The mixed sandwich society: why mediocre people dominate the world

Think of vanilla ice cream. No, better yet, think of a mixed sandwich. Here is a photo to get inspired. Visualize the best possible mixed sandwich, with its hot ham, melted cheese, toasted bread ... Is it the best food in the world? Of course not. Is it the worst? Surely neither. Nobody dislikes a mixed sandwich but hardly anyone would choose it for their wedding menu or as a last supper on death row. It is not a bright dish, but to get out of the way is never wrong; It fulfills its function. "Excuse me, the kitchen has already closed, but if you want we can make a mixed sandwich."

We could say that the mixed sandwich is a simply mediocre dish. Not bad, eye, gave me-cre. That is, "of medium quality" , according to strict definition of the SAR. "Undeserving". Come on, from the pile.

Now forget the sandwich and look at your boss's office. There it is. Think about your children's teacher or put the news for a while and look at our politicians. Even in the latest fashion movie or the best selling album. The latest best seller ... Don't tell me you don't know everything about ham and cheese? Welcome to the dictatorship of the mediocre.

"We live in an order in which the media has ceased to be an abstract synthesis that allows us to understand the state of things and has become the standard imposed that we are obliged to abide by," says Alain Deneault , philosopher and professor of Sociology at The University of Québec and author of Mediocracy, when mediocre people come to power (Ed. Turner), an essay that comes to Spain today and analyzes how the mediocre aspirations that invade society are causing more and more idiotic citizens. Condemned - we would say - to have breakfast, lunch and dinner a mixed sandwich. "The mediocracy encourages us in every possible way to fall asleep rather than think, to see as inevitable what is unacceptable and as necessary the disgusting."

The mediocracy encourages us to fall asleep rather than think, to see as inevitable what is unacceptable and as necessary the disgusting

Let's look at a practical example given by Deneault to understand the perverse game he talks about in his book. The system does not want a teacher who does not know or use the photocopier, but even less will accept a teacher who questions the educational program trying to improve the average . Nor will it admit the employee of a company that tries to show a pinch of morality in a company under pressure from its shareholders. Move the model to any other profession and you will find a panorama with university professors who instead of research fill out forms, journalists who hide great scandals to generate clicks with news of rapid consumption, artists as revolutionary as subsidized and politicians of extreme center. No sign of pride for a job well done. "For opportunism or fear of structural reprisals, it is difficult to resist the pressure of mediocrity," laments the Canadian philosopher.

Everything is governed today under what is known as the Peter Principle , a theory formulated by the pedagogue Laurence J. Peter and the playwright Raymond Hull (also Canadians) who states that, in modern hierarchies, all moderately competent workers - not the brightest nor are those who are not complete useless - they are promoted in their company until they reach a position for which they are no longer trained.

«Our massive systems of qualification, evaluation and indicators are designed to manage the average. And the truth is that they do it quite well ”, defends Daniel Innerarity, Professor of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country. «The bad part is that they also punish dissonance, the disruptive. What sounds strange to us tends to qualify it as bad . The only way to combat this bias is to have a parallel system to grant a certain exceptionality because the system, for our gregarious behavior and for democratic equality, tends to reward adaptive behavior. Who wants to avoid this bias, what he must do is to seek the company of someone who tells the truth to the face, who does not do the ball as today's advisors do, but who ever tells him that he is doing the ridiculous , as did the jesters of the King ».

The origin of this mediocracy goes back, according to Alain Denault's account, to the 19th century, "when the trades gradually became jobs", the work was standardized and the professionals became "human resources", formatted, classified and packaged as managers, partners, entrepreneurs, freelancers, associates ... With a large-scale effectiveness that, for Denault, has no comparison in history. We have people who produce food on assembly lines without knowing how to cook even a ham and cheese sandwich, who give you the turra on the phone with stimulating rates that they don't even understand, who sell books they would never read. They work like the average because the work is not for them more than (worth the redundancy) a mediocre average of survival.

One can be a very competent mediocre, that is, applied and servile but without convictions. In that case, the future is yours

"We generate a kind of standardized average, required to organize large-scale work in the alienating model we know today," explains the author. "The mediocre ones will organize themselves to flatter each other, they will make sure they return the favors and they will cement the power of a clan that will grow by attracting their peers," he says. "It is a vicious circle".

- Is a mediocre professional more dangerous than a directly bad one?

- For power, no. Mediocrity is not synonymous with incompetence . The established powers do not want perfect incompetent, workers who do not comply with their schedule or who do not obey orders. It really costs to be mediocre. One can be a very competent mediocre, that is, applied, servile and free from all convictions and own passions . In that case, the future is yours because the institutions of power are reluctant to rub shoulders with politically and morally committed people or who are original in their thoughts and methods.

- Are we more mediocre than before?

- We will not invent a mediocrometer to study the degree of mediocrity of people, but we can establish an evolution of the terms mediocrity and mediocracy in the course of modernity. Initially, it was a dismissive expression used by elites to denounce the claim of the nascent middle classes who wanted to prove science, art or politics. On the contrary, mediocrity in our time is no longer deplored, but promoted . It has become a system.

At the top of that mediocratic regime, we find our politicians. He will have tired of hearing how mediocre they are and will surely believe that those of today are worse than those of before and ours are worse than those of the neighboring country. If it's any consolation, Alain Denault argues that mediocrity is in the nature of almost all current politicians and the regime that draws his essay is based on that new policy turned into a "management culture," in which our leaders are they limit themselves to handling yesterday's problems and in which any critical thinking or any long-term reflection is despised , because only the normative, the reproduction, the mechanical statements of the obvious are authorized.

"This is - underlines Denault - the political order of the extreme center." And we are not talking about the demonstration center, where the political scientists say that the elections are won, but directly about a proposal to suppress the debate between left and right and replace it with empty words . «The barbarities of private organizations have been imposed in the language: social acceptance instead of democracy, interested parties instead of citizens, civil society instead of people, consensus instead of debate, competitiveness instead of mutual help ... We are told, paradoxically, that it is up to us to get out of unemployment, make ourselves attractive to the labor market, be active on Facebook, undertake ... Almost everything conspires to make us fail, so that it seems like a personal shame what is only political anger directed against an individual who has been taught to restrict his conscience. There is nothing more extreme than the extreme center, ”says the author of Mediocracy.

We return to Spain to find out where our extreme center was. "There are people who have confused the center with centrality," shares Daniel Innerarity. "The center can be an ideological combination of left and right values ​​or it can also be a singular combination of intellectual laziness and opportunism."

They have long since stopped being the smartest in the Government but not because the rulers are more stupid, but because the others are now smarter

Are our politicians worse than ever? "No, the problem is that mediocre politicians now have more present," says the Spanish philosopher. “ We tend to idealize the leaders of the Transition, for example, because we remember the good guys but forget about the amount of trash there was then . The smartest people in the Government have long since stopped being, but not because the rulers have become more dumb, but because the others are now smarter. Before they were brighter by comparison with the average. Today politicians stand out less not because they are more mediocre but because the distance between the leader and the leaders has been reduced.

-What is the solution against mediocracy?

- Democracy is a system of government for the average people, so the solution is to raise that average, so that there is more culture of formation. It is not about improving the process of selecting leaders. We become obsessed with leaders or with their exemplarity, such things that underline the individual qualities of people, when what we have to work is the collective intelligence of society. And that applies to the Government and also to any form of human organization.

The alternative, Alain Denault reminds us, is the "grayness," the "tasteless." You know, the mediocre.

A sandwich, mixed, please.

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