I was asked recently the following questions:

Why intelligent people are not allowed to rule and get the world out of its dire situation? Why capable people are not permitted to have power and organize or manage things in such a way so as to change this world for the better? Why smart people lie in the pits of failure while obviously greedy and psychopathic individuals lead the world to a worse place? Why, despite all the apparent reasons to let the best rule, they are denied power?

I admit, it’s a tricky set of questions. In one way or another, I constantly hear different people asking the same thing: why capable, skilled, gifted people are kept far away from those places which could allow them to make a difference for the better?

Why this?

I don’t have a complete answer, so I’ll just go with the flow of my thinking.

First, people are incredibly hypocritical. Most of them. For this reason, a lot of them would simply say that the world is doing just fine, that everything is well and there is no need to “fix the world”, since this world is “perfect” in the way it is. Yes, a lot of people do what is called denial of reality. Actually, most people are content with the way the world functions and they see no problem with it. And if a problem is not acknowledged, a solution cannot be found. It’s like the alcoholic or the drug addicted who says that there is not a dependence in his/her case; if there is no problem, there is no start of a process to find a solution. It’s just as simple as that: some people are either in full acceptance of the way the world is, or they are benefiting from its obvious flaws. Therefore, a “Savior”, someone smart that is worth summoning so as to change the world, is either useless (in the first case), or damaging for one’s interests (in the second case), generating not only rejection, but also active resistance.

If you live from trafficking or stealing, would you vote for the reinforcement of the police or of the justice system? C’mon, just get real!

A second idea that comes to my mind is that, for a lot of people, the way they feel is much more important than the efficiency of a system, its functionality or fairness. People have a great capacity of self-illusion, in the sense that “what is imagined at the emotional level” is much more important than “what actually happens in reality”. People are obsessed with the “image” they show to others; they are also obsessed with their “status” or “the amount of respect or praise they think they get from the others”. Most people have degrees of separation between them and the objective reality, and for this reason there is the concept of “subjective realities” or “partial realities”. What are these? The partial realities are the perceptions of a person and her peculiar way of thinking; when dealing with someone, it is much more important to understand “his/her opinion about reality” (his/her subjective perception) and “his/her mental justification, his/her twisted way of thinking” (his/her thinking process). It is – as everyone with some degree of life experience can confirm – completely useless to convince someone about the validity of your opinions, perceptions or judgements, as the other will always trust his/her inner world more than anything you’d possibly say. If a person decides to believe that “this world is perfect the way it is” and “people can’t be evil or do evil”, there is no way you can convince that person that the world needs someone capable to “fix” it. If you insist, that person will even start to hate you, because you are challenging her worldview. “A beautiful world needs no fixing!” – that’s what you’ll be told. And, secondarily, you might be advised to “start with changing yourself before attempting to change the world”, which has some degree of truth but can also be used to justify doing absolutely nothing about a dysfunctional world.

The third idea that comes to my mind is that, in order to be a leader or be in a position of power, one needs to “win” that position. You can change the world only when you are in a position of great influence, and in order to get there, people must elect you or vote for you in a way or another. Electing a leader is always a process done by identification; this means that the general population or the group must “see” itself in you, so that a mandate could be passed to you. Or, the general population is generally hypocritical, emotional and more or less delusional, so they will generally elect a psychopath who is able to seduce the masses. Fortunately, this happens rarely. Unfortunately, the election of a leader is typically done through a process of selection by a small powerful elite (rich and influential people), who will see to it that any possible candidate is controllable (read blackmailable), hence giving to the masses what we might call “the illusion of choice”. Fundamentally, the elites don’t want change; they thrive in the dysfunctional world you know (because they are at the top), they “feed from it”, so any possibility of change is either an anecdote, or an unforeseen error of history. Imposed or elected democratically, the “providential leader” is either a puppet or a psychopath, so the possibility of a skilled leader arriving at the helm of power is next to zero. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t smart leaders; they exist. But they are so limited in what they are allowed to do that they end up doing almost nothing or the bare necessary minimum. Such as, not making things worse. Or, more frequently, not doing something extremely bad, by siding with the tradition, with how the things used to be done in the past. So, no revolution this time! Maybe next time…

Now, let’s use the method of reduction to absurd. Let’s suppose that someone really providential – a reformer – does manage to get to the top job and starts to implement smart decisions for the benefit of everyone. What is likely to happen?

If you decently know the life-story of Jesus Christ, you have a good answer: the messianic reformer was crucified by his own people, sharing his final moments with 2 thieves; the mob was unable to distinguish (read “didn’t want to see”) between someone providential and the worst kind of person that fully deserved being executed. Why this happened this way? Because the crowd has a lot of inertia and a built-in stability mechanism that prevents its volatility. A reformer is someone who, unavoidably, brings traumatic change to “how things are”, and the crowd, aiming to maintain and conserve its structure, will inevitably fight back and eliminate the rebellious individual. In the end, the “Messiah” will be replaced with someone more similar to the crowd, someone who shares its moral flaws (or is more tolerant to the crowd’s subjective ideas about what is “proper” or “real”) and is more open to various degrees of moral compromise.

It might seem a setback to keep promoting low-quality leaders, various tyrants or deranged individuals – crazy in the most authentic sense of the word. But the trauma of change – the trauma of doing things well and efficiently – the Change – is way bigger a problem for people used to live in hypocrisy and/or illusions about reality. The human species – as many other species – needs incremental evolution (gradual adaptation) and dislikes the convulsions or the shocks of “the New”, even if “the New” is, paradoxically, the best solution there is…