A Good Question about the Failed Evolution of Political Culture — Katrina vanden Heuvel Asks Why Previously Disgraced Leaders Still Have their Opinions Prominently Aired by the Media during Challenging Times, when One Would Think Proven Capability Would Be at a Premium

© 2011 Peter Free

 

30 March 2011

 

 

With no cultural evolutionary mechanism in place to favor survival of the fittest leaders, we seem to be actively promoting the thinking of the dumbest — an illustrative example

 

Katrina vanden Heuvel asked took a more or less random sample of the silly opinion garbage that shows up so regularly in the media, in order to make a larger point:

 

(i)  The ABC television program, “This Week,” interviewed former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, ousted for significant errors by the George W. Bush Administration, for his opinion regarding intervention in Libya.

 

(ii) International Finance published a comment about economic recovery from arguably the most significant architect of the current economic disaster, Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve Chairman.

 

(iii) Fox News invited Colonel Oliver North (retired), who directed a secret war in Nicaragua, to criticize President Obama for bypassing Congress in ordering the current Libyan no-fly intervention.

 

 

A basic point — why do we tolerate a media that actively discriminates in favor of the least professionally capable and most damaging people in our society?

 

Vanden Heuvel then asked three related questions that are much more significant than they appear to be:

 

Are there no standards whatsoever for punditry?

 

Do high government or corporate officials suffer no consequence for leading us into calamity?

 

Public officials who have failed spectacularly in office should have the common decency to retire in disgrace.

 

But even if modern-day officials know no shame, why in the world would opinion pages, network talk shows and reputable journals give them a forum to offer their opinions, when they have shown that their advice isn’t worth the air it disturbs?

 

© 2011 Katrina vanden Heuvel, Are there no standards for punditry?, Washington Post (29 March 2011)

 

 

A larger, but still intermediate point — why the double standard between the big and little guys?

 

Vanden Heuvel continued:

 

There is a striking double standard operating in America.

 

We hear much about enforcing “accountability” from the powers that be. Teachers, students and schools are judged in high-stakes tests. Minority students particularly are subjected to “no excuses” school punishments. Punitive “three strikes and you’re out” prison sentencing disproportionately snares those caught for drug possession or other nonviolent offenses.

 

At the top of society, bankers, CEOs and hedge funders enjoy increased license, prestige and lavish rewards. Yet when their excesses, lawlessness, ideological blindness or simple incompetence result in calamity, there seems to be no consequence.

 

© 2011 Katrina vanden Heuvel, Are there no standards for punditry?, Washington Post (29 March 2011) (paragraph split)

 

 

The big picture point — evolution with no teeth does not work

 

When a culture allows the architects of past disasters to:

 

(a) continue to wander in the fields of privilege

 

and

 

(b) worse, to flood media chatter with the fruits of their failed intellects,

 

it is inevitably headed for decline.

 

Evolution of the fittest individuals and nations operates only when it is founded mechanisms that literally weed out the unfit.

 

Our society, in perverse contrast, appears to actively reward the most egregiously damaging people and institutions among us.  There is money to made, even after having been proven both wrong and egregiously greedy.

 

Does that make sense to you?

 

In essence, we are paying our most incompetent and self-centered losers to continue to persuade us to stay on the path to self-destruction.

 

That’s a lot like deliberately sending more blood to the metastatic cancers that are going to kill us.