We tend to think of dueling in terms of personal honor, but it may have also functioned to keep incompetents at bay.
Certain bureaucratic decisions are foolish. In modernity, it seems less and less possible to directly confront foolish bureaucratic decisions. One can just be ignored, or perhaps there will be much shouting and pointing to various credentials, claims of expertise, election results, this or that metric going up or down, etc...
Whatever.
When you hear the sound of running water in your own house, you will probably search out why you hear running water, because you know you will see it on the bill later. If you are particularly slow, you develop this habit after you see an astronomical water bill or two.
But if you are in a place run by bureaucrats, well, you have probably trained yourself not to hear it. Because if you do hear it, you might feel the need to say something about it, and if you do say something about it, you will be rewarded with unpleasantness.
Now there are great many issues relating to management that seems incredible hard to transmit to the right people. Clearly, education would be the way to go, except I have checked into the whole realm of management education and I see instead that it is propaganda, apparently designed to make impossible for anyone to identify and listen to people who are smarter than them- and/or at least people who know something about the subject under discussion.
Dueling would be a very quick and effective way of radically transforming this class of people. If they knew they might have to defend their decisions in battle, then, presumably, they'd be a little more careful about their decisions. Plus, a rather large group of people unfit for any battle, not to mention unfit for any decision, would leave in exodus- especially after some girl who has watched too much Game of Thrones dies at dawn over the new pronoun policy she just tried to push on the company.
1 comment:
The part about not reporting a serious problem in a bureaucracy reminds me of an incident some twenty-odd years ago. A hospital in the Province of Ontario had a computer glitch that resulted in an enormous number of bills, for $5000 each, being sent out to every person who had been a patient in that hospital over the previous two years. It was a major P.R. disaster for that hospital. At that time I was working in the mailroom of a bank, next to statement rendition, and I knew it was not possible for anyone working in those departments to realize how unusual and wrong such an event would be. Were those people too stupid or too afraid to say anything? Did the person in charge go to their manager and was told to mind their own business and just "do their work"? I don't know who was held responsible for allowing this to happen or if anyone was held responsible. I also remember a government agency, in the 1990's, in the Province of British Columbia getting in hot water for allowing numerous children to die from neglect and abuse despite the agency having clear documented knowledge of this. The result of this was the socialist government of the time transforming the agency into a ministry. So the same people implementing the same policies; but promotions all around!
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