Theater Kids are Incompetent Professionals, Managers and “Elites”

In the past week, I came across two cringe-worthy videos on Twitter. The first one contained a bizarre rant by a somewhat senior foreign policy person about why USA should not fear nuclear war with Russia and help Ukraine with every weapons system they requested and more. What made his rant especially comic was that he came across as a character from a play in some community theater group rather than someone who is actively employed at a senior position by state department and makes over 500k per year between his main job and remuneration from other front organizations. Then we had the opportunity to watch Francis Collins, the current director of NIH, humiliate himself by posting a short video of himself singing a poorly written song about how COVID-19 was not made in a lab. Collins, along with Fauci, were big supporters of various NIH grants to support Gain-of-Function research at Wuhan institute of Virology. And this finally made me write about something which has bothered me for many years- namely, why is the current crop of professionals, managers and “elites” in western countries so full of visibly incompetent actors masquerading as experts.

Before explaining what ‘Theater Kids’ are, let me tell you about the first time I met one. In the late 1990s, just after moving here I was talking to someone applying for Medical School. This person, best described as the offspring of a family acquaintance, let me read her admission essay. The essay was quite interesting, but not for the reasons one would normally assume. To put it bluntly, it contained what can be best described as a messy and convoluted word salad of clever-sounding buzzwords which meant nothing. But there was something else about that essay which I found odd. She spent a lot of time trying to portray her being ‘south-Asian’ and female as somehow making her more oppressed that others and hence more deserving of admission. This was especially odd since her mother had a PhD, her father was a rehabilitation therapist and while not exactly rich, they had a very stable and comfortable middle-class lifestyle. At that time, I briefly asked her if it was necessary to portray herself as a victim given that she had very good grades, a high MCAT score and good reference letters. From her reply, I understood that having a very good academic record and references was inadequate to get into Medical School. She had also spent some time rehearsing interviews to give an adequate performance during interviews. I then joked that she could have benefited from acting in school plays.

The next ‘Theater Kid’ I came across was also trying to get into Medical School. This person was a summer student in the lab in which I was working. To make a long story short, she had a very hectic schedule between her duties in the lab and outside it- which was a long series of volunteer positions. Curiously, this person also spent time on topics which she was clearly not interested in- such as an obscure school of south-American indigenous music. While I didn’t think much of all this initially, her motivations became very clear once I read the CV and application essay. All her efforts and “interests” were directed towards getting into a Medical School. Notably, the word salad she used in her application essay was very similar to the one I had encountered a few months ago. Over the next couple of years, I came across a few more people who aspired to get into Medical School or had already got into one. Almost every single one of them had a very similar way of talking, extra-curricular interests and what can be best described as school play level of acting while talking to large groups of people- such as during a presentation.

Around that time I also started this peculiar behavioral pattern in many other areas, such as politics. If you watched cable TV news during the late 1990s, it was hard to not come across Bill Clinton trying to connect with his audiences. While many saw him as a gifted politician, I always saw him a C-rate actor who got lucky by becoming the president near the start of a decade long era of relative global peace and prosperity after the dissolution of USSR 1991. Even then it was obvious that Clinton, and the people around him, were different from previous presidents and their administrations. While nobody claims previous presidents such as Nixon, Ford, Carter or Bush Sr were good human beings, it was clear that they had real achievements and competencies. Compared to them, Clinton and all subsequent American presidents have been empty blowhards whose only real skill lay in regurgitating carefully choreographed word salads and pretending to care about their voters. Trump is a partial exception since he never pretended to be cultured and sophisticated and Obama was a better actor than others. But they were all ‘Theater Kids’.

So how do I define this group? What are their most distinguishing characteristics? The main reason why I refer to them as ‘Theater Kids’ is that they have mediocre acting skills but constantly deploy them in almost single interaction with another human being. Many of you might also know this as ‘used car salesman’ behavior. But what is the difference between a used car salesman and somebody aspiring for entry into Medical School or a similar vocation, seeking political office or some vague overpaid managerial positions in a corporation? It comes down to the topics they pretend to understand, not their pattern of behavior. All of this is a polite way of saying that Theater Kids are C- and D- rate actors who might be a bit smarter than your average actor, but still vastly inferior in competence to those who actually understand the fields in which they claim expertise. And this brings us to what makes them especially dangerous for the societies in which they arise and succeed. Remember those two aspiring Medical students I talked about at the beginning of this article? Well, they both got into Medical School and one became a pediatrician and the other became an anesthesiologist. Some other ‘Theater Kids’ I met in the first 2-3 years of moving here have since become Ophthalmologists, General Practitioners, Neurologists and more. And this brings us to the issue of reduced competence.

While not every ‘Theater Kid’ I came across over the years was incompetent or even seriously into the bullshit which started their career- a worryingly large number of them haven’t given up on being one- and for good reason. The system of admittance and promotion in most western instructions in past four decades is heavily biased towards ‘Theater Kids’ and anyone with similar behavioral pathologies. This might be due to the concurrent ascendancy of neoliberalism which privileges the projection of false images, numbers and ideas above anything else. As things stand today, the upper echelons of power in every institution in West from medical associations, universities, school boards, teacher unions, multinational corporations, elected offices at all levels etc are now filled with Theater Kids of limited competence. This continuous decrease in competence is one of the main reasons why everything around you in the West seems to be slowly decaying and declining. It is also why most large and complex projects are never completed on time, on budget and frequently at all. It is also the reason why government bureaucracies and politicians support and promote increasingly impractical and dangerous ideas such “Zero Carbon”, Electric Vehicles , “Renewable Energy” and “Climate Change”.

And this problem affects many more areas and in many more ways than most people can imagine. For example, many recent building standards and materials approved (and often promoted) for residential construction are based in methods and assumptions which are laughably naïve. It is a safe bet that a good percentage of the current crop of houses and apartments will require far more repairs and fixes than their predecessors. Similarly, a majority of the very expensive anti-cancer drugs approved in past two decade have no measurable effect on overall life expectancy of patients with those specific conditions. Theater Kids running the show is how we got COVID-19 and all the dumb restrictions and “protocols” pushed in past 2-3 years. These same morons in positions of power are how USA and many other countries self de-industrialized themselves and now cannot make the chemical precursors for basic drugs such as Paracetamol and Amoxycillin. It is Theater Kids who came up with the dumb idea that the economy of most cities in North America could be stably supported by continuous expansion of Educational (Schools and Universities) and Medical (Hospitals and Medical Services) sectors. In summary, the real problem with having Theater Kids in any position of power is that they are incompetent and will end up making increasingly bad and disastrous decisions. Having said that, I think that the West deserves them because Theater Kids are the ultimate expression of Neoliberal ideology- Fake it, till you make it and then keep on faking it.

What do you think? Comments?