The long journey from competence to bureaucracy to ruin
The Blind Chicken and the Seed
In 1996 I moved from Damascus to Paris.
I followed my heart, had some money in my pocket, no French whatsoever, and absolutely no idea what the hell I was doing. The first months were chaos. I learned French at near-comical speed because I quickly understood one brutal truth: without the language there would be no future for me there. Paris is many things, but patient with linguistic tourists is not one of them. The money I had brought from Syria lasted around eight months, which meant I started looking for work almost immediately. After a few short-lived jobs, I stumbled into a German entrepreneur running a tourism company called Paris Tours. He brought busloads of German tourists into Paris and needed a transfer driver and guide. The work was brutal. Endless hours. Endless traffic. Endless tourists asking the same questions with the same delighted expression as though they had personally discovered the Eiffel Tower. But the pay was better than anything I had seen since arriving in France, so I stayed.
Paris Tours was a child of a historical accident.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Eastern Germans suddenly had money, mobility, and a hunger to see the world they had spent decades being forbidden from touching. Paris was the obvious destination. The founder of Paris Tours saw the opportunity early, organized cheap bus tours, and for several years the business printed money with almost vulgar ease. Cash poured in faster than competence was required.
And that distinction matters.
Because success and competence are not remotely the same thing.
A man can stumble into fortune the same way a drunk man stumbles into a cathedral during a rainstorm. Neither event proves wisdom.
The tourism boom had an expiry date. Eventually the novelty faded. Eastern Germans normalized. Travel patterns stabilized. Margins tightened. The easy years ended. What had once been a goldmine now required actual management, discipline, adaptation, and long-term thinking.
That was precisely the moment I entered the story.
Paris Tours should have evolved into a normal business.
Instead, the founder became intoxicated by his own mythology. He believed he possessed golden hands. The early success convinced him he was not merely lucky, but gifted. Money was wasted with astonishing creativity. Expansion plans multiplied. Grandiosity replaced discipline. Basic realities were ignored because a man who wins at the casino several nights in a row inevitably starts believing the universe itself has taken a personal interest in his destiny. The ending was predictable: bankruptcy, fraud investigations, collapse.
I only witnessed the sunset years, not the final detonation, but even then the trajectory was obvious. Naturally I tried to argue. I tried to point out realities. But I was a tour guide, not a prophet, and nobody listens to the man carrying suitcases while the boss is still buying expensive wine.
Hubris killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.
And the truth is that Paris Tours had never been particularly brilliant to begin with. It had simply fallen on top of a temporary opportunity and possessed enough nerve to exploit it before others arrived. In Austria we have a saying: even a blind chicken occasionally stumbles upon a seed.
But the chicken remains blind.
The founder of Paris Tours was not a great entrepreneur. He was a gambler who mistook luck for genius. And once life became easy enough, once success insulated him from consequence, the idiot inside him began to grow unchecked.
That is the important part.
Idiocy contains a self-destruct mechanism.
At the smallest level and the largest, the pattern remains remarkably consistent. Individuals, corporations, governments, civilizations — once success removes friction and consequences become negotiable, the idiot inevitably rises. It climbs the hierarchy. It gains prestige. It begins replacing competence with performance, discipline with vanity, reality with narrative. And eventually the structure collapses under the accumulated weight of protected stupidity. The good news is that idiots ultimately destroy themselves.
The bad news is that they usually take everyone else with them first.
The Luxury of Escaping Consequences
Modern civilization has spent decades constructing elaborate systems designed to protect stupidity from reality.
Not ordinary human error. Error is unavoidable. Human beings are flawed creatures and always will be. No, what we have built instead is something far more dangerous: a civilization increasingly organized around insulating bad decisions from immediate consequence.
Failure is cushioned.
Responsibility is diffused.
Accountability is collectivized until it evaporates entirely.
And because consequences can be delayed, stupidity compounds quietly for years before the structure finally begins to crack.
That is the great weakness of prosperous societies. Once life becomes sufficiently easy, sufficiently stable, sufficiently wealthy, the natural filters that once eliminated idiots begin to malfunction. Civilization itself starts shielding incompetence from reality. Bad decisions no longer immediately destroy the people making them. Entire generations can rise through institutions without ever encountering meaningful consequences for being catastrophically wrong.
At first this appears compassionate.
In reality it is civilizational dry rot.
