The entire world is now wondering how blooming idiots and underachieving academic drones became presidents of Ivy League universities in the United States. What has gone wrong?
Well, the problem is even broader than academia, which might actually be hopeless at this point.
We are only now fully aware of the wild distortions that have come to the free enterprise system itself over the past two decades. In particular, since the wild drive to zero interest rates after the turn of the millennium, the largest corporate players gained access to nearly unlimited funds at near-zero cost. The distortions that have taken place have utterly corrupted the whole of white-collar culture, to the point of absurdity.
Essentially, it comes down to this. In vast swaths of the upper echelon of American business today—I’m deeply embarrassed to report this—there is an expectation that no one should do any actual work. That in turn has been mirrored by a hysterical inflation of titles. The higher the title, the less work you have to do.
Before 2020, people already had the impression that the paycheck is issued solely for sitting in a chair. After all, a 45-minute commute plus a slog up the elevator and the stress of brittle coffee-room conversations is hard enough to endure after a restless night trying to shake off a weed-soaked and liquored-up evening.
After lockdowns, it got worse: The paycheck plus stimulus arrived just for existing. Who among the professional class really wanted to go back to the old days? And today? Millions among the professional class believe that they’re simply entitled to six figures due to their very existence.
It’s that absurd.
I was just tooling through an organization chart for a major corporation, and it struck me immediately: Every single person listed is a big shot. There are no more janitors, maids, secretaries, accountants, or anything else that sounds like work. Now, it seems like everyone is in charge of something, but that something doesn’t really exist.
Everyone is a vice president, executive, director, manager, senior, associate, officer, or chief of whatever. What precisely these people are directing, managing, executing, senioring, officiating, or otherwise associating is unknown. All chiefs, no Indians, as they used to say before such phrases became unsayable.
This is the essence of the U.S. professional class today. You don’t have to do anything meaningful to get such titles. You only need to demand them. It’s a matter of dignity and status. Also, the more dignity and status you have, the less work you have to do.
Everyone does demand an elevated title. And everyone gets one no matter what. In this way, everyone becomes in charge of everyone else, except that there is no one else. There are only people in charge. And they “brainstorm” and meet and confer and circle back. Or something. It’s not entirely clear what happens.
If you expect some actual work from anyone, you are clearly among the oppressor class. It was bad enough before the lockdowns when the cash available to the largest borrowers seemed infinite. Everyone hired wasn’t only above average but truly in the 1 percent. Anything less than that was beneath anyone’s dignity. But after lockdowns, the situation reached new levels of absurdity, so that everyone was entitled to the highest levels of prestige even without having done anything or having any skills at all.
The proliferation of C-suite titles was bad enough. It became absurd, not just CEO and CFO, but also COO, CLO, CBO, CSO, CCO, CLO, CMO, and on we go through the whole of the alphabet all the way to CZO (Chief Zoning Officer) and several times back again. Think of any word in the English language and put the word chief before it and officer after it and you have a wonderful title to look great on your LinkedIn profile.
The more title inflation, the fewer actual employees there are and the less work that gets done. In the old days, the laborers used to collaborate and attempt to act as one to get higher wages for their work. In the new days, the top-heavy executive suite collaborates and acts as one but with a different goal: reduce the work demands to as little as possible.
They do this mostly through meetings. The more meetings they can put together, the more they can kill time and preen in front of others. The central purpose of the meeting isn’t to get work done, obviously. The purpose is to be a forum for subtle forms of social signaling and competition between individuals and groups. When one person praises another’s achievements, it’s a sure sign of a quid pro quo in action. When a person comes under criticism, it’s a sign of a plot. All of this unfolds with absolutely no genuine concern for productivity.
Younger workers just showing up in this world get the message quickly. There’s far more to be gained by gaming the system than doing stuff. Figuring this out, they join the game through clever alliances and politicking. The firm then becomes an extension of college itself, in which students figure out after four years that it’s mostly about bamboozling authority and looking the part.
One might suppose that with the tsunami of high status that has flooded corporate America, everyone would be happier than ever. Money, status, and no real work: what else is there for which to hope? The problem is that the fear factor among the overclass is more intense than it ever has been. This traces to the underlying reality: Most of these people don’t actually know how to do anything. Knowing this, they fear being found out. And more than anything else, they fear the fall into a lower echelon upon discovery. This is why they are so filled with angst and overcome with pathological insecurity.
In those days, there was still an ideal in operation called “merit,” but in the 21st century, that was replaced by identity. Now, we’ve stopped pretending, and the Peter Principle has become not a bug but a feature of the system.
We look at the career of someone such as Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, and we aren’t even shocked to discover that she has few academic achievements, and those are compromised by rampant plagiarism.
There’s no surprise here at all. That kind of fakery is ubiquitous in the entire corporate sector, which is why there’s no broad outcry within the institute that Ms. Gay should resign. After all, if she has to go, what of the millions of others who cling to status and money without any merit? If she has to go, what becomes of the whole C-suite of the Fortune 500? The overclass regards this as a very dangerous game.
We’re just at the beginning of the meltdown of this whole system of subterfuge and fakery. The necessary cleaning out of the ranks has begun with the first and second rounds of cutbacks, but there are many more to come.
Somewhere along the way, elite opinion became very confused. Once believing that there’s inherent dignity to all work, they came to believe the opposite. And then they reveled in being on the right side of the great divide during lockdowns: both essential and homebound.
That period might have been the last hurrah of the overclass with its puffed-up titles, minimal competence, and privilege born of identity and gratuitous credentials. The jobs available in this sector will be ever fewer and far between in the future. Mercifully so.
