Part 1: Elites are Not Good at Strategic or Long-Term Thinking

Many people seem to believe that members of the so-called "elite class" are very good at strategic and long-term thinking. This particular belief is the basis for many of the more outrageous conspiracy theories which you might have heard or read about. But is this really the case, or is it a case of wish projection? To be clear, I am not denying that any group of people will, given enough time, attempt to come up with some scheme to attempt domination of others. The real question is whether that can achieve anything beyond pissing in the proverbial rain. What that in mind, here are two reasons why the "elite" might seem more competent than they are in real life.

1] A 'winner takes all' economic system favors luck and chance over competence.

Would Microsoft, Google, Apple etc be what they are today if they hadn’t received a few important lucky breaks in the beginning and their now-extinct competitors made fewer serious mistakes? Do you believe that MS-DOS or Windows were the best or only Operating Systems (OSes) for PCs in the 1980-1990 era? What happened to other competitors such as Commodore and Amiga. Or ask yourself- how much of the success of Google was a consequence of the many poor decisions made by its much larger competitors in late 1990s? Isn’t most of the current success of Apple due to its early embrace of tablet-style computing (iPhone and iPad) when other competitors, including Microsoft, dropped the ball?

Why did the hardware architecture pioneered by IBM stick around even though it wasn’t the best-selling PC manufacturer throughout 1980s? Why didn’t the hardware architecture of its many competitors such as Commodore, Amiga and yes.. even Apple either disappear or get relegated to the minority. Were all these companies staffed with dumb engineers and programmers? So why did they not win the PC architecture race? How much of Microsoft’s success was linked to the eventual domination of IBM-style open PC architecture? Could it be that a few good decisions made by IBM PC division plus a combination of inertia and luck ended up making Microsoft the still undisputed leader in PC OSes?

Or take Walmart or Amazon. Beyond all the talk about their wonderful supply chains and logistics lies the real reason for their success- cheap manufacturing in countries such as China, Mexico etc. Now ask yourself- how much of their success is dependent on the neo-liberal policies followed by USA and rest of West since 1980 and industrial policies of countries such as China? Isn’t the success of Walmart and Amazon largely due to being in the right place at the right time. Wouldn’t changing any one of the pre-conditions change the outcome of retail and online shopping in this country? Let us be honest, corporations such as Walmart and Amazon owe almost all of their success to the rise of neoliberalism in West rather than any intrinsic special ability.

2] Money and reputation from previous "wins" can temporarily cover current mistakes.

Would any company other than Microsoft be able to survive massive flops such as Windows Vista or Windows 8? In both cases, revenue from their previous successes such as Win NT series, WinXp and Win7 allowed them to weather failures which would have killed pretty much any other company. But what does repeatedly making such potentially lethal mistakes say about their intrinsic competence? Or take Apple, which almost killed itself by making many software and hardware mistakes in the 1990s before Steve Job came back. It is a miracle they lasted till 1997, because Apple came very close to becoming a part of computing history (like Amiga) before Steve Jobs came back to lead the company in 1997.

Another set of examples concern the many overwhelming failures of new drugs in Phase II and Phase III clinical trials during past 10-15 years. Did you know that most of these new compounds were supposed to be blockbusters, and yet they failed after consuming billions of dollars and years of research by thousands of “smart” people. How could thousands of "super-smart" people fuck up so badly? In some cases, these fuck-ups were so obvious that even a bunch of semi-retarded people should have figured them out. But they did not, and it ended in disaster. And even when things do not end in disaster, the results are underwhelming. The majority of drugs approved to treat cancer during past two decades have no effect on overall survival. Sure.. a few do have almost miraculous effects on very specific (but uncommon) types of cancer, but most are expensive duds.

Or look at the F-22, an airplane first commissioned in the 1990s which still suffers from issues with pilot oxygen supply- even though each airplane has cost over 200 million dollars a piece. Even worse, the F-22 program has suffered from more basic failures in the past- in many cases after induction of the aircraft in the USAF. Or take the F-35, an airplane which is still subject to widespread groundings years after official induction in the USAF. How can people who are supposedly "smart and competent" make such big mistakes.. again and again? Or take Trump.. how many businesses run by that guy have defaulted on their creditors? And yet he won the presidency and has no problem raising money for his next batch of schemes. How many of Warren Buffet's "wins" are due to lobbying, legalized corruption and sweetheart deals?

The reality is that the so-called "elite" are frequently less competent than your average village idiot. Only socio-cultural inertia, slick image manipulation and the willingness of most people to believe in a 'fair' world keep them relevant.

Most of these people don't have even the basic abilities to succeed in the fields they claim to excel in. Take strategic thinking. People often forget that quality strategic thinking requires a high degree of objectivity which in turn requires a certain level of detachment from your immediate environment to see the bigger and less obvious picture. The "elite", on the other hand, use their money and position in society to insulate themselves from the bigger picture. They tend to focus on the minutiae such as status jockeying (where they studied, traveled, ate, drank or what they read, saw, who they listen to etc). These parasites spend their whole lives trying to think about as small a slice of reality as possible, while claiming to be good at seeing the big picture.

The "elite" also claim to be good at 'long-term' thinking- but evidence would suggest otherwise. Let us first consider the obvious problem with any 'long-term' planning aka our inability to predict the future. Given that many " very smart" people have been repeatedly shown to be so wrong, should we even trust anybody who claims to predict the future? Can you predict any process which you neither understand nor control? Human history is full of actions and decisions which in retrospective look like the handiwork of severely retarded persons. However all of these actions and decisions were conceived, executed and supported by the "best of the best" and the "brightest" minds of that era. How come these "most respectable" and "meritorious" people kept on fucking up so badly- century after century, millennia after millennia?

I believe that the best way to model "elite" thought, behavior and actions in any human society is to ask yourself the simple question- What would a parasite do?

What do you think? Comments?