Because the idiot does not remain passive once protected. It expands. It reproduces institutionally. It promotes copies of itself. And because true competence represents a threat to mediocre people inside bureaucratic systems, competence itself gradually becomes unwelcome. Anything that begins as 95% purpose and 5% overhead eventually becomes 95% overhead and 5% vague institutional mythology about why the organization supposedly still exists.
Reality, however, remains patient.
And reality always returns.
The Priesthood of Experts
Experts are the secular priesthood of modern civilization.
Society increasingly treats credentialed authority with the same trembling reverence medieval peasants once reserved for bishops handling sacred relics. Except bishops occasionally admitted miracles were difficult.
Modern experts promise omniscience as a subscription service.
A friend of mine once underwent what should have been a routine medical procedure. Tiny bladder tumor. Standard operation. Thousands are performed every year without incident. And they butchered him.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
They perforated the bladder, caused catastrophic complications, and permanently crippled the man. A routine surgery became a lifelong sentence of pain and dependency.
Naturally, once the investigations began, responsibility vanished like smoke through open fingers.
Nobody had technically made the mistake.
Nobody had technically possessed authority over the precise moment where the catastrophe occurred.
The same experts who previously radiated supreme certainty suddenly became astonishingly modest regarding the limits of their expertise. The urologist apparently understood every aspect of the urinary system except the organ he had accidentally damaged.
One almost admires the elegance of the escape act.
And this is the true genius of modern expertise: absolute authority paired with zero accountability.
The expert class increasingly functions not as a meritocracy but as a guild system.
Credentials no longer merely certify competence; they provide institutional immunity. Once inside the bureaucratic cathedral, failure becomes strangely difficult to identify. Errors transform into “systemic challenges.” Catastrophes become “process issues.” Responsibility dissolves into committees and procedural fog.
Worse still, truly competent people increasingly threaten the system itself.
In organizations saturated with mediocrity, competence becomes dangerous because competence exposes the fraud. The genuinely capable employee does not merely outperform colleagues — he silently demonstrates that the entire ritualized theatre surrounding institutional expertise may be unnecessary.
And bureaucracies hate nothing more than exposed ritual.
So the competent either learn to remain quiet or disappear entirely.
The terrifying part is not that experts sometimes fail. Humans fail. That is normal.
The terrifying part is that modern systems increasingly remove the evolutionary pressure that once filtered incompetence naturally. Experts can now double down on disastrous decisions for years so long as those decisions remain institutionally fashionable.
And because consequences are delayed, the idiot survives long enough to promote more idiots.
Institutions That Forgot Their Purpose
Every institution eventually petrifies.
That is not a malfunction.
That is the lifecycle.
Given enough time, institutions cease pursuing their original purpose and begin pursuing self-preservation instead. The mission becomes secondary. The bureaucracy becomes primary.
Universities cease educating and become accreditation cartels.
Media organizations cease informing and become narrative management systems.
Government agencies cease governing and become employment ecosystems for procedural aristocracies.
International institutions cease solving problems and become conferences with pension plans. The decay is rarely dramatic at first. Institutions rot through accumulation. Layer upon layer of procedures, managerial abstractions, compliance rituals, liability structures, ideological fashions, and bureaucratic self-protection slowly bury the original mission beneath administrative sediment.
And because modern societies worship continuity above all else, institutional survival itself becomes treated as a moral good regardless of functionality.
This is civilizational embalming.
When I lived in France, there was a television program dedicated entirely to absurd government offices that no longer served any meaningful purpose. One administration still existed to oversee postwar reconstruction decades after reconstruction had ended. Another office employed people responsible for opening and closing medieval city gates despite the walls themselves having been demolished generations earlier.
The institution survives.
The purpose dies.
But the salaries continue beautifully.
And because prosperous societies can afford this nonsense for remarkably long periods, the idiot flourishes. Bureaucratic abundance acts like fertilizer for incompetence. The easier life becomes, the more energy society can waste maintaining structures nobody truly needs anymore.
Ancient civilizations understood something modern societies desperately try to forget: destruction is not always failure.
Sometimes destruction is maintenance.
The Norse understood this through Ragnarök. Hindu cosmology placed destruction alongside creation and preservation as equally necessary functions of existence. The wheel turns because things end.
Modern civilization, by contrast, attempts to preserve everything indefinitely.
Every failing structure must be rescued.
Every decaying bureaucracy expanded.
Every institutional corpse resuscitated with public money and managerial jargon.
And so rot accumulates until collapse becomes mathematically inevitable.
Corporate Communism in a Tailored Suit
We still pretend publicly traded megacorporations and privately owned businesses belong to the same species.
