Reign of the Competency Cosplayers

American politics is a disaster and it’s due, in large part, to the fact that the people in charge have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t know anything, have little interest in learning, but are confident in their ability to fix everything. The result looks to be about what you’d expect: instead of fixing, they’re breaking, and instead of acknowledging that they broke it, they’re insisting that’s just what “fixing” looks like.

One way to frame this is that Americans—or enough Americans to win elections—reject expertise. They don’t value knowledge much anymore, and don’t feel they should be led by experts because they’ve looked around, don’t like what they see, and blame it on the experts having led us astray. The solution, at least in their minds, is to replace experts with non-experts, which can’t be any worse, right?

There’s something to that story. Americans have rejected experts. Where the story goes wrong, though, is that they haven’t rejected expertise. Instead, they’ve shifted how they assess expertise and what counts as an expert. They’re getting the assessment very wrong—we are not ruled by experts but instead now by cranks and dullards—but they still care about what they imagine to be competent experts who are instead non-experts wearing the costume and adopting the mannerisms of experts.

And that’s what’s going on with America. The country’s been taken over by competency cosplayers.

How’d we get here?

If you’re angry and feeling righteous, the last thing you want is for someone to tell you you’re mistaken about whatever’s made you mad. Doubly so if the person telling you is, you’re convinced, the kind of guy who looks down on you, sneers at you, and belongs to a cultural group you believe is to blame for most of what’s wrong around you.

What happens, then, when knowledge and expertise about the topics that have provoked your anger, and that you’re emotionally invested in, is concentrated among those very people you least like? What happens when the expert consensus goes against your deeply held views, and rests primarily among people on the other side of the tribal, cultural, or partisan division?

One option is to accept that you might not agree with those guys on everything, but they do know more than you do, so maybe you should listen to them when they’re speaking from genuine expertise. Another option is to dig into the body of knowledge they possess, learn it thoroughly, and then assess, with your own newfound expertise, whether they’re correct.

But if you’re mad, and if those guys are in the out-group, neither’s terribly appealing. Becoming an expert yourself is a lot of work, and probably requires a great deal of education—and your political tribe doesn’t really value serious book learning, and certainly not the academies where it takes place, anyway. Deferring to their expertise means admitting you are wrong, and admitting they know more than you do, and that means giving them credit, and they’re the out-group.

Still, it’s nice to feel smart and in-the-know, and a good way to feel that is to have experts tell you you’re correct. If intelligent and competent people say, “Yeah, you were right all along, and those so-called experts on the other side are actually stupid, or morally corrupt, or ideologically blinded, or all three. While you are intelligent, morally worthy, and so thoroughly adept in logic and reason that ideology has no obscuring hold on you.”

What you do, then, is find your own experts. People who clearly know what they’re talking about, and are definitely competent in their fields, but who won’t challenge you, and will give you expert-endorsed permission to continue believing what those other guys tell you is inaccurate.

Except there’s a problem. How do you know these guys on your side actually are experts? How do you know they’re not snake oil salesmen taking advantage of your ignorance and motivated reasoning? To identify expertise, we’ve really only got two options. First, we can develop it ourselves, but that’s, like we said above, a lot of work. And even if you can do it in one domain, no one, not since maybe Aristotle, can be an expert in everything. So your second option is to trust the judgement of other experts and to put a thumb on the scale for expert consensus. If everyone who knows a lot about a topic believes one thing about that topic, it’s probably better, lacking expertise yourself, to go with their consensus than to assume the random heterodox thinker has it right. That’s not foolproof, of course. The consensus can be wrong, and heterodox thinkers have been proven right. But it’s a decent heuristic.

That second option is what most of us do most of the time. It’s a good bet. But, if the expert consensus is against you, which it is if you’re the sort of person we’re talking about, it’s not a satisfying bet, because it looks an awful lot like admitting error.

The way out of this trap is to find a critical mass of your own experts, who agree with each other—and agree with you. They don’t need to be actual experts, not in a way other actual experts would recognize. In fact, they can barely know more about the topic than you do. But they need to convincingly perform as experts in an “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” sense. And they need to perform that “expertise” in concert with enough similarly situated performative experts that it can feel like there’s something of a consensus on their, and your, side.

They need the appearance of competence, too: They’ve found success in applying the things you believe to be true, and their success in applying them reflects in a flattering way on you. It’s not just that the guy on TV knows a lot about, say, business, and that what he’s saying about business maps on to what you believe about business yourself. It’s that he’s achieved something in business—he’s demonstrated a degree of competence—and this shows that if you were to enter into business, you’d have similar accomplishments. It’s success by proxy.

But here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter if his success is real. In fact, it’s unlikely to be, because he’s saying the things you believe, and you’re not an expert, and the real experts disagree with you. And, generally speaking, success, while it has a degree of luck, also demands expertise. If he were a real expert, he’d disagree with you, because the consensus among real experts is that you’re wrong.

Thus the “success” in success by proxy can only really be a simulacrum of success, one given form and believability not through real world achievements that would show genuine expertise, but instead through a constructed narrative about that “expert” put together by the lore-builders of your preferred media and information ecosystem. Further, it’s not just that this person seems to “know” things. Book learning’s not that important. What matters is that they appear clever in applying their knowledge, that they do things. That they have accomplishments that are the result of their expertise. They’re rich. They’re famous. It doesn’t matter how they got rich or famous, just that they are. Or that the lore of your media ecosystem tells you they are. They have, in your mind, competence. And you know this because so many people who believe the same things you do keep telling you they have competence. It’s not just that this person isn’t a doctor but plays one on TV, it’s that the TV is telling you the medical drama he appears in is actually a documentary.

I call these people competency cosplayers. They’ve taken over the commanding heights of politics. They’ll keep breaking things, because their competency is pretend. They’re performing a role for people who want to see people like themselves in those roles. Or, if not like themselves, because they know they’re not rich and they know they’re not experts in this stuff, people who like them. People on their team, in their tribe, and opposed by the guys on the other side in that consensus that is so unbearable, or stuffy, or snooty, and keeps saying you don’t know anything and should listen to those who do.

They want to play a character, and you want to believe they are that character, and everyone playing or wanting to believe is in a media bubble telling them all these guys are legit, and everyone who’s not these guys is a fraud or corrupt. All this is understandable, because if the people you don’t like are telling you you’re wrong, you don’t want to believe them, because that means the people you don’t like are right. But when the people you do believe take the reins of power, all the imagination and fancy costumes your tribe can bring to bear won’t paper over the fact that these guys aren’t competent, and they aren’t experts. They’re just cosplaying.