Incompetence

[degringolade]

Early Sunday morning.  I am doing the laundry and drinking coffee.  Today is wandering over Vantucky way to hang out with the elder and hope that the younger can spare a moment.  I am not holding out any particular hope.

I do have to pick up spices from Winco and maybe a couple of pounds of tea from my little Russian Store.  I am feeling the need to up my game in the pantry.  I am feeling that the cold times might be pretty damned cold this winter.  The market is making some strange creaking and the money looks to be getting shaky.  I am going to spend some time with AA tonight.  She is country-crazy enough to understand where I am going with this.

Screed

I gave out the link in yesterday's post.  So let's start from the beginning.  The title itself gives a pretty big clue as to the author's mindset and what audience he is pitching the article toward.

The Rise of the Incompetent Citizen and the Appeal of Right Wing Populism

If the title itself isn't a tell, I don't know what is.  Now, I do want to tell you that the article is well written and has many cogent points that need to pondered in a serious way.   But the author is an academic, pure and simple.  My guess is that he is tenured and has years of clear thought behind him going into this article.  I kinda think that I read a couple of his early papers in the long-ago when I was going to be a lawyer and reveled in the soft sciences.  But that may just be old age creeping up on me.

Now, you are probably asking "what tell are you talking about?"  What I am talking about is the differing parts of society described by Toynbee and to a less extent, Spengler.  The man is a true-blood elite.  Now, there is no problem with the idea of the elite.  To ability posit that all people are gifted with the same intellectual horsepower is to ignore the evidence of the world around you.  As a matter of fact, the basic premise is that the Hoi Polloi just ain't got the horsepower

The weakness is the relative inability of the citizens of the modern, multicultural democracies to meet the demands the polity imposes upon them. Drawing on a wide range of research in political science and psychology, I argue that citizens typically do not have the cognitive or emotional capacities required.

Fair enough.  As a man who spent four years in the infantry and way too much time in the seedy working-class bars that I so enjoy, I really can't argue this point.  I think that this gentleman's point is clear. 

But, as an elite, he is part of the minority that have created the Democracy that he now feels as threatened.  Whether the gentleman likes it or not, the complexity and the mental effort required to understand and successfully navigate an increasingly complex polity are, in a great majority of the population, beyond their intellectual powers.

But exactly what to do.  That is a pretty huge question.  I will get back to that in tomorrow's post.  I got laundry to do.