Leadership, Democracy, and Quality Control

When we think of democracy, we tend to think of it as the best system in the world compared to a dictatorship. The problem is that democracy lacks something that corporations have had for over a century: quality control, not only in their products but also in their hiring processes.

Think about it for a moment: if you want to be a commercial pilot, you must accumulate thousands of flight hours, pass rigorous medical exams, technical certifications, psychological evaluations, and periodic recertifications. If you want to be a surgeon, you need years of academic training, supervised residencies, competency exams, and be subjected to constant performance audits. If you want to be a structural engineer, your designs are reviewed by multiple peers, subject to strict codes, and your license can be revoked if you are negligent.

These professions demand quality control because mistakes have immediate and fatal consequences. An incompetent pilot crashes a plane. An incompetent surgeon kills a patient. An incompetent engineer causes a building to collapse. The connection between incompetence and disaster is direct and obvious.

But governing a country—making decisions that affect millions of lives, controlling militaries, defining economic policies that can sink or save nations—requires no prior demonstration of competence. You just need to be popular.

Jason Brennan (2016) calls this the absurd paradox of democracy in Against Democracy. He says that if you take your car to the mechanic and he tells you, "I don't really know anything about cars, but I'm very charismatic," you leave immediately. But if a political candidate tells you, "I don't really know anything about economics, international relations, or public policy, but I shout loudly and tell people what they want to hear," millions of people vote for him.

Brennan argues that political power is a weapon, and allowing someone incompetent to use it is a violation of human rights. You wouldn't allow an unlicensed surgeon to operate on your child, so why would you allow someone with no demonstrable knowledge to decide whether your country goes to war or manages its economy? The hiring process in a modern corporation includes: background checks, employment references, technical competency exams, psychometric evaluations, probationary periods, and ongoing performance reviews. If you don't meet the standards, you're simply fired.

The "hiring" process in a democracy includes: having money for a campaign (or friends who will give it to you), hiring publicists to make you look good, repeating simplistic messages that resonate emotionally, and surviving an election cycle without making a fatal public blunder. There's no competency test. There's no verification that your promises have any basis in reality. There's no genuine probationary period (the first 100 days are pure media theater, not a real evaluation). And if you're a complete failure, in the worst-case scenario... you simply don't get re-elected. But the damage is already done.

This contrast is insane. We have collectively decided that the people who make the most important decisions—decisions that affect the life, death, and well-being of millions—need to demonstrate absolutely no prior competence beyond their ability to manipulate the electoral process.

Why? Because at some point we decided that "popular will" was more important than demonstrable competence. That it was better to have an idiot elected by a majority than an imposed expert. And in theory, that slogan that power should come from the people, not from a self-appointed elite, sounds beautiful.

But in practice, what we have is a system where any lousy tyrant can seize power through lies and propaganda, without any real filter to verify whether they have the slightest clue what they're doing. And when everything inevitably goes to hell, we shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, that's democracy."

No. That's democracy without quality control. And that omission is the fundamental flaw that has led the economies and societies of many third world countries to disasters that could have been avoided or at least reduced with better leadership, as happened in my country, Venezuela, in the Vargas Tragedy of 1999 or in the earthquake of June 24 of this year.

Reference
Brennan, J. (2016). Against Democracy. Princeton University Press.