Not a Competency Crisis. A Crisis of Excellence.

The true soul of America was never just democracy or liberty, but a specific kind of freedom that unleashes human excellence.

Everything you depend on that once was great is degrading, crumbling, and becoming frustratingly mediocre. It’s not because the people in charge are all incompetent. It’s on purpose.

It isn’t a crisis of competence. It’s a surrendering of excellence.

Boeing used to be a workshop of engineering excellence. Now airplane doors are falling off mid-flight while astronauts get stranded in space. Google, a former institution of excellence, has allowed its core product of Google search to degrade into near-uselessness, yielding marginal information deep on the ninth page. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN were all institutions of excellence we trusted to dig into the truths that power didn’t want us to know. Nobody thinks that anymore.

Hollywood produces boring CGI spectacles and even Disney, once the definition of entertainment excellence, is releasing strings of mediocre product no one is going to see. Harvard and our other elite universities, once temples to knowledge, are becoming chaotic credentialing farms. Apple is no longer innovating. Intel is imploding. Chipotle charges serious prices for burritos with no filling, while McDonalds has remodeled stores to look like uncomfortable bank lobbies so nobody will hang out there with their kids. Even Nike is struggling, shifting away from making inspiring shoes to bean counting the marketing of shoes online.

Our roads and airports and other infrastructure are a world embarrassment. Once elite agencies like the CDC and Secret Service are revealed to be run by Keystone Cops. Our public architecture is uninspired and ugly. Our art is uncreative. Our communities are so disordered stores lock up shaving cream behind glass cabinets that a clerk has to unlock.

Then there’s the depressing case of our public officials and politicians.

The United States government used to be an imposing edifice. Our officials were still politicians, with all the negative implications the word “politician” implies, but they were also deadly serious people. Watch an old presidential debate from the 1980s or before and start to weep. American politics is now a circus inhabited by entertainers chasing titles and status they haven’t earned. Do these people demonstrate knowledge, resolve, wisdom, and dogged purpose? They stumble about on the public stage looking for attention and a laugh.

How many people with framed headshots in front of American flags do you really trust to have the judgment necessary to protect your family from nuclear war?

We talk about a crisis of competence because American institutions, public and private, clearly are no longer competent. We have few pillars of true excellence left to admire. There’s still the military. Perhaps the teams working to develop AI. There are isolated individuals—artists, writers, surgeons, engineers, scientists, and filmmakers battling against their systems to do great things. Very few major institutions, however, carry out their stated missions with capability and pride. Very few appear to even care. They’re happy to muddle along as good enough pillars of mediocrity.

Some say we lack “state capacity,” meaning our institutions no longer have the ability to organize and accomplish things. I’d say it’s even bigger, a lack national purpose. Everything in America increasingly is Comcast—functional, profitable, frustrating, mediocre, and sad.

This issue—one most Americans refuse to acknowledge out of denial or national pride—is among the most important of our era. It’s neither left wing nor right. It’s gravely serious. We need institutions that fulfill their missions, aspire to greatness, and simply work. We need to bring back the pursuit of excellence.

For most of the history of our republic, America represented excellence. Excellence was part of our national mythology and DNA. We celebrated people who created things. We idolized creativity. We honored those who took big risks that paid off. We loved people who pushed themselves to become the best at what they did. We wanted America to be number one.

Excellence was the soul of what we called our pioneer spirit. It was the energy of American invention like the miracle of flight, the wonder of electricity, the sensation of the telephone, and the marvel of the Internet. It was the heart of our great enterprises like Ford’s automobiles, IBM’s computers, the steel of US Steel, McDonalds’ hamburgers, and Apple’s computers. A drive for excellence allowed America to build almost from scratch a whirring machine of sixteen million men each doing their part inside an impressive clockwork, shipping them across the world, equipping them, supplying them, and then invading beaches and island strongholds to push back the onslaught of fascism until it broke.

The true soul of America was never just democracy or liberty, but a specific kind of freedom that unleashes human excellence. We aspired to be a place in which greatness wasn’t just possible but rewarded. Ordinary people would push to improve themselves by earning degrees, reading novels, listening to symphonies, traveling to Italy, and learning to cook like French chefs. We would insist, unlike the corruption of powerful institutions across human history, that America’s institutions would be fair, impartial, and pursue their stated missions with zeal. Our industries would conquer mountaintops to become the best. We would build things, create things, and ship things around the world. We would create a middle-class society in which anyone could own a home, buy a car, raise a family, and pursue ambitions. America believed chasing excellence was our responsibility, if not our destiny. We chanted “we’re number one” because we meant it. This was America’s true superpower.

Excellence, however, means more than just success or personal achievement. Excellence isn’t climbing ladders or winning high-stakes games. Making the most money is not excellence. Having the fanciest title is not excellence. Winning elections is not excellence. These things are difficult to do and prized, but they’re simply more desirable forms of mediocrity. People who chase such things and win them are successful but ordinary. Excellence is about creating.

