“In other words, it is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual’s use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone… The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends. The very division of knowledge increases the necessary ignorance of the individual of most of this knowledge.” 

Without a doubt, this is an important observation, both through the part it plays in Hayek’s philosophy and through the lessons in leadership it can provide.

If one considers how this applies to President Bush, it provides a critique slightly more nuanced than the common refrain related to his intelligence. Questions of intelligence aside, his appointment of cronies to head various offices is a fact no impartial observer would dispute. By selecting appointees based on loyalty rather than competence, he has crippled his ability to take advantage of knowledge he does not possess.

One thing I’ve heard several times is the suggestion that [insert name here] is too hard on President Bush, and that Bush is doing the best job he can. There are two appropriate responses to this:

1. From Get Your War On, this cartoon:

2. Yes, in some cases, he probably is doing the best job he can. By relying on cronies rather than fully competent people, however, he has made “the best job he can do” a lot worse than it should be. It’s like saying that someone who has climbed into a car, stabbed himself once in each eye with an icepick, and proceeded to try to drive to the store is doing the best job he can. Sure, he’s trying not to hit things, but he’s made it pretty difficult for himself.

Lesson for future Presidents: Jackson’s “Spoils System” provides a nice way to repay political favors, but it has the unfortunate drawback, one that has worsened in modern times, of making your administration worse at doing its job. One of your most important duties to the American people is to appoint competent people to each and every position. So when you consider your legacy, remember that history won’t catch every bad appointment you make, but some are bound to hurt you in the long run.

I’m including this passage so that I can refer to it later. There is a method to this madness.The passage:

“A screw sticks, for example, on a side cover assembly. You check the manual to see if there might be any special cause for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is “Remove side cover plate” in that wonderful terse technical style that never tells you what you want to know. There’s no earlier procedure left undone that might cause the cover screws to stick.

“Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn’t just irritating and minor. You’re stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It’s absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.

“This isn’t a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck. In traditional maintenance this is the worst of all moments, so bad that you have avoided even thinking about it before you come to it.

“The book’s no good to you now. Neither is scientific reason. You don’t need any scientific experiments to find out what’s wrong. It’s obvious what’s wrong. What you need is an hypothesis for how you’re going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn’t provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they’re around.

“This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It’s a miserable experience emotionally. You’re losing time. You’re incompetent. You don’t know what you’re doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.

“It’s normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge hammer if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you’re inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It’s just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

“What you’re up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination – “unstuckness”, in other words – are completely outside its domain.

“We’re still stuck on that screw and the only way it’s going to get unstuck is by abandoning further examination of the screw according to traditional scientific method. That won’t work. What we have to do is examine traditional scientific method in the light of that stuck screw.

“We have been looking at that screw “objectively”. According to the doctrine of “objectivity”, which is integral with traditional scientific method, what we like or don’t like about that screw has nothing to do with our correct thinking. We should not evaluate what we see. We should keep our mind a blank tablet which nature fills for us, and then reason disinterestedly from the facts we observe.

“But when we stop and think about it disinterestedly, in terms of this stuck screw, we begin to see that this whole idea of disinterested observation is silly. Where are those facts? What are we going to observe disinterestedly? The torn slot? The immovable side cover plate? The color of the paint job? The speedometer? The sissy bar? As Poincaré would have said, there are an infinite number of facts about the motorcycle, and the right ones don’t just dance up and introduce themselves. The right facts, the ones we really need, are not only passive, they are damned elusive, and we’re not going to just sit back and “observe” them. We’re going to have to be in there looking for them or we’re going to be here a long time. Forever. As Poincaré pointed out, there must be a subliminal choice of what we observe.

“The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to care!”