In a
brilliantly perceptive piece Chris Hayes wonders why elites are so incompetent. Why they always seemed to create messes of sometimes global proportions behind them. It is due to the tendency of all those in power whether they be left or right wing to leave the mechanics of governing to others.
Hayes credits Robert
Michels,a German social theorist for putting his finger on the mechanism involved.
"At first, he joined the Social Democratic Party, but he
ultimately came to view it as too bureaucratic to achieve its stated
aims. “Our workers’ organization has become an end in itself,” Michels
declared, “a machine which is perfected for its own sake and not for the
tasks which it could have performed.”
Any organization must delegate to the few professionals who must run the machine. Sooner or later the professionals become so expert in the machine they cut off conversation with the rest of us and believe that they have the magic solutions to solve complex problems. Meanwhile we cannot understand what they are talking about.
“Without wishing it,” Michels says, there grows up a great “gulf
which divides the leaders from the masses.” The leaders now control the
tools with which to manipulate the opinion of the masses and subvert the
organization’s democratic process. “Thus the leaders, who were at first
no more than the executive organs of the collective, will soon
emancipate themselves from the mass and become independent of its
control.”All this flows inexorably from the nature of organization itself,
Michels concludes, and he calls it “The Iron Law of Oligarchy”: “It is
organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the
electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over
the delegators. Who says organization says oligarchy.”
Within these governing organizations--elite financial, legal and other groups find ways to maintain their power and justify entrance through succeeding in the meritocracy. Intelligence becomes " a vitally necessary characteristic for those with
powerful positions. But it isn’t just a celebration of smartness that
characterizes the culture of meritocracy. It’s something more
pernicious: a Cult of Smartness in which intelligence is the chief
virtue, along with a conviction that smartness is rankable and that the
hierarchy of intelligence, like the hierarchy of wealth, never plateaus.
In a society as stratified as our own, this is a seductive conclusion
to reach. Since there are people who make $500,000, $5 million and $5
billion all within the same elite, perhaps there are leaps equal to such
orders of magnitude in cognitive ability as well."
Hayes focuses on the way that this cult of intelligence becomes divorced from morality through the example of the one man who was "behind many of the Bush administration’s most disastrous and
destructive decisions" David Addington, counsel and then
chief of staff to Dick Cheney.
"Addington was called “Cheney’s Cheney”
and “the most powerful man you’ve never heard of.” A former Bush White
House lawyer told
The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that the
administration’s legal framework for the “war on terror”—from indefinite
detention, to torture, to rejection of the 1949 Geneva Accords, to
denial of habeas corpus—was “all Addington.” Addington’s defining trait, as portrayed in numerous profiles, is his
hard-edged, ideologically focused intelligence. “The boy seemed
terribly, terribly bright,” Addington’s high school history teacher told
Mayer. “He was scornful of anyone who said anything that was naïve, or
less than bright. His sneers were almost palpable.”
And Hayes gives other examples of how the "cult of smartness" ruined the financial industry with such serious consequences for the rest of the world. How to avoid the cult of smartness? How about, as a first step having ordinary people, at the table to ask that simple questions have intelligible answers. Additionally, how about clearer conflict of interest regulations that prevent all the elites thinking that important institutions like government and banks are there for career advantage rather than for a public good. Hayes refers to Janine Wedel's book, the
Shadow Elite, about the new global ruling class, who "recalls visiting Eastern Europe after the fall of the
Berlin Wall and finding the elites she met there—those at the center of
building the new capitalist societies—toting an array of business cards
that represented their various roles: one for their job as a member of
parliament, another for the start-up business they were running (which
was making its money off government contracts), and yet another for the
NGO on the board of which they sat. Wedel writes that those “who adapted
to the new environment with the most agility and creativity, who tried
out novel ways of operating and got away with them, and sometimes were
the most ethically challenged, were most rewarded with influence.”