Excellence means grappling with the world’s chaos and using your will to twist it into something better. It’s not the technology company that earns the most money that is excellent. It’s the one that makes a stunning device that delights people and changes how they live. It’s not the guy who earns the most on Wall Street trading derivatives who is excellent. It’s the guy who builds a thriving company that builds material things people depend upon and love. It’s not the director who makes billions at the box office who is excellent. It’s the one who makes a film people still watch in a hundred years because it inspires their humanity. It’s not the person who wins the White House who is excellent. It’s the one who shakes the earth to create a program that fixes a broken system, rights a wrong, frustrates abusive power, and changes people’s lives.

Nikola Tesla was among the greatest scientists and inventors in history. He did things no other man could, or would. His discoveries changed the course of our world. He died, beaten in business, living in a hotel room in poverty. He didn’t get rich, but his life was a model of human excellence.

A lot of what we call achievement isn’t excellence, but extraction. Instead of building things, making things, or changing things, it’s about taking what exists and extracting some for you. Skilled extractors may be successful in the sense they acquire great resources, status, or power from the world. They live in luxury atop the mountain adored by crowds barking orders like a lord. They’re successful but also ordinary. They haven’t wrestled against reality to build anything, improve anything, or change anything. The just shifted some of what others made into their own account. It’s a kind of success, but it isn’t excellence.

America’s leadership class is competent. In fact, they’re wickedly smart and insanely good at what they do. The reason nothing works isn’t because the people running institutions are incompetent. It’s because they have goals other than being excellent.

There’s a famous quote from Stafford Beer: The purpose of a system is what it does.

Google search isn’t mediocre because the people running Google are dumb. It’s because, as Cory Doctorow recognized, tech firms are intentionally degrading their products to seize more value for themselves. No national media company today would dare publish the Pentagon Papers, but not because the people leading them lack courage. It would involve a massive cost in relationships and profits, things more important to them then telling truths, holding power to account, or supporting democracy. No major studio would make the Godfather, but not because Hollywood can’t recognize brilliant stories or great talent. Creating films is risky and expensive, and it’s safer to make another bland sequel based on a popular comic. They all have chosen other goals over pursuing excellence.

Congress isn’t neglecting problems because it’s incompetent. It’s because Members of Congress don’t care enough to fix them. Fixing problems takes grit, study, and risk. It makes people angry and rarely gets rewarded. The priority of officials is raising money, getting re-elected, winning higher office, and getting on cable TV. There are better ways to achieve that than improving lives.

Valuing excellence is unusual. Most societies across history don’t. In most places across history, leaders don’t seek excellence but to exalt themselves. They extract wealth, status, and power from the system that exists. They view the world as static and seek to capture as much as possible for themselves. This mentality is why most societies have been mediocre for most of history. Excellence was only found in irrational pockets, isolated human spirits that couldn’t be snuffed out. Crazy writers and artists chased excellence while living in near poverty. Obscure scientists labored alone, cloistered from society. A few pursued greatness on battlefields for love of country or for brothers in arms. Rarely, a society embraced excellence for a time and created a golden age like Republican Rome. Then it would fade away and mediocrity would creep back in.

America was different. America was dynamic. In America, excellence was encouraged and rewarded. Excellence won you honor and recognition. It won you status and attention. It could make you rich. Failure to pursue excellence, on the other hand, was shameful. In America you didn’t just have an opportunity to be excellent. You had a duty to pursue it—to be the best that you could be so America would prosper and achieve, making it the best that America could be. Leaders had no choice but to lead their institutions toward excellence because our culture and society demanded it to maintain status and position. Excellence was also the core of the American Dream.

The American Dream was never about a safe job, car, and suburban home. Those were just its byproducts. The American Dream was about the opportunity to become the best version of yourself without unfair impediment. As Truslow Adams, the man who coined the term, wrote in The Epic of America:

It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

It is, in other words, a dream of pursing excellence.

Pursuing excellence, perhaps most important, makes us happy. We have come to recognize a troubling crisis in meaning in America. Americans are not happy. Many of us lack a sense of fulfilment and purpose in our lives. A lot of this decay in meaning is due to this draining away of excellence. When you’re part of a great enterprise, doing a small part to change the world, you don’t come home drained believing your sacrifice was pointless. You come home energized. Even if your part was small, even if the task was dull, you were part of something excellent. This is what the good life is about.

The abandonment of excellence as a national value is dangerous. America is becoming less like America. It’s becoming more like everywhere else. This is why it increasingly looks like everywhere else.

What has caused this fracture in our national spirit? Why across all domains, at all levels of society, has America abandoned the pursuit of excellence? Why are we no longer fighting, not to extract the most, but to become the best? Why are we no longer rewarding those who fight dragons instead of those who manage them? Why do we no longer shame those with great power who refuse to build? Why are we becoming not a nation of innovators and pioneers but silky administrators, managers, and bureaucrats? Why does America no longer want to be America?

We need to bring this sense of honor and excellence back into our nation. We need leaders who see their jobs not as rewards but solemn duties, responsibilities to those they’re supposed to lead. We need institutions that fulfill their missions with vigor. We need citizens who gleefully seize opportunities to become better versions of themselves. We need to make more great films. We need to build more things of stunning beauty. We need to write more and think more and read more. We need to found more business empires that make things. We need to erect more monuments of awe that stand for generations. We need to create and build. We need to once again unleash the power of the American Dream.

We need America to become America again. A republic of excellence.

How do we bring back a republic of excellence? Share with the community in the comments or in notes.