The Paul Principle

I don't usually duplicate an entire blog posting from another author but in this case, the writing is so on topic, so appropriate that I hope I can be forgiven.

Paul Wilmott is a British financial analyst who has long been critical of the overly abstract risk models used by Banks and Investment firms. The following posting can be found at http://www.wilmott.com/blogs/paul/index.cfm/2009/4/8/Society-Has-Finally-Risen-To-The-Level-Of-Its-Own-Incompetence

The Peter Principle (named after Dr Lawrence Peter) is the idea that people “rise to the level of their own incompetence.” Originally it was proposed in a humorous book published in 1968 but has since become accepted as giving genuine insight into how humans interact. According to Wikipedia “It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their ‘level of incompetence’), and there they remain. Peter’s Corollary states that ‘in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties’ and adds that ‘work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.’” This is related to the concept that everything interesting happens at the margins.

The same is now clearly true of larger organisms, and I am obviously thinking of western society as a whole. The evidence is unambiguous: Bonus-bewitched bankers destroy institutions that had been around for centuries, politicians rescue their rich friends and ensure they get handsomely rewarded for their catastrophic failures, then people protest peacefully at the G20 summit where the police are the aggressors.

This has been made possible by ‘progress’ thanks to technology, the Ponzi scheme that is the world economy, the lawyer-led victim culture, the abandonment of common sense because of political correctness, the advance of globalization so that we are all tied together in one giant global-village/shopping-mall and the ubiquitous career politicians having no productive real-world experience but who know how to crawl their way to the top, lining their pockets all the way, over the bodies of the hard working and what are now called the ‘coping class.’

Senior management being paid in inverse proportion to their achievements; Personal Identification Numbers everywhere so that we are forced to use the same one every time therefore increasing the security risks they were meant to reduce; Health and safety rules that mean we are not permitted to experience the small pains that stop us from suffering from the deadly; There being so much new legislation that most people commit a petty, trivial crime each day, while real criminals go unpunished; No one being allowed to fail, all students must be given an A grade so it is impossible to tell who is fit for a job, while simultaneously lying on CVs is encouraged; The BBC being unable to spell its news announcements correctly, they happen so quickly; Over-paid professors proposing that spelling be relaxed because children find it too hard; Children unable to play in the streets because of hysteria over paedophilia; Children unable to learn contact sports properly because teachers are not allowed to touch them; People allowed to drown because ‘rescuers’ didn’t have the right ‘certificates’; People vying to be in minorities so as to get special treatment; Bins too heavy for binmen; Fines for not sorting rubbish; Homeopathy; Creationism;…

On my street recently a man was deliberately run into by a car and carried around the neighbourhood on the bonnet. The man suffers from MS. The police did nothing, even though they have a CCTV camera in the spot and it recorded the whole incident including the car’s number plate. But they manage to use the same CCTV on the same road to record parking violations and issue tickets without any problem. The reason is obvious, fining people for parking is profitable, solving crimes is not. And according to en vogue theories every part of society must be a self-sufficient, profit center, mustn’t it? Utter madness.

Society has risen to the level of its own incompetence and at the same time the means to return to a more sensible world has been legislated out of existence. The above we all know. But only some of us really care. If you are one of us, you will already know the solution, but you are perhaps understandably afraid to carry it out. The solution is this…I ask please do your best to bring back freedom of speech and expression; Please be politically incorrect at every opportunity; Tell jokes that are in bad taste; Travel on trains without a ticket, and then for your court appearance hire Cherie Blair as your barrister. Laugh in the faces of health and safety personnel! Edmund Burke, the political philosopher, is attributed with the saying “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” I’m not worried about evil, it’s stupidity that is soon going to be victorious. But the world can only continue its descent into madness if you let it.

- Paul Wilmott, www.wilmott.com/blogs/paul/index.cfm