Failed aptitude can cease to be an accidental selection error and become functionally reproductive for the power structure itself. The qualities that get people into power are not necessarily those required to exercise it; at times, the mismatch is precisely what keeps the machinery running.
The problem is not simply that power attracts the wrong people. That explanation lets the machinery off far too easily. Power helps produce the kind of person it knows how to recognise, rewards them for surviving its tests, and then presents their arrival at the top as evidence that they belong there.
Political systems establish what a viable candidate looks like long before anyone reaches office. Parties, donors, media formats, polling and the internal contest for advancement reward confidence, persistence, simplification, visibility and coalition management. These are real capacities. They establish an aptitude for becoming electable. They do not establish wisdom, restraint, kindness, systemic understanding or the ability to govern consequences that will unfold for generations.
Technology performs the same trick at greater speed and scale. A founder builds a product, attracts capital, captures a market and defeats competitors. This demonstrates an aptitude for expansion. It says almost nothing about whether that person understands how a platform will reorganise childhood, employment, politics, warfare, language or human attention. Market success supplies its own credential. The ability to accumulate power is accepted as proof of fitness to exercise it.
This is failed aptitude: competence within the game that allocates power mistaken for competence in the task for which power is supposedly required. The person need not be stupid. They can be exceptionally clever inside the narrow system that selected them. The failure lies in allowing success within that system to define fitness everywhere else. Failed aptitude is not the absence of ability. It is ability attached to the wrong problem and promoted beyond the conditions under which it worked.
The System Between the Person and the Position
A leader and an institution do not begin as complete, independent objects and then enter into a relationship. Each becomes what it is through relations connecting candidates, parties, boards, investors, advisers, employees, voters, regulators, platforms and publics. What looks like a person occupying a ready-made position is a temporary concentration of relations that began before them and will continue after they are gone.
The relation between leader and institution is a system in its own right. It consists of delegated authority, expectation, loyalty, interpretation, compensation, resistance, delay and consequence. The institution encounters the leader through its procedures, habits and dependencies. The leader encounters the institution through a partial model assembled from advisers, briefings, personal history and belief. These encounters are asymmetrical in both directions. Neither side contains the relation that is producing them both.
Authority can be concentrated in one person while power remains distributed across the ensemble. The deeper pattern is retained in recruitment practices, legal powers, reporting lines, precedents, myths, interfaces, incentives and habitual responses. No single part contains it. It persists as a distributed bias in what the system is prepared to notice, reward and reproduce. In this sense, power is stored as possibility. Some candidates, decisions and futures are made easier to produce than others before anyone consciously chooses them.
The relation therefore precedes its occupants in logic, though not as a secret plan or earlier event. A presidency, ministry or chief executive role already defines differences between leader and follower, authority and opposition, permission and restraint. New occupants enact and alter those differences, but they do not begin from nowhere. Each performance changes the probabilities inherited by whatever follows. Power remembers through recurrence, even when nobody involved understands what is being remembered.
Continuity does not require the same people, language or material arrangement. It requires only that each transformation remain compatible enough with the next to reproduce a recognisable pattern. This is why reform can replace every visible component and leave power looking suspiciously familiar. What persists is not stored at one point. It is preserved across the changes.
When Misfit Becomes Functional
No leader remains perfectly fitted to a changing world. Technologies alter what can be done, institutions accumulate commitments, ecological consequences return after long delays, and public expectations move. Even a capable and conscientious leader remains partial. The qualities that served one situation can become liabilities in the next.
Drawing on Thorstein Veblen, Robert Merton described bureaucratic “trained incapacity”: skills that succeeded under earlier conditions become blind spots when conditions change (Merton, 1940). Bureaucratic discipline becomes rigid formalism. Decisiveness becomes recklessness. Confidence becomes insulation from evidence. Loyalty becomes organised blindness. The trait that carries someone into office can prevent them from adapting once the world has moved.
Misfit is not proof that the whole arrangement has failed. It is ordinary information about a changing relation. A viable institution detects the discrepancy and adjusts. The dangerous system is one whose legitimacy depends on pretending no discrepancy exists. It reads correction as disloyalty, uncertainty as weakness and contrary evidence as threat. Instead of revising its relation to reality, it protects its current performance of competence.
