“Men bungle their affairs. Everywhere, I see incompetence rampant, incompetence triumphant.”
That was in a book written 50 years ago (1969) entitled Peter’s Principle, authored by Dr. Peter Laurence and Raymond Hull, which was a No. 1 best seller. I still have a copy of it, just a thin paperback edition.
Now is a good time as any to revisit it because it could have been written today to describe our present state of affairs. It appears that incompetence knows no barrier of time or place. It does not want to leave us, it just mutates, like a modern-day virus.
What is the Peter Principle? Simply stated: in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. And this pattern is the reason “why things always go wrong,” which is the book’s subtitle.
It is a useful cautionary guide especially for people in management who are primarily responsible for promoting employees in business establishments. But the principle can be applied not just to business but also to any area of human endeavor. As the blurb of the book states: “It tells why schools do not bestow wisdom, why governments cannot maintain order, why courts do not dispense justice, why prosperity fails to produce happiness, why Utopian plans never generate Utopias.”
What makes it even worse is when the incompetent person placed in a critical position exhibits what psychologists call Dunning-Kruger effect, which simply means overestimating one’s knowledge or competence. A person with this egocentric trait fails to recognize genuine skill in others and is not even aware of his inadequacy.
It wasn’t too long ago when we witnessed how the chief executive of a powerful nation became a walking and talking embodiment of Peter’s Principle and Dunning-Kruger effect—a person who was elected to a position without the required competence for it and who showed symptoms of illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing his ability as much higher than it really was. Alas, the world watched him blunder, fumble, and falter in his own incompetence and ego-centrism, bringing down his country by several notches together with him.
But right under our flat noses, we have Peter’s Principle and Dunning-Kruger effect gone rampant. We have lockdowns that come and go, and yet the number of infections has stayed on the high side. The tally is not even reliable because of limited testing. Contact tracing never even got off the ground. Our vaccine rollouts are sporadic because the supply is delayed and it comes in spurts, to the dismay of city mayors. The economy is being opened but workers are struggling to get a ride.
All these are to be expected when people with military background are put in charge of addressing a vital public health and social crisis. Not an epidemiologist, not a public health expert, not even a doctor of medicine. Something doesn’t fit. No wonder our country is floundering in its efforts to manage this never-ending plague.
And who made the decision to put them in those positions? Let me quote Professor Randy David who states it better: “A pre-modern local politician who knows almost nothing about the challenges of modern statecraft, and, even less, of the imperatives of political leadership in a globally interconnected world.”
Incompetent people are in high positions because we elected them. We go with anyone who is popular, ignoring his or her incompetence. That’s how one popular old actor got elected to a national policy-making body, only to become invisible for his entire term. A champion boxer who is a local hero now dares to run for president, because he is widely known and will probably get elected, in spite of his past dismal record as an elected official.
Some highly educated people who should know better must share the blame for lowering the bar. Top businessmen and respected opinion makers who have been vocal in demanding competence from people in government have embraced and supported such phonies, proclaiming them as “the real deal.” The painful truth is, we have been suckered by con artists.
Our tolerance for incompetence has allowed know-nothing and do-nothing young personalities to make politics and entertainment a family business, simply by capitalizing on the family name. Most of them are without skills and have nothing better to do. Public office and showbiz are now a sustainable source of fame, power or wealth.
Nick Joaquin once had an essay entitled “A Heritage of Smallness” in which he pointed out how the Filipino people can be so much contented with all that is small, all that is little and all that is just enough. We have a term for it: “Mababaw ang kaligayahan” or “madaling makontento.”
Now, aside from our heritage of smallness, we are becoming a nation of low expectations. As a social analyst commented: “Beyond poverty of the mind and pocket we have a serious case of poverty of expectation and ambition. We can’t even have decent, realistic and proper expectation of our leaders. You cannot sow stupidity, bad planning, inefficiency, incapacity and expect to reap wisdom, organized society, efficiency and success.”
We deserve better but we don’t demand it. It’s true: “A people get the leaders they deserve.” We have either chosen, allowed, tolerated, been complicit about or encouraged poor leadership and we pay the price together. We are doing this to ourselves. Time and again, this is all I hear from people around me: Pwede na. Sige na nga. Nandyan na ’yan. Pagtitiyagaan na lang.
Let us first of all look at ourselves. Do we value competence in what we do? Are we striving to grow in skills and expertise? The problem isn’t our leaders’ incapacity nor their failure or their lack of vision. The real problem starts with our own individual low regard for competence, never mind excellence.
What we need to do in our post-pandemic future is to regain that high regard for competence in ourselves and in people we work with. By doing so, we help build herd immunity against shoddy performers, a critical mass of people who have higher expectations, and low tolerance for incompetence and mediocrity. Then to lead us, let us choose outliers, persons who are not just competent but who are, most of all, difference-making achievers.
Enough of pwede na. Instead, as one people, let us demand: “Pwede ba, step up ka naman!”