Luxury Mendacity

As so many of us know, a problem of our time is a governing elite which defines itself by absurd luxury beliefs. Absurd because they make no practical or economic sense or even because they make not sense whatever, because they are simply false. Yet still we create career pathways for the luxury mendacity of our governing elites.

For a number of decades we have created a stream of intelligent, well educated, ambitious, socially competent but untalented people by expanding university education. How does this stream of people fulfil their ambitions without taxing the talents they don’t have? For the amoral among them, a career in mendacity may beckon.

For a number of decades we have also created a complex network of taxpayer-dependent semi-sinecures within an equally complex network of taxpayer dependent organisations. Quangos, NGOs, regulatory bodies, think tanks, charitable foundations, research institutes and pressure groups are just some of them. How do they find people to fill their executive positions? By attracting well-qualified, socially adroit people looking for a congenial career in taxpayer dependent bodies. If mendacity is part of the culture – no problem.

These two broad features of modern life have left us with career pathways we would never have planned. Pathways for a governing class based on mendacity, but not accidental or planned mendacity. A chicken and egg mendacity where people attracted to elite career paths are temperamentally suited to the useless organisations which hatched those same career paths.

Career paths for intelligent, well educated, ambitious but untalented people. Not careers promising enormous wealth, but easily enough to be secure, unaffected by the wider consequences of mendacious incompetence. People with the social skills to join a governing elite under the shelter and congenial protection of luxury mendacity.