When correction is blocked, the system begins reorganising around the discrepancy rather than correcting it. That protection generates structure. Advisers translate confused instructions. Administrators compensate for bad judgement. Public relations teams manufacture coherence. Loyalists suppress contradiction. Consultants convert failure into programmes. Opponents organise around the leader, media systems amplify the conflict, and careers become attached to explaining, defending or resisting the centre.
A poor leader can generate an astonishing density of organised activity. Every confused instruction creates meetings. Every contradiction requires interpretation. Every failure demands repair, explanation, defence and someone else to blame. Costs spread outwards while attention and dependency gather around the centre. The leader becomes less capable of governing the declared problem while becoming more important to the system built around their incapacity.
Misfit has now become functional. A leader who resolves a crisis can shrink the apparatus built to manage it. One who distributes authority can make the centre less indispensable. One who tolerates contradiction can weaken rituals of loyalty. One who addresses the source of persistent failure can threaten the budgets, identities and careers accumulated around its management. An inadequate leader can keep every one of these relations alive.
The best leader for reproducing a structure of power is not necessarily the best leader for governing the world upon which that structure acts. Under some conditions, the poorer fit produces more allegiance, surveillance, explanation, opposition, emergency authority and resource flow. What fails as government succeeds as reproduction.
No mastermind is required. Across repeated selections, arrangements that regenerate dependency recur more easily than arrangements that remove the need for themselves. Each recurrence leaves legal, institutional and cultural traces that make a similar arrangement easier to produce again. The system does not know what it is doing. Present activity simply reorganises the field from which the future will be selected.
History Is Not Short of Evidence
Political science describes one direct form of this logic as the loyalty-competence trade-off. Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin showed why a vulnerable ruler can prefer loyal but mediocre subordinates: greater competence can also make an adviser more dangerous to an insecure ruler (Egorov and Sonin, 2011). The apparent failure is functional for regime survival and dysfunctional for the task the institution publicly exists to perform.
Ian Kershaw’s account of officials “working towards the Führer” describes another mechanism. Hitler’s authority did not operate only through precise commands descending a hierarchy. Subordinates competed to anticipate and enact what they understood as his intentions, while disordered administration contributed to cumulative radicalisation (Kershaw, 1993). This does not make Hitler passive or dilute responsibility; it shows how authority can organise action beyond explicit command. Incomplete direction from a highly charged centre multiplied activity throughout the system and made that centre still more consequential.
Organisational psychology finds the same separation between appearing capable and being capable. Dominant individuals can acquire influence by causing others to perceive them as more competent, even after actual ability is taken into account (Anderson and Kilduff, 2009). Institutions can then preserve the discrepancy: formal structures confer legitimacy while becoming partly decoupled from practical activity (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Authority, competence, legitimacy and continuity can drift far apart without the arrangement immediately collapsing.
Why This Matters Now
Humanity has entered a period of vast and unrelenting climatic, technological, sociopolitical and cognitive change. These are not separate crises politely waiting their turn. Climate disruption reorganises food, insurance, migration, infrastructure, security and political legitimacy. Technology reorganises work, warfare, knowledge, communication and attention. Changes in collective attention alter what societies can perceive, remember and coordinate around. Each process changes the conditions under which every other process unfolds.
The IPCC describes climate risks interacting with non-climatic risks to produce compound and cascading consequences (IPCC, 2023). Research by Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and colleagues found increasingly steep rises and shorter periods of collective attention across several cultural and informational domains, linking the acceleration partly to growing information flows competing for finite attention (Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2019). Hans Jonas identified the deeper problem decades ago: technological power had extended the reach of human action beyond the proximate conditions around which traditional responsibility developed (Jonas, 1984).
Our systems for selecting authority have not caught up. Political careers are still built through electoral cycles, media performance, party discipline and the compression of difficult problems into repeatable signals. Corporate authority is validated through growth, valuation, market capture and investor confidence. These systems reward fast, visible success while many consequences return slowly, indirectly and through domains excluded from the original decision.
We are placing planetary capacities in the hands of people selected through non-planetary tests.
A platform decision can alter the informational environment of several societies. A financial decision can reorganise infrastructure and energy use for decades. A military error can propagate through automated and nuclear systems. Climate decisions accumulate across generations. The scale of the consequences has changed while the tests for authority remain embarrassingly small.
