Thursday, November 12, 2020

Death By Bureaucracy


Mediocre Man



Everywhere you go in the West, you are confronted with rules and regulations that make little sense at face value. Every business has to have people who spend their days keeping up with the rules, which change constantly. The “compliance officer” has taken the role of the ideological enforcer. Instead of making sure everyone is properly enthusiastic for the latest truth from the party, the compliance officer makes sure everyone is enthusiastic about following the rules.

These rules, of course, are the domain of the mediocre. Now, don’t confuse mediocre with average. Average people know they are average and accept their limitations, while the mediocrity imagines himself as an elite. Every “policy expert” in Washington is sure he knows more about his subject than the people who actually do the work. Every lawyer thinks he is Blackstone. Every politician thinks he is a great historical figure. The mediocrity does not know what he does not know.

This is the reason mediocrities love complex rules. The Mediocre Man loves rules for the same reason small children love large bulky toys. Just as the child lacks the fine dexterity and spatial awareness to manipulate small objects, Mediocre Man lacks the cognitive ability to act independently. He is a man who grasps the rail when going down a few steps, because that’s what you do. His mastery of the rules is proof that he is the smartest man in the room.

This is why the West is so burdened with elaborate and complicated rules that have no obvious point. It’s why Massachusetts now has a curfew to fight Covid. It’s not just that they think Covid is a night stalker, but that an army of mediocre men came up with a plausible sounding, but ultimately absurd, reason for the curfew. The mediocre men in politics, being mediocrities themselves, embraced it for the same reason a toddler picks up the big toy. It’s what makes sense to them.

Mediocre Man and his love of rulemaking is why we have a war on reason and observation in the West. Mediocre Man sees the rules against reading Table 43 of the Unified Crime Report and assumes anyone mentioning its contents broke the rules, which the worst possible crime. There are rules about what you can say about Covid, peace be upon him, so anyone not in full compliance, even if he is right, must be hounded out of polite society. The rules demand it.

...we have allowed Mediocre Man to take the controls of society and drive us into a jungle of rules. It is why Mediocre Man has locked himself in place by a form of regulatory capture.

Just as regulatory agencies are dominated by the industries or interests they are allegedly regulating, Western societies have been captured by those rule loving mediocrities they should be controlling. The smart fraction, like those in the classic science fiction story, find themselves the slaves of stupid people who think they are the masters of the universe. The problem in the West is that it has been taken over by Raskolnikov, who thinks he is Petrovich.



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