For more than 40 years, I’ve argued that everything is top-down; ethically, competence-wise, and functionally. Both as a manufacturing manager in the 70s and 80s and as a consultant in the early 2000s, I unsuccessfully tried to convince CEOs and other pointless and unproductive upper mismanagement types that the example they set with their own ethics and productivity filters down to every person in the company. That, obviously, clashes with the Harvard MBA career development motto, “push blame down and pull credit up,” and it was not only not received well it wasn’t even acknowledged. A good friend, who had recommended me for the consultant job in her firm, eventually gently, kindly, and very firmly told me that “Today’s executives want to be told they are right, not that they should be doing something right.” The posterchild for that kind of mismanagement today is Elon Musk who not only needs to be constantly spoon-fed congratulatory Pablum but can’t tolerate any injection of reality into his self-promoting world. So, I left mismanagement consulting (a turning point for this blog, which was once a consulting website) and did other things for the last 18 years of my career.
Like our declining, decaying, and mostly obsolete manufacturing sector, the US has suffered a long string of incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional presidential administrations beginning with Eisenhower and Nixon, continuing with 8 years of Reagan’s corruption and outright stupidity, almost two decades of moronic Bush shenanigans, and peaking (so far) with the dumbest, most corrupt, laziest, least competent President in the history of the United States; Trump. (Ending that sentence with Trump’s identify is only there for you Qnuts, everybody else knows how stupid that man is.) The dribble-down moral effect is pretty obvious.
You can find dozens of articles about the the dumbing down of America (including Canada, unfortunately) along the lines of “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” The argument that we’re getting dumber and heading for an Idiocracy is not only not new but coming from all directions: right, left, and center. Even stupid people think the country is getting dumber. Of course, 65% of Americans think they are of above average intelligence and, obviously, more (white) men think they are above average than women, mostly proving that Americans suck at math and statistics. The Dunning Kruger Effect is in full bloom.
The combination of top-down stupidity and corruption is the cause of practically ever breakdown in the country. For four depressing years, we suffered an administration full of corporate criminals, the 3rd tier of our 1% elite who are too dumb and too useless to work in a real administration, and some outright low life mobsters. (Yeah, I’m talking to you Giuliani.) Now, every unemployable deplorable in the country has been empowered to gun down anyone they don’t like, steal anything that isn’t nailed down and chained to a metal pole, and run wild in the streets pretending “this is our 1776!” [It was, by the way, conservatives’ 1776 and just like the last time they lost another war. In 1776, conservatives were called “Tories” and, just like today, they were on the side of an authoritarian theocratic government.] The amoral right wing have loudly claimed the various gods are on their side, including the freakin’ godless Russians! In possibly the most arrogant example of Orwell’s double-speak since Trump’s last sputtering Russian Deputy of the State Duma Vyacheslav Nikonov (a grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov) claimed, "In the modern world, we are the embodiment of the forces of good. This is a metaphysical clash between the forces of good and evil . . . This is truly a holy war we're waging and we must win.”
In other words, just when you think life can’t get crazier, insanity doubles-down and lowers the bar even further than you imagined it could fall.
It’s going to get a lot worse before, if ever, it gets better. Americans are, by nature, conservative and uncreative and they whole idea of “the American Experiment” makes most of us uneasy. “Experiment” means trial-and-error and using logic like the scientific method to determine the success or failure of any part of an overall experiment. Admitting failure is tough even for scientists, but it is apparently impossible for the average American citizen. That means the failures of our national experiment have to rise to the level of the great depressions of the 1890s or 1930s before Americans will make any adjustment to the terms and assumptions of the experiment. 2007’s Great Recession was not enough and the unnecessary deaths of more than 1,000,000 Americans in Trump’s Plague didn’t even put a dent in the direction conservatives want to take their perversion of the country’s ideals. If we ever decide to make a correction in our experiment’s assumptions, it will require the collapse of the dollar in the world financial market (which is most likely going to happen in my lifetime), at least 20% unemployment, massive inflation at the Mexican or Venezuelan magnitude, and/or much worse.
The best argument most people can give for doing something they way they do it is, “We’ve always done it this way.” For most questions, that is the dumbest possible answer. When it comes to trying to hold back change and cling to historic “values” in the face of a raft of evidence that those false values are based on superstition, ignorance, and prejudice, the obvious result will be some kind of catastrophe.
If it happens before bankruptcy, this is the kind of disaster required for corporate reform, too. My favorite example is Ford Motor Company in the 1980s. In the early 80s, most of us in the manufacturing sector assumed Ford was heading for the dustbin of history like Packard, Studebaker, Rambler/American Motors, and the rest. In 1980, Ford lost $1.5 billion dollars. Those useless talking heads who had been the media darlings, like Lee Iacocca, had thoroughly trashed Ford with a collection of wrong-headed product and marketing decisions and grossly inflated executive salaries. By 1980, having done their worst, Ford’s executive staff were jumping ship like the rats they were. The last man standing was Donald Petersen, the head of Ford’s truck division and an actual engineer instead of the usual MBA, sales/marketing, or accounting refuse who had populated the CEO’s office for too many years. Petersen listened to engineers, including the company’s long-ignored quality and manufacturing engineers, and turned the company around in less than a decade. Those were the “Quality is Job One” years, a slogan that actually had the weight of action behind it. The company is still living on the standards created during those years.
Likewise, the 1930s Great Recession created a national economic disaster along with the challenge to democracy, capitalism, and decency provided by Hitler/Mussolini/Stalin forced the citizens of the United States to put up or shut up. The country came (mostly) together and created a collection of New Deal reforms that took Republicans and other regressive forces 40 years to destroy. We can only hope to survive the next challenge as successfully, but it will take a disaster to force responsible action and that means the outcome is totally based on luck: good or bad.
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