My husband tells a lovely story about his bleak nights clubbing in 1980s Peterborough. A group of lads in suits with a bottle of 20/20 in their top pocket would go out looking for a laugh, and women if they were lucky. They generally were not. My husband tells of a famous scene when one of their number saw a group of still unclaimed women in the corner. The club lights were coming on and everyone was forlornly trooping home. One optimistic mate locked eyes with one of the women, pushed his hands through his hair and made to stride across the dancefloor for a 2.30am attempt at seduction. He’d made no more than two steps when the woman swiftly raised her hand and shouted: “NO!” The optimist turned on his heel, rejoined his useless mates. The savage rejection scene became the stuff of lad legend.
I propose we adopt this wise woman’s approach to clearly unhinged public policy ideas. No consultations, no trials, no soft launches, no debates. When a drunk new policy makes a swaggering step onto the public stage we all just shout a loud and clear: “NO!”
No doubt you are as fed up as I am at the uselessly late newspaper columns suggesting the transing children / lockdown / furlough / extension of usual vicissitudes of life into mental health conditions / open borders / concrete tower blocks etc. may not have been such wise ideas after all. I’m thinking here of Matthew Syed (on the false compassion of an over-generous benefits system), Kirsty Allsop on trans, Rishi Sunak endlessly lying about trying to control immigration. It is all far too late. The damage has been done.
I have no doubt Matthew Syed, Kirsty Allsop and Rishi all knew instinctively and immediately that the various policies they helped to champion and tacitly supported by not speaking out against them were grade one stinking bullshit, but they were not brave enough to raise their hands and shout “NO!” until years after the event.
Imagine for a moment if that over-optimistic nightclub chancer was a public policy. The clear-sighted young woman would have been encouraged to override her instincts and listen to his sales pitch. Perhaps she would be encouraged to take him in for a ‘trial’ period. And if she didn’t like him, experts would have swung by to say, that actually, she needed to keep him because the evidence suggested he would eventually make an economic contribution to society. When it turned out he was indeed a desperate no-hoper, as the young woman had instinctively known, those advising her to take him on will first insult her, then disappear. Perhaps years later they might bravely emerge to suggest accepting a staggering drunk loser at 2.30am was not a good idea. They will write that lessons will be learned and leave her alone to pick up the pieces of her spoiled life.
As a society we all need to adopt the original and correct attitude of this astute young woman in the 1980s Peterborough nightclub. She could just see with one glance that the man in question was not to be entertained. We must follow her example and loudly shout “NO!” at whatever lunacy is next offered to us as an innovative public policy.
Think of these policies as a 1980s lad in a Peterborough nightclub, making an audacious stride across the dancefloor to some unsuspecting public. First taking to the dancefloor with a flick of the pink hair is: “Just stop oil.” No eminent meteorologists or examination of the charts of ice-core records are required for us to know immediately that just stopping oil is civilisational suicide. We raise our hands and shout all together: “NO!”
It’s an easy game to play, another public policy has a go. This time a gangly ugly fellow approaches the dance floor looking for pastures new. Onshore wind farms? They look horrible and don’t blow when it’s not windy: “NO!”
A cadaverous chap holding a sickle: euthanasia? “NO!”
A big fat sweaty bastard: even higher taxes for highest earners: “NO!”
Decriminalisation of abortion up to birth: “NO!”
Solar panels on farmland: “NO!”
Gender self ID: “NO!”
Lib Dem plan to make pensions ‘green’: “NO!”
Tony Blair’s return to Government under Starmer: “NO!”
Oh jeepers, he’s got across the dance floor…Tony Blair’s plans for Labour to forge closer ties with the EU: “NO!”
Penny Mordant as Tory leader: “NO!”
Legalisation of cannabis: “NO!”
Cloud seeding: “NO!”
Another Scottish referendum: “NO!”
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
“Those with merit rule.”
Anyone who thought that, wasn’t paying attention to those who actually ruled… or the mediocrats ruling today.
Socialism is the quintessential ideology of mediocracy – all reduced to the lowest common denominator to ensure equality. This cancer has invaded all our institutions, which is why we are where we are.
Spot on !
Thought provoking but I think the author hasn’t fully explained how or by which attributes hierarchy is established in a mediocrity.
