Continued collapse of competence points toward decline of a culture

By David McElroy · October 29, 2017

I see the collapse of modern culture in this biscuit promotion at a fast food restaurant.

That might seem alarmist hyperbole, but I see it as a tiny symptom of something much larger. All around us, competence is dying. Incompetence is becoming both expected and accepted — and I can’t think of a more obvious early indicator of a culture’s coming death.

This sign has been in front of a Birmingham-area Burger King for weeks, but the problem is not just a local phenomenon. I see the same sorts of things everywhere, both in the physical space around me and in the incoherent mush of popular media.

The sign says “2 FOR 4 BISCUITS.” Are they offering two biscuits for $4? Or is it four biscuits for $2? If you happen to know what’s typical for Burger King biscuits, maybe you’d have a guess, but even then, it would be just a guess.

If this were unusual, I would just laugh at it and move on, but this sort of casual incompetence is everywhere today. It scares me and it angers me.

If the problem were limited to biscuits or fast food restaurants, it would annoy me but it wouldn’t seem like something larger. But this cancer of incompetence is growing — and it threatens more and more of society.

Most news writers can’t write competently. Their editors are little better. They don’t seem to understand grammar or logic or (heaven forbid) AP style. As a result, the information we get from the media is worse and worse. You can blame it on ideological bias if you want — and there’s certainly some of that — but sheer incompetence is even worse. (Take a look at the teaser headline below from CNN’s website this Saturday.)

It’s bad enough to tweak a news story (consciously or not) to make your political side look better, but it’s infinitely worse if you truly don’t even understand the news you’re writing. Newspapers are getting terrible all over, but our local paper is one of the worst. After beancounters at the corporate office decided to fire the copy editors and get rid of competent journalists with experience, they’re left with people who are mostly incompetent. Some are idiots. Some are ignorant. A once-proud newspaper has been reduced to brain-deadening incompetence, but I suppose the corporate beancounters are happy.

I constantly read examples of workers at restaurants and day-care centers and retail stores doing simple things which put people in real danger through sheer incompetence. I encounter such incompetence from employees in stores all the time — and I’m pretty sure you do, too.

One of my most vivid memories of this was a few years ago when a customer handed a cashier at a fast-food restaurant some change along with some currency. The customer’s total came to something such as $5.32 and the customer initially gave the clerk a $10 bill. Then the customer realized he had 32 cents in change, so he added that.

The cashier had already entered $10 in the register as the amount given to her, so she was completely confused. She was so accustomed to the machine doing her math that she had no understanding of what the customer was doing — even after he explained. The confused cashier finally called out to a manager, “Hey, I need to borrow your ‘math head’ over here.” It was very difficult for her to understand that $10.32 minus $5.32 meant the change should be $5.

When I tell stories such as this, people mostly nod vigorously and then start lecturing about whatever they see as the core ills of society. Some want to talk about how terrible teachers are. Others want to blast the entire government-operated school system. Others see it as an indictment of society’s lack of willingness to give enough money to schools. And on and on and on. Everybody knows who to blame.

Except me. I see plenty of places for blame, but I’m less interested in the big-picture blame.

I don’t believe I can fix everything — for fast food workers who can’t do simple math or for college students who can’t write or journalists who don’t know their trade.

I’m frightened and angry about it because the problems are getting more widespread and are putting us in danger.

Did the guy who wrote the software in my self-driving car know what he was doing? Competence isn’t as important as making sure that all the “right groups” are represented among the coders, right, Google? Does the person running the advanced medical equipment at a hospital know what he’s doing when I show up at the emergency room with a serious problem? Is he going to miss something because he’s grown up in a society where competence is slowly becoming optional?

Incompetent people are everywhere around us. They’re putting all of us in danger. They’re making us less able to become more productive and improve our lives. They’re a risk to an entire culture.

The worst part is that so few people care.

If I told the local Burger King manager (or one of the employees) about this unclear sign, I would get a shrug. Why should I care? Why should he care?

The best thing I know to do is to uphold higher standards and encourage others to do the same. Competence matters to me and I want to teach my future children that competence should matter to everyone. If you have your child in a typical school — even one in an affluent area — you’re putting that child at risk of being dragged along into the mindless incompetence which characterizes our age.

Everybody makes mistakes. I certainly make a lot of them. I don’t expect anybody to be perfect, so that’s not the point. I do expect decent and educated people to care about competence and to care about self-improvement.

I don’t know how to change the coming collapse of western culture, but I don’t plan to be part of it. I don’t intend to be part of the cause and I don’t intend to be stuck with the effect. If you want to pretend that nothing is happening — and there’s no cause for alarm and no cause to change your life — you’re going to be shocked when the inevitable gets here.

So the next time you see simple incompetence — about biscuit pricing or apostrophes or how to make change — remember that there’s a lot more at stake. It’s an entire culture slowly falling apart.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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