Hierarchies of Competence

Generally speaking, it's not the case that our hierarchies of competence are reasonably functional and not only are they functional, they're valuable. We need to know who the competent people are, and we need to reward them. Even more importantly, we need to tell young people, "Hey, there's some hierarchies of competence out there—like a thousand of them. Go be a plumber, man, but be a good one, you know? Be an honest one."

I had a plumber once, you know. It was the night—well, the night before we were putting drywall in our house; we were redoing our house—and he had put in all the plastic piping, you know. I was going to test the joints; they're supposed to be glued together with this pipe glue, right? I told him I had to test the joints, and he said, "Well, you don't have to test my joints—they never leak." I thought, "Yeah, that's okay, how about if I test them?" So I went up on the third floor and filled the pipes with water, capping them in the basement like you're supposed to, and like half an hour later, I had two inches of water in the basement; there were 30 leaking joints. That was the night before the drywallers were supposed to show up.

Well, he wasn't particularly competent—that's the point of that story. But even more so, he had put a bunch of the plastic pipe outside where the drywall would be, so it would have been sticking through the wall. I spent a frenetic night, you know, sawing through plastic pipe and regluing Joints so that, well, so that the drywallers could come in.

What's the point? If you're going to be a plumber, man, be a good plumber, because otherwise all you do is go out there and cause trouble. We don't need people to cause more trouble; we need people to solve problems, you know. And so you can be a Tradesman, and you can be—you can make a lot of money as a tradesperson. It's a bloody reliable, honorable, uh, forthright, productive way of making a living, and there is a hell of a lot of difference between a working man who knows what he's doing and one who doesn't, both in terms of skill and ethics, right?

When you work with someone who knows what they're doing, it's a bloody pleasure. They tell you what they're going to do; they tell you how much it will cost; they get it done; it works; and you pay them. Perfect, everyone's happy, and that's what happens when you have genuine hierarchies of competence.

So you listen to these panderers of egalitarian, egalitarianism and equity, and they fail to recognize completely that there are differences in rank between people. It's not such a terrible thing, man. Maybe you wouldn't be a great lawyer—like, it's certainly possible most people aren't—but that doesn't mean there isn't something you could be great at. There's lots of hierarchies to attempt to climb, and if you fail in one, go try another. But the point is you're still trying to aim for the top, and what the hell are you going to do if you don't try to aim for the top? You know, flap about uselessly and whine about your life. It's not helpful; it'll just make you miserable. You're not reliable to anyone; you can't help out in a crisis—it's like…

So you tell young people—and this is another message for conservatives—like, "I don't care what you're going to do, but go out there and make something of yourself, for God's sake! Be an honest person, and work, and get to the top of whatever it is that you want to get to the top of, you know; and, and, and—stand up for yourself like a respectable human being, and be a bit of a light on the world instead of a blight."