This is important in understanding how seemingly mediocre people come to get power and rule over us.
The article was very good I did enjoy it. But to offer a possible route for the mediocre to gain a leg up for power, I would suggest the mediocre types propensity to go to University and get a degree in a subject of equally mediocre value gives them the grounding in the essence of inflated self worth. Which because of their inflated opinion of self, deem themselves the custodians of the right opinions, to be imparted upon those less fortunate.
We are being ruled by a class (if you prefer) of people with a purported academic knowledge of subjects that bear no relationship to the material and operational functions of a living society. Everything is possible to them as they have never learnt from or experienced a failure. When the lights go out and their laptop battery runs out through lack of power, the failure their Net Zero policies will merit their greatest achievement.
University as in Blairs dumbbing down and renaming he entire FE sector universities. That guaranteed mediocrity.
Nicely put. It also seems that in increase in the Blair type Uni grad population, is equal to the regression of and non productive society we see today.
So you’re saying hierarchy in a mediocracy is established by a system of bogus credentials.
That’s probably part of it.
A significant part to me is one’s ability to create social networks. People with social networking skills have higher status and power.
And I would venture to suggest that there is a negative correlation, perhaps not a very strong but significant one, between social networking ability and actually productive skills.
It is the productive skills that promote civilisations advancement, the rest is just a noise that some of us, I am happy to say, do not listen to, but equally are aware of its power to influence those who are susceptible to it.
May I make a shout-out for the more well-known Peter Principle where people in any organisation, including government, will rise to their level of incompetence, or ineptness to use the terminology of the article.
This is particularly true of our current crop of political leaders. The jury is still out on Farage, but he has shown his mastery at PR in that the whole country is talking about him today. There is no such thing as bad publicity.
In a similar vein is C.Northcote Parkinsons definition of a ‘Spastic Organisation’ where incompetents fill departments up with people ‘just like them’. The function of the organisation moves away from its raison-d’etre, and its objectives become unclear until the structure reaches critical mass, at which point the people of genuine merit are out of there, but the organisation continues to fill up with useless people. This seems to sum up every school I come into contact with btw. It does feel as though Parliament itself has now become a spastic organisation. Parkinson suggested two solutions. First that such an organisation could be saved by people of genuine merit getting into positions by stealth, and slowly replacing mediocrity with merit. Second and more likely, it should be closed and swept away.
Interesting, but I have an alternative theory: wealth creates the opportunities that generate a lifestyle which allows the purchase of an affordable belief system. Wealth purchases not just material items, but also the moral correctness of the top tier of society that maintain the wealth. That tier continues to expand their wealth and so continue to expand their virtue. The political class sit at the elite level, either through direct wealth or the propagation of wealth, and so have all purchased or had purchased for them, an affordable belief system. That belief system is neither driven by meritocracy or mediocracy, but the comforting certainty of faith.
I am a great believer in the idea that the whole of human existence is a paradox and that the physical laws that operate at an atomic level have effects in the meta physical. However I had a lot of trouble with the phrase “successful representatives of the inept”. In theory these people can’t exist? Or maybe it’s all relative. The most adept of the inept, rule the inept?
They are less than mediocre admittedly few of them seem to show any brilliance but their attitude isn’t just a matter of a lack of understanding. Some of them understand very well but feel that they might as well do as well as they can for as long as they can in order to be in a better position when it all collapses. The British do like a game of last man standing. If by merit you mean the ability to go beyond, intellectual transcendence or the man of action – that was crippled a very long time ago and the two wars finished it off entirely. The plebian nature of society, the chavs, the weak etc are entirely a creaion of the ruling class. The plebicization of the intellectual class and the ruling class is a result of the actions of the ruling class. You found it expedient to breed pygmies and then you complain about the stature of the pygmies. Not to mention a hundred years of a scientifically crafted western propaganda model. It is a wonder that there is any nous or dissent left at all.
👍
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” Act II Scene 5 of Twelfth Night.
In the case of politicians in positions of government & power, the conditions that must be met to get elected and the working conditions that one must endure, selectively on their own, ensure only the mediocre will ever expose themselves to such a system.
Time to dust off the copy of Atlas Shrugged ?