The Civil Rights Movement is one of those eras in history that make us proud; proud to be American, proud to be human. Who can forget its iconic martyr, Martin Luther King, his ringing words that inspired a nation?
And yet, it turns out that this momentous turning in American life is having unintended consequences, namely an increasingly fragile “system of systems” due to decreasing competence of people who work within them.
America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
In short:
The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.
By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws — most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.
This entire — long, detailed, analytic — article is well worth reading:
Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis
In the interest of accuracy, DEI, or Diversity Equity Inclusion needs to have its letters reversed, to Diversity Inclusion, Equity: DIE.
This developing systemic disaster is nobody’s “fault.” It’s simply a massive and accelerating unintended consequence of a glorious ideal.
How do we work with this knowledge, this contradiction between what we wanted and, given what seemed to be needed to get there, we actually got?
So important to continuously remember that people are of equal value, but not of equal competence, or I should say, not of equal competence in any particular area of expression. Every human being is unique. Each one a genius! — if allowed and encouraged to follow his or her original nature.
Give people their heads, connected to their hearts, and they will flourish, no matter what the color of their skin.
Force people to “measure up” to something external to them, then only the most advantaged will flourish.
It’s time each of us takes back our sovereignty. Build the new world from there, one free of systems of systems that capture free individuals into preformed slots, forcing them to ignore or repress the parts of themselves that if, allowed to unleash would ignite an explosion of creativity on this planet.
Yes. Let us re-imagine the dreaded nuclear blast as a miraculous explosion of creativity.
P.S. I know this sounds utopian, impossible.
Start here, inside yourself.
What would you be doing in life if there were no obstacles?
Take one tiny baby step in that direction.
Come on, you can do it!
Take another baby step,
no matter how foolish you feel.
Pay attention to any synchronicities that arise
for they are trail markers, blazing the path ahead
Take another baby step.
Keep going.
Watch the world rearrange itself in the direction of your intent.
The new world will arise through thousands, millions, billions of tiny experiments
(and experiments imply both failure and success; with each failure, learn from it and keep going)
performed by those who are taking back their sovereignty,
trusting the universe,
knowing deep inside
that if they follow their nature,
nature will take care of them.
