One of our board members has spent roughly 20 years working as a live event sound engineer. They have shared a maxim famous in that industry: “Everyone knows two things: Their job and audio.”
This board offers that one of the most productive yet maddening and divisive aspects of the American character is brought to light in this joke. For lack of a better word, it is an American “I-know-your-job-better-than-you-ism.”
This charming little feature is present in all manner of American pastimes: armchair quarterbacking, grade-grubbing, getting a second medical opinion, DIY projects, etc.
The underlying assumption is usually this: Everyone is at once expert at their job and even more brilliant at everyone else’s. The logical contradiction here should be apparent.
Once in a while, this impulse to do a job better than the next person creates huge improvements in an occupation, a business, an industrial sector or even the world. More often than not, it is downright condescending. To paraphrase Hofstadter, this results from an underlying attitude of egalitarianism combined with a growing fear and resentment of modern specialized expertise.
Two growing manifestations of this are cause for alarm. The first, ironically, articulates this egalitarian impulse to elite credentialism and weaponizes them both in the form of management consultancy. Leaders used to be promoted from inside the core of organizations, knowing them inside and out.
Now, the transcendent MBA/MPA sells management of any particular organization as a set of universal principles that one must have gone to generic yet elitist networking programs to apply. Running an oil company and running a university are potentially both noble and yet not the same process or set of concerns. They exist simultaneously but not identically.
The second manifestation is even worse. It articulates this paranoid egalitarianism and fear of expertise to potential elected officials. The past two Presidents of the United States were elected largely because of their lack of experience in government. The Greeks saw politics as the highest of callings. Americans see it, judging by polling, as the work of untouchables.
Americans on two political sides got their wish. In Obama and Trump, we got a non-tainted ingénue organizer/professor and a take-no-prisoners businessman to show those stogy statespeople what is what. How is that working for us?
