On Power and Stupidity

Why do so many fools end up in positions of authority?

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When the fools leading the world’s most powerful country accidentally text war plans to a journalist, it’s time to ask an obvious question:

Why do so many idiots end up in power?

Bertrand Russell took up that question in 1946—shortly after an alarmingly large number of powerful and malicious idiots killed around 85 million people across the globe. Russell offered a concise insight: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Nowhere were the world’s powerful but cocksure fools more exposed than in the metastasizing Signal scandal, in which America’s ever-swaggering and perfectly-coiffed texters spent more time checking their hair than checking whether their little fingers were sending classified intelligence to the wrong person before they blew up a bunch of civilians.

Once exposed, they then racked their big brains for how to limit the damage from their boneheaded mistake and came up with another ingenious idea: what if we lied about it by falsely claiming that none of the information being shared was classified? Surely nothing bad could happen next!

It never occurred to them, it seems, that the inevitable outcome of that lie was for the journalist, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, to call their bluff by sharing the entire thread.¹

“You say it was no big deal and wasn’t classified? Okay, then, here it is!” (For the record, if sharing specific attack plans, with specific weapons systems, and specific targets before an airstrike isn’t classified, it’s hard to imagine what is).

Beyond the flagrant danger of being so careless with critical military intelligence and the blatant nefariousness in trying to obscure government communications from official legal channels, there’s a bigger story here and it’s this:

There is no Secret Genius lurking in the Trump administration. They’re not playing 3-D chess. There’s not some grand strategy. No, Occam’s Razor cuts deep here, and lots of blood may soon be spilled as a result of the evident implication:

The most powerful people in the world are both stupid and incompetent.

This is a rather depressing state of affairs, which would be mildly amusing if it wasn’t so chillingly destructive. The incessant clicking noise you hear in your mind when you read the news these days is the Ticking Time Bomb of Imbeciles.™² Alas, there seems to be nobody around who can defuse it. (Even if there were someone with the requisite technical expertise, they were probably already fired by DOGE, under the strategic genius of a certain bureaucracy expert: Mr. Big Balls).

These are the same people, mind you, who work for the man who claimed you needed an ID to buy cereal, said a hurricane was “one of the wettest we've ever seen from the standpoint of water,” and wrote an inadvertently powerful avant garde poem called “Gettysburg, Wow,” reproduced here in its hallowed entirety:

Trapped in a burning theatre of the absurd as we all are, it brings to mind some of the opening lines of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which Douglas Adams opines on the frequently dire blunders of our maddeningly flawed species:

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.”

I have, for better or worse, devoted quite a lot of time and a considerable number of brain cells to contemplating destructive people in positions of authority, so I will humbly offer four observations about the nature of power and stupidity, in the hope that it will help illuminate why we end up governed by overconfident ignoramuses.

Observation 1: Humans confer power based not on whether someone would be good at wielding power, but on whether they are good at getting power.

Observation 2: Increasing social complexity creates greater capacity for boundless stupidity and a higher risk that some of us will be hoodwinked by charismatic imbeciles.

Observation 3: Idiocy, carelessness, and incompetence frequently change history in consequential ways, but it’s far easier to break things than to fix them.

Observation 4: Because we like to imagine that people in power are clever and know what they’re doing, we feel compelled to perform intellectual gymnastics in pursuit of sticking rational explanations onto egregious stupidity.

These dynamics of power do not work in obvious ways, so we must turn to scientific studies, to history’s great political blunders—from Four Seasons to Four Pests—and to exploring why systems of modern power have launched us all on a rapidly leaking voyage, all aboard the Ship of Fools.