Listen to the article
Laurence Peter was not really a cynical man at heart. He was a simple, competent Canadian educator, mainly serving at the University of Southern California, and passed away in 1990. However, in the meantime, he upset the administrative and business world with The Peter Principle, a book published in 1960 that was translated into 38 languages and is a bestseller everywhere, taught in the best universities.
His principle is simple: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” The reason is that a competent professional, as a reward, is generally promoted to a higher level. After successive promotions, he will eventually reach a position where he is incompetent, which is why he will no longer be promoted and will continue to exercise his incompetence in that same position.
Practical illustration of the principle: most of our MPs, ministers and high-ranking officials—which explains the poor state of our government and your state of mind. Consider, for example, the ministers. We become aware of them as soon as the government is formed: loaded with degrees, well-filled CVs… And then the harsh reality: they have reached their level of incompetence with this portfolio.
First, there’s the Minister of Energy who promised a continuous power supply, which is normal since tariffs were raised to the cost price. People swallowed the pill, thinking they would at least get rid of the generator.
No such luck. Four hours of electricity, maybe none if the Central Bank of Lebanon (BDL), the Minister of Finance, the Parliament, the Iraqi Prime Minister and maybe the UN Secretary-General do not intervene in time to unload a ship that has been waiting for two weeks off Zahrani, a result of a surreal Lebanese-Iraqi agreement.
In fact, ministers, instead of delivering a real achievement that will never come, apply what Laurence Peter predicted: hierarchs, when they have become truly incompetent, enjoy attending meetings, colloquiums, conferences. Illustration: our ministers’ travels have never been so frequent, their meetings and press conferences so numerous, their achievements so anemic.
Here’s one who announces for the thirteenth time the French bus circulation project, starting with a fleet of eight buses! Enough to make the French RATP blush with admiration. Another one comes up with a masterpiece: a National Mental Health Strategy, whereby the minister could reassure his subjects, “You lost your house in the South, your brother, your bank deposit, your health coverage to hospitalize your mother. It’s not a big deal; we’ve developed a strategy to prevent you from getting depressed.”
An appendix to spice up the episode: the Minister of Economy, seeing that his Health colleague failed to hospitalize the poorest, thought he too could achieve the same nullity. And that’s exactly what will come out of the broad meeting he held with all the actors of the medical profession.
Then there’s the Minister of Telecommunications struggling to connect private Internet distributors to the official Ogero network—which at the same time announces a possible interruption of its network, due to lack of equipment and money, or following a strike. In other words, the minister hoped to bring everyone down to his level of incompetence.
More examples? There are plenty. But let’s move on to a direct consequence of the above: “Murphy’s Laws,” invented by American engineer Edward Murphy, which have since traveled around the world. According to his laws, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Worse still: “Between two events that can go wrong, the worst one will happen.”
And that’s exactly what we witness every day, and it no longer even surprises us. Just listen to people chatting in any café. “Do you still get water from the Office twice a week? I’m sure it will dry up more and more.” We’ve reached a stage where we are unconsciously fervent adherents of Murphy’s Laws.
Let’s conclude with a third enlightened one, Joseph Overton, from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a think tank in Michigan, USA. According to Overton, what is at first a completely unthinkable idea is gradually brought by decision-makers towards something radical, then conceivable, then possible, then probable, before becoming anchored in reality and accepted by conviction or resignation.
This is quite the story, one of a country without a president, vanishing bank deposits, a war in the South with which we coexist while awaiting a total war that seems possible, non-existent state services that we find perfectly tolerable and, finally, the story of these corrupt or incompetent politicians, or both, whom we end up enduring as a fatality.
But at least we will have served a purpose in this country: beautifully substantiating the best alarmist concepts in literature… amidst 50 summer shows playing to sold-out audiences.
