You know, the absolute craziest idea that I have come across in recent memory is the “Peter Principle." Raymond Hull and Laurence Peter jointly authored the book of the same name based on Laurence’s research, published in 1969. Generally, it is a theorem that says eventually everyone in a hierarchy will be promoted into a role for which they are incompetent, and there they shall remain. Such is an example: 

Say Bob works at a construction job, and as it turns out Bob is pretty great at working with his hands. Bob is actually quite fantastic in that regard, and he often sees his salary increase– (Ha! Okay, this is a hypothetical. Salary increase? In this economy?) Well, after some years, a position above his opens up, and he is invited in to manage the new guys at the construction company. He could be good at it. Then he may one day be promoted. However, if Bob is not good at his role, that is where he will remain. He might be alright, or okay-ish, but regardless, Bob is not good at managing people. As Laurence puts it, (Bob would rise through the hierarchy) “to a level of respective incompetence.”

There, promoted to the role/level they are worst at is “Peter’s Plateau,” where the person will no longer be promoted because they are incompetent. In their 1969 book, both Hull and Peter also discussed counterarguments that would arise in the off chance that there are those who are promoted up regardless of incompetence. For this, they came up with the phrase, “percussive sublimation,” or “kicked upstairs". The incompetent person is shifted from one position of incompetence to another (be it a real position or one with a longer job title), to keep morale up among employees and hope alive that those lower employees may one day be promoted too. 

Interestingly, the book goes on to talk about "super-incompetence”, and super-competence.” Where if you (‘you’ in a general sense, ha!) are too incompetent and exceptionally (likely very visibly) incompetent, you are fired. And if you are too competent at your job, you are also fired. Funny enough, in the Book, Hull and Peter pointed out real examples of "super-competence” among special-education teachers for children with exceptional learning disabilities. Those teachers they had found had exceeded math and reading scores among special-needs students but had not set aside enough time for “finger-painting and bead-counting.” 

It is possible, Peter argued, that a person could reach the "summit of competence” in an organization, but only because there weren't enough roles/levels of hierarchy available in that size of organization. 

The Peter Principle goes hand-in-hand with concepts brought up ten years later in a book from 1976, “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, by Norman F. Dixon. The author of the book studied over 100 years of British military failures and reasoned that beyond failures to modernize British forces, he saw a horrid pattern: that in the military people of a particular type are recruited, and only those of a particular mindset were promoted. Especially then among the British there was a disdain for artistic personalities, intellectual endeavors, a pressure or concentration of male virility, and a subservience to tradition. These types of soldiers are sycophantic with superiors and exceptionally harsh to new recruits. 

The traits ascribed above might be good (Norman Dixen didn't think so) or they might be bad, but those are the type of men who are recruited into the military and eventually promoted to officers and the like. Do you think that the military wants painters and sophists in their ranks? The answer is actually “maybe.” Do they recruit them? Ha! Norman showed in his book that the most famous military commanders, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, were not like the men mentioned above. Generals like Napoleon, whose minds are creative and flexible, not set in dogma or tradition, make for poor grunts.

But as was mentioned above in the Peter Principle: the men who are recruited, given enough time, and have general competency at lower tasks will be promoted to the point of their lowest incompetency, and those of “super-competency” won't be promoted because they won't ascribe or promote the same things, or “industry standard” like finger-painting. (Side note: working with children for more than ten years, I have absolutely gotten into arguments with bosses over them wanting me to procure more finger painting from children “for parents," rather than the kids doing assignments or getting physical activity). Finger painting is just an example: in the military, I am sure there are things that they do which are normalized, that a super-competent man like Napoleon would have done away with. 

I.E.: he was the one who did away with those silly line formations that Americans make fun of the British for doing in the Revolutionary War. Everyone in Europe was fighting in those long, stupid lines, and officers obsessed over it for nearly two hundred years. Imagine going into any military school and being a super-competent person; you dismiss the orderly lines of combat when men would line up to shoot each other in volleys–and you are dismissed or reprimanded. You would probably later be forced to stand at attention in your doom while other men shot at you.  

 Keith Johnson at the Foreign Press wrote an article on this book and… Pete Hegseth. Man, I laughed when I read it. Hegseth is like, “rah rah, beards are unprofessional.” I dunno, man, Abraham Lincoln kinda rocked, and he had an awesome beard. I just knew I had to write a broader opinion on it in politics today. A Spaniard, the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset  wrote before Norman did about militaries, and before Hull and Peter did on incompetence: 

“All public employees should be demoted to their immediately lower level, as they have been promoted until turning incompetent.”

Honestly, this essay is not a direct dig at Hesgeth; he is a man who was promoted far above his (seeming) level of competence (the current state of the Iran Affair is a perfect example). This essay is perhaps more of a lamentation at the realization that incompetence everywhere is partially an inevitability - as long as people choose to allow it to be so by not recognizing and promoting those with super-competence, as well as keeping incompetent people (percussive sublimation) because it makes the manager's life easier. Maybe, in part, people fire or demote super-competent people because it either makes them look bad, or one day they will lose their job to that person?

We all suffer unequally, so do incompetent people in the wrong position in a hierarchy. 

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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