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.
This is completely off-topic, but I wasn’t sure where else to put it. I have two very good seats including to VIP Meet and Greet tickets for The State show tomorrow night in NYC. And now there is no way I can go. A week ago I suffered a severe L4-L5 disc herniation that has made walking more than an hour extremely difficult and painful. I was hoping I could find some way to still make it but sadly it’s just not going to happen.
So, if any of you are able to go to the show tomorrow night and don’t already have tickets, I am giving these away for free. I thought maybe at least I could try to give them to people who already seem to like Michael instead of just blasting it across Twitter.
Or if you know of anyone, Michael, who wasn’t able to get tickets, please let me know. These can be transferred from the Ticketmaster app. I’ve never done this before but I imagine you must at least have an account with Ticketmaster if I am to transfer them.
As I can’t find anyway to DM here or on Patreon, just email me at jasonwesleyclark@gmail.com
It’s killing me to miss the show and if this wasn’t such a serious, debilitating condition, I would have made it happen. But if I can’t go, I would love to give these away to another fan of Michael and The State.
Wow 😮 couldn’t have said it better myself.