Quote of the Day
In the impersonal offices of North American education in the 1970s, a Canadian educator named Laurence J. Peter observed with clinical irony how hierarchies devoured talent. He saw systematic promotions: the excellent teacher became a mediocre principal, the competent principal a clumsy bureaucrat, the bureaucrat a disastrous civil servant. From that observation emerged the Peter Principle, published in 1969: “in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence.” Promotion is based on prior success, not on aptitude for the new role. The result is that organizations end up filled with people who no longer master what they do, but who can no longer be demoted without breaking the system.
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The left’s social engineers, eternal dreamers of planned paradises, respond to the disaster they themselves generate by demanding more hierarchy, more State, more positions for their faithful. When the machine clogs with incompetents, the solution is never to shrink the monster’s size; it is to inject it with more militants and more budget. The cycle is inexorable. Loyalty over competence, failure over correction, excuses over reality. And in the end, as always, the bill is paid by those at the bottom, while the red Peters keep rising, with beatific smiles, toward their next level of catastrophe.
๐๐๐ฏ๐ฎ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป ๐ ๐ฑ๐ฒ ๐ข๐ฟ๐๐ผ๐ด๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ณ๐ถฬ๐ฎ @CubaOrtografia
Posted on X May 14, 2026
The original post was in Spanish, the English translation was by X.
While I’m sure the above is an important component of socialism disasters and government in general, there are other issues as well. As I have brought them up many times before (and here are but two examples) I will not dilute the current observation.
True but not limited to education. Back when dinosaurs walked the earth, I encountered a social worker named Maynard Allyn. He had been Malcolm X’s child welfare worker. Malcolm mentioned him in his autobiography as the only white person he ever trusted. Not his only accomplishment and he was legendary for mentoring young people. By the time I met him, he had been promoted and was a mediocre administrator. Great pity as he would have been worth any amount of money in his original role by that wasn’t the way HR worked. Also see the career arc of Sepp Dietrich. I think any profession has examples.
I can attest to the Principle at least in a corporate environment.
Prior to retirement I worked as a Design Engineer for (not quite) MegaCorp for 27 years doing technical work which required a large amount of experience and attention to detail. When the head of the engineering group for the division moved to a different company, the manager of our division called me into his office for a meeting.
He asked me to take over the job as the head of the global engineering department for our division. I actually laughed out loud since I thought he was joking. Turned out that he wasn’t; he actually thought he wanted me to do that job.
Now, you have to understand that I am a typical nerd engineer with all of the social skills of an autistic idiot-savant with Tourette’s. I have no tact, grace, or diplomatic skills, and am blunt to the point of being completely obnoxious when I am right about something when everybody else is deluding themselves. On t’other hand, I could get things done correctly at a speed about 3 or 4 times faster than anyone else in the division. The buyer of our products at one of our major customers, when introduced to me at a large meeting, exclaimed, “Oh, (insert name here), you’re a ROCK STAR with the engineers at (insert customer company name here).”
So I tried (as diplomatically as I could) to explain to him just how bad an idea this was. I noted that I was considered to be one of the best engineers in the entire company (not just the division) and that I was pretty darned good in the position I currently held which covered the engineering work for more than a dozen product lines simultaneously. I also pointed out my complete lack of caring about other people’s personal problems (IMHO necessary for a manager), and the lack of social skills I’ve already mentioned.
As the final item I noted that the division would be:
A) Losing an extremely competent engineer, and
B) Gaining a truly terrible manager.
That pretty much ended the meeting, and the possible promotion, right then. I continued on in a technical position for the next 10 years or so, while a succession of terrible managers were put into place one after another.
My conclusion with regard to the Peter Principle is that (as Dirty Harry once fictitiously noted), “A man’s got to know his limitations.” A major part of that is knowing when to turn down a position for which you know that you are not capable of doing the work. I’m guessing that you’ll NEVER see a socialist acknowledge that reality since they’re all convinced that they’d be perfect at telling other people how to work.