects of the moneyed class. Doing what they are paid to do.
How much time have you spent in the UK? Utter incompetence in leadership is endemic here, not just in politics, everywhere. Workplaces of all kinds, community organisations, national politics, local politics, everywhere.
posted by Dysk at 1:14 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]
How much time have you spent in the UK? Utter incompetence in leadership is endemic here, not just in politics, everywhere. Workplaces of all kinds, community organisations, national politics, local politics, everywhere.
posted by Dysk at 1:14 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]
Oh well. Mustn't grumble.
posted by flabdablet at 2:43 AM on June 30
posted by flabdablet at 2:43 AM on June 30
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posted by HearHere at 2:50 AM on June 29