Some years ago, I had a coworker who was painfully stupid.  She couldn’t handle the most fundamental tasks of the job and was constantly creating chaos in her wake (I’ve joked for years her filing her system was based on the weather and color her socks – if it was raining everything got filed under “w” for wet or “r” for rain or “y” since she was wearing yellow socks that day, possibly though it might be under “g” for grey).  Yet, when asked, she asserted that she was extremely highly skilled that her work was excellent.  In her mind,  criticism of her work was motivated by personal jealousy and dislike – her boss didn’t like her and that’s why her boss criticized her.  After she was fired, she was devastated, convinced that she’d been done in by a cabal of persons who disliked her intensely and had conspired to undermine her reputation and work.  I would guess she’s out there somewhere now, causing her coworkers no end of grief with her combination of genuine niceness and likeableness and utter crazy making inability to perform simple tasks.

While sorting through my office a while back I found a document a previous coworker had prepared to ‘balance’ the monthly group life insurance bill.  It was obvious she’d spend hours on it; yet simply glancing at it, I could see that her work had been wasted.  She had simply used the pieces of information.  She balanced the bill against the applications for insurance not the actual payroll deductions.  As a result, she contacted the insurance company and made a host of changes to the bill so they matched the applications.  The actual premiums deducted from the paychecks were radically different than those shown on the applications.  When confronted as to why the amount deducted from paychecks was different than the amount paid to the insurance company she had no answer.  She defended herself asserting that the bill “balanced.”

I’ve heard stories of other coworkers who are equally astonishingly unskilled.  Apparently my employer once had a warehouse worker who could not count correctly – he’d record five boxes, someone else would walk up and see six; yet he would assert there were only five because two came from the same person and therefore counted as one box not two.

I found myself thinking about these coworkers the other day.  The skills you need to arrive at the correct answer are the same skills you need to know if the answer is wrong.  To put it another way – if you can’t get to the right outcome, you probably don’t possess the necessary skills to know what the right outcome is in the first place.  It’s not a simple lack of knowledge or different interpretation of rules – it’s a form of full scale incompetence that is so   This is a situation known as the Anosognosic’s Dilemma.  Here’s a nice description:

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.  Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

It’s a provocative idea.  What if someone is simply so stupid they don’t know they are stupid?

DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making.  How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life?  And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true.  And I became fascinated with that.  Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them.  Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS: Why not?

DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute.  The decision I just made does not make much sense.  I had better go and get some independent advice.”   But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.  In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer.  And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas.  And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

The other day, I was in the grocery store and watched as a woman spent easily 15 minutes trying to use the self check.  She couldn’t figure out how to start the process, then she didn’t understand the bar codes then she didn’t understand you have to bag the items.  I would guess she was spending a minute scanning for every dollar spent.  A few days later, I saw the same woman using the self check like a professional.  She had acquired and mastered the necessary skills.  For the anosognosic, the problem is that they aren’t even aware they don’t have the necessary skills.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this because it’s necessary to understand before moving on.  Paul Rosenberg is suggesting that the problem with American politics is the anosognosic’s dilemma – the policy elites of the US are incapable of recognizing their own blithering idiocy on a great many policy questions.

Step by step.  We start with Chris Hayes of the Nation:

If you’ve been paying attention this past decade, it won’t surprise you to learn that the country’s policy elites are in the midst of a destructive, well-nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by the degraded standards of the Washington establishment, the growing panic over government debt is shocking. [snip]

This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation—if it can be called that—about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable—Saddam Hussein—became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that “serious people” were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost.

Hayes points out what may be the most distressing aspect of public debate in the US today.  Once the “serious” people make a decision which is false, they demand the rest of us accept their premise.  Those who reject their false premise are dismissed as unserious and largely excluded from discussion.  Our moronically incapable press corps blithely reports “well both sides have a point” and steadfastly refuses to fact check.  The discussion then turns on a set of entirely false assumptions as increasingly hysterical pronouncements create a chaotic sense of urgency among elected officials and before you know, they’re scrambling to solve the wrong problem.  Common sense, meanwhile, lies bleeding on the Senate cloakroom floor, the victim of a mass mugging and possibly gang rape at the hands of Republicans and DC commentariat elite while far too many Dems scrambled for cover knowing they’d be the next victim if they spoke up.

Paul Rosenberg talked about this process in terms of the deficit discussion, arguing:

No.  We are facing total systems failure, just like Versailles leading up to the French Revolution.

This is not just a matter of individual failing. It’s both institutional and inter-instutional.  It is systemic. We are the United States of epic fail, the United States of Anosognosia.  We are, as a nation, trapped in what Errol Morris so chillingly called it,“The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is”.

