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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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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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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

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Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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