The danger is not simple collapse. It is that our systems continue reproducing themselves while the world supporting them becomes less viable. An institution can grow busier and more indispensable as it becomes less capable of serving the reality that justifies its existence. A civilisation can become exceptionally good at processing the consequences of its failures while remaining unable to alter the relations producing them.
Persistence is not competence. Continuity is not viability. A power system can preserve itself while consuming the human and ecological conditions upon which every future exercise of power depends. Cancer manages recurrence quite efficiently.
A Rational Basis for Hope
The answer is not to find a flawless ruler. There are none, and the search usually ends badly. Misfit cannot be abolished because people, institutions and circumstances continue changing one another. The practical task is to stop misfit becoming invisible, immovable and useful to the structure surrounding it.
A good leader is not someone who is never wrong. A good leader allows the wider system to discover that they are wrong. They preserve independent judgement, expose decisions to evidence, protect disagreement and allow authority to move towards the people who possess relevant knowledge. Their strength lies partly in refusing to make institutional continuity depend upon the performance of their own infallibility.
Research on high-reliability organisations describes sustained attention to failure, sensitivity to operating conditions, resilience and deference to expertise rather than rank (Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld, 1999). Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric governance examines systems with multiple formally independent centres of decision-making that can learn and adapt across complex problems and scales (Ostrom, 2010). Neither approach eliminates error. Both prevent one local account from becoming the unquestionable description of the whole.
The institutional consequences are concrete. Selection for office must be separated from continuing evidence of fitness. High-impact decisions should remain contestable and, wherever possible, reversible. Independent sources of knowledge require protection from the authorities they evaluate. Whistleblowing and dissent must be treated as regulatory functions rather than personal betrayal. Consequences must be traced across longer periods and beyond the administrative boundaries that make them convenient to ignore. Authority must be distributed widely enough for correction to occur without requiring the collapse of the entire system.
Misfit is the signal through which a changing world becomes legible. Suppressing it does not preserve coherence. It preserves one arrangement by exporting its contradictions into other people, other systems and the future.
The same relational depth that stores failed patterns can store correction. Every successful challenge, revised procedure, protected dissenter, redistributed authority and publicly acknowledged mistake changes what the system is prepared to recognise next time. New precedents alter expectations. New expectations alter selection. Repeated correction becomes institutional memory, and a different future becomes easier to produce.
This is a limited but rational hope. Humanity does not need leaders capable of containing the whole. No person can do that. It needs systems capable of remaining answerable to relations no person can fully contain. The future will not be secured by people who never fail. It depends on whether failure remains available to correction before the surrounding system converts it into identity, dependency and continuity.
We cannot eliminate misfit. We can stop mistaking ascent for aptitude, persistence for success and power for proof that its occupant deserves to possess it.
References
Anderson, C. and Kilduff, G.J. (2009) ‘Why do dominant personalities attain influence in face-to-face groups? The competence-signaling effects of trait dominance’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(2), pp. 491–503.
Egorov, G. and Sonin, K. (2011) ‘Dictators and their viziers: Endogenizing the loyalty-competence trade-off’, Journal of the European Economic Association, 9(5), pp. 903–930.
IPCC (2023) Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Jonas, H. (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kershaw, I. (1993) ‘Working towards the Führer: Reflections on the nature of the Hitler dictatorship’, Contemporary European History, 2(2), pp. 103–118.
Lorenz-Spreen, P., Mønsted, B.M., Hövel, P. and Lehmann, S. (2019) ‘Accelerating dynamics of collective attention’, Nature Communications, 10, 1759.
Merton, R.K. (1940) ‘Bureaucratic structure and personality’, Social Forces, 18(4), pp. 560–568.
Meyer, J.W. and Rowan, B. (1977) ‘Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony’, American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), pp. 340–363.
Ostrom, E. (2010) ‘Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change’, Global Environmental Change, 20(4), pp. 550–557.
Weick, K.E., Sutcliffe, K.M. and Obstfeld, D. (1999) ‘Organizing for high reliability: Processes of collective mindfulness’, in Sutton, R.I. and Staw, B.M. (eds) Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. 21. Stamford, CT: JAI Press, pp. 81–123.