Except, of course, that all us DFHs know exctly what it is.  It’s the same old elitist aristocratic death grip that we’ve been struggling against for the past 10,000 years.  The “I’m right, you’re wrong, God said so, and who the fuck are you to question me?” mentality.

That’s what’s wrong.

There’s a far simpler explanation, one that Philip Zimbardo described as bad barrels making bad apples, but also described by Carol Tavris as walking down the pyramid.

I started off by talking about coworkers who were too stupid to know they were stupid.  I want to talk about a coworker with a different problem.  This coworker is very competent; but like all of us makes mistakes.  Here’s where it gets messy – unable to admit his mistakes my coworker wastes huge amounts of time defending and justifying his mistakes – he’s at times gone so far as to argue that it’s not a mistake, in fact the outcome is really what we wanted in the first place.

In Mistakes Were Made ( . . . but not by me), authors Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson examine a set of circumstances under which people justify our mistakes.  Once we make those mistakes, once we publicly claim some position, we own it – we literally can’t back away from what we’ve said or done.  We defend our actions and the more we defend them, the more we feel the need to defend them.  If someone criticizes us we feel an even stronger need to defend our flawed positions.  In a case where a position we valiantly and publicly defended turns out to be disastrous, we’ll edit out people who were right while were wrong.  The Iraq war is a perfect example.  Of course it was a completely wrong policy from day one.  Lots of otherwise respectable people however did everything they could to support the Bush administration in the run up to the war.  Lots of otherwise smart people supported the war.  Andrew Sullivan, for instance, was ridiculously outspoken in favor of the war.  He eventually recanted that position.  He’s one of the very few.  As Tavris and Aronson explain, in the face of such a massive misjudgment, honestly admitting how wrong you were is painful, more than the average politician can be, simply because the average politician is also possessed of a massive ego.  To admit they were not only wrong, but taken in by Bush’s lies and deceptions?  No, that’s more than they could do.  It would strike to closely at the core of personal identity to be able to admit such a thing.

Philip Zimbardo is known for his famous Stanford Prison Experiment (which I wrote about here, here and here).  He discusses at length in his book The Lucifer Effect the ways in which otherwise ordinary and moral people behave in shocking and immoral ways.  Zimbardo focused on extreme circumstances where persons are removed from their normal social support networks, from the normal forces which shape and support their moral behavior; take someone away from home, deprive him or her of family, friends etc. and extreme behaviors can occur.  Individuals fall into a dangerous groupthink, they sacrifice their independence in the name of social cohesion.  Some examples include fraternities and sororities – people end up behaving in ways they not normally behave because they are isolated from their usual networks.  They establish new identities consistent with their new setting.  Zimbardo calls it the bad barrel effect – put a good apple in a bad barrel and it goes bad; in terms of people, take someone out of that bad barrel and put them in the previous good barrel and they will return to the previous behavior and attitudes.  Isolated from other people and located in a bad barrel, members of Congress begin to engage in groupthink – focusing disastrously on a narrow range of ideas.  Rather than engaging the vast currents of thought and richness of ideas in modern America, members of Congress find themselves in a bad barrel that exposes them and approves of a very constricted set of ideas – Saddam Hussein is a bad man; we have to get rid of him.  They accept the premise – which automatically limits their options.  The basic debate over the Iraq, for instance, that happened within American political circles was degraded, shallow, an offense to the idea of democracy.  Within the wider culture however there was an often vibrant and dynamic debate.

Given that at least since 1980, the most vocal part of the punditocracy has accepted and parroted Reaganite ideas about government and taxes, given that many of them cheered on Bush’s tax cuts and wars they now cannot face the realities that they were horrifyingly wrong.  Protected by the bad barrel that is the insider world of Washington DC parties and pundits and commentary, they are able to pretend that the most pressing problem facing the US is the deficit they themselves played a key role in creating.  They can’t admit that the bad policies they themselves supported created the problem.  To do so would require they sacrifice a huge portion of their self image as competent, intelligent, insightful, knowledgeable insiders.  They would sacrifice their place within “respectable” society.  And rather than confront those who were right, they dismiss them and lead to the situation Paul Krugman pointed out that those who have been right all along are written off as unserious, dismissed as having no role in the current debate due to that unseriousness.  Admitting them now would require admitting that maybe back then, they were right and the cheerleaders were wrong and let’s be honest, the collective and individuals egos of the commentariat and the politicians got us into this mess can’t permit that.

It’s not – as with the anosognosic – that they lack the skills to see their error.  They lack the will.