They do not.
One may still possess a nervous system. The other has already undergone spiritual taxidermy. Once a company goes public, responsibility immediately begins dissolving into abstraction. Nobody truly owns the machine anymore. Everyone merely manages fragments of it while insulating themselves legally from the consequences of failure.
That is the architecture of modern corporate life: responsibility atomized so thoroughly that accountability becomes structurally impossible.
Then comes the inevitable collapse.
A scandal.
A fraud.
A product failure.
A bailout.
And suddenly society is informed that this sprawling managerial organism is “too big to fail.” Public money must rescue private incompetence because allowing failure would supposedly threaten systemic stability.
This is not capitalism.
It is managerial collectivism wearing a tailored suit and speaking in quarterly earnings reports.
Privatized rewards.
Socialized consequences.
And just like Paris Tours, the entire system depends on confusing temporary success with permanent competence.
But luck always expires eventually.
And when it does, the idiot finally meets reality.
When Fantasy Meets Arithmetic
For years modern finance has attempted something almost theological: converting moral narratives into investment strategy.
The green investment boom promised the perfect fusion of virtue and profit. Save the planet while generating guaranteed returns. History’s greatest moral emergency conveniently aligned with history’s greatest speculative opportunity.
Remarkable coincidence.
Unfortunately arithmetic remains stubbornly reactionary.
And now reality is beginning to seep through the floorboards.
Many of these investments increasingly resemble politically protected bubbles sustained less by economics than by subsidies, regulatory incentives, institutional pressure, and social intimidation disguised as financial analysis.
If losses remain isolated, the system can hide them.
But pensions are different.
Pensions transform abstract stupidity into personal betrayal.
The moment ordinary people realize their retirement security has been sacrificed in service of fashionable ideological fantasies, the emotional climate changes rapidly. Propaganda loses potency once consequences become tactile.
A population will tolerate astonishing amounts of elite absurdity right until the absurdity reaches the kitchen table.
Then legitimacy fractures.
And once legitimacy cracks, collapse accelerates.
How Systems Suddenly Collapse
I remember 1989.
Not merely the collapse itself, but the acceleration preceding it.
The Eastern Bloc did not disintegrate evenly. It unraveled in waves.
Hungary loosened first. Poland followed. East Germany cracked. Czechoslovakia collapsed almost overnight afterward. Romania resisted longest and paid accordingly.
There was an old joke:
Hungary changed in ten years.
Poland in ten months.
East Germany in ten weeks.
Czechoslovakia in ten days.
Romania in ten hours.
The numbers are exaggerated, but the underlying pattern is real.
Systems often appear stable until suddenly they are not.
That is because civilizations behave like aging structures. Tiny fractures accumulate invisibly for years. The building continues standing long after engineers privately understand something is terribly wrong. Then one ordinary moment finally exceeds the remaining tolerance and the staircase collapses all at once.
Prosperous civilizations produce idiots naturally because prosperity suppresses consequence. But once the accumulated weight of incompetence becomes too heavy, the system enters a correction phase.
And correction phases are never gentle.
The systems that adapt early survive more softly.
The systems that resist reality most aggressively tend to shatter.
That is not ideology.
It is physics.
Ragnarök
The old world is not coming back.
That fantasy needs to die.
The structures that created modern prosperity also created the conditions for modern decay. Prosperity itself produced insulation from consequence, and insulation from consequence allowed the idiot to flourish institutionally.
That cycle is ancient.
Success produces comfort.
Comfort produces softness.
Softness produces incompetence.
Incompetence produces collapse.
Collapse restores reality.
Reality restores selection.
And eventually competent people rebuild from the rubble.
Then the cycle begins again.
History does not move in straight lines. It rotates.
The wheel always turns.
Modern civilization increasingly attempts to interrupt this cycle artificially. We subsidize failure. We rescue incompetence. We preserve broken systems indefinitely because destruction itself feels immoral to comfortable societies.
But civilizations cannot survive indefinitely once consequence becomes negotiable.
At some point reality always reasserts itself.
Quietly at first.
Trust evaporates.
Birthrates collapse.
Institutions hollow out.
Competence retreats.
Infrastructure decays.
Then suddenly the process becomes visible all at once and everyone acts shocked that the termites finally reached the load-bearing beams.
And the idiots?
Yes, ultimately they destroy themselves.
That part remains true.
The tragedy is simply that before the self-destruct mechanism activates, they usually manage to drag an entire civilization into the blast radius with them.
