In the Room With the Shit and the Fan
A moment of gratitude today that I hold no position of power. Any decisions I make today will likely affect almost nobody. Whatever public statements I issue will be ignored. My words will go unheeded, and my previous statements on any given topic will go unscrutinized. Today I express joy that I am of little to no consequence. How is one with power and influence supposed to go about their jobs today when the world holds so few good decisions and so many bad? My life is small, and happily so. If I were king today, I would abdicate the throne.
There are people who want to be in the room where it happens. I’m not one of those people. Let presidents and prime ministers haggle over the world’s ills. I prefer to be the guy hanging out by the pastry table. “Is this apple or pear?” is about as deep as I want to go into policy discussions today. I have no ideas and can help nobody do anything. Even the other day when a couple tourists asked me for directions in my own city, I had to think extra hard about the answer and, even then I told them I wouldn’t trust my response. (As it happens, my directions were correct but I held no confidence in them.) Thank goodness nobody trusts me to do very much of anything.
Should I feel bad for my gratitude or grateful for my ineptitude? Hard to say. But I know this: when the shit hits the fan, I have no desire to be anywhere near the fan.
The truth is, there are leaders and there are followers and there are people like me who would rather just not get involved. I don’t think that makes me a bad person any more than getting involved make somebody a good person. After all, we’ve seen what happens when the people who want to be in the room make decisions. The shit ends up perilously close to the fan. One has to ask: who let these people be in charge?
The answer is I did. And you did. And this is the world we’ve got. Worse, this is the world we chose. While it’s easy to snipe at our leaders for their obvious failings, could any of us have done any better? I don’t know and I don’t care to find out. If elected, I will not serve. If nominated, I shall decline. And if you are stepping forward to serve in my stead, my trust in your powers of discernment will be diminished accordingly. Calling one’s self a leader inspires about much trust as calling one’s self a prophet. Usually the guy yelling “Follow me!” in the dinosaur movie is the first guy who gets eaten by a dinosaur.
How can we trust anybody who has enough confidence in their own vision of the world to rally people around them when we know that nearly every single person who has had a vision of the world ends up getting murdered? The one thing visionaries rarely anticipate is their own demise. Worse, they never seem to anticipate that the end they meet will usually come at the hands of their own followers.
Why does this keep happening? Because nearly everybody – even leaders – is an idiot. Maybe especially leaders. Consider all of history’s dumb leaders, all the knaves and fools who had led their people right into calamity. When viewed through a historical lens, one might have to conclude that, compared to the population at large, leaders are, disproportionately, very stupid people.
Of course, the disadvantage we ordinary people share is that we are subject to the whims of the disproportionately stupid people we selected to make their disproportionately stupid decisions. The result is what we see on the news: war casualties, refugees, people suffering from disease and famine and terrible corruption. Those at the top may get the blame but they also get good meals and comfortable beds in which to sleep every night, at least until those with the long knives come in the night.
Be wary of those with solutions. Suspect certainty. Do not trust anybody who asks for your trust. Consultants? I would not consult. Allow nobody else to make decisions for even though you are incapable of making good decisions. A final rule: even when you are at fault, blame somebody else. If you look hard enough, you will almost always find somebody with whom to find fault for the mistakes you have made.
Leadership bears more resemblance to augury than anything taught at Wharton. Entire governmental agencies are organized to predict second and third tier repercussions of decision-making, and those massive agencies get it wrong just as much as they get it right. What chance do you or I have to get it right? None whatsoever. So today, let us celebrate our own irrelevance in the face of this damnable world. Let us express gratitude for our powerlessness and thankfulness for our irrelevance. Our leaders have failed and we could have done no better.
Thank God we will never be given the chance.
Being the inconspicuous speck to observe sometimes for self-preservation. I remember when starting my last job (since retired) in the hospital (RN). A couple came to me frantically needing directions. It was my 1st shift and I barely knew how to get to my unit myself. I had no idea where they needed to go and not another soul around. A little part of me wanted to say I have no idea, but I found a wall phone to call the hosp operator to help them. Sometimes I want to bury my head in the sand, but then I can't. I'm no smarter than anybody else, but I keep showing up and plugging along for the ride...of life.
I was just thinking today how lucky I was to do boring tasks like cleaning cat poop and live uneventfully 😅