Power's Priorities: Loyalty Over Intellect?

Look at how societies are built and the picture is surprisingly simple. Small but tight-knit “factions” of power steer large numbers of scattered, unconnected people. What makes these factions work is their unity: they all look in one direction, and they’re bound to one another by loyalty and devotion — in the best sense of those words.

For a long time I was a believer in meritocracy — the idea that the key seats should go to the people with the highest level of knowledge and skill. But experience talked me out of it. Loyalty, devotion and cohesion often turn out to matter more. And the roles that demand real intellectual horsepower or narrow expertise can usually be handed off — to deputies, to assistants, or simply outsourced.

This may sound crude, but ten cohesive idiots will always beat ten scattered geniuses, and they won’t leave them a sliver of a chance. The force of working together toward one goal outweighs the most brilliant individual gifts — at least when the point is to actually get a shared result.

The principle holds at every scale. Take the great machines of governance — states, corporations, big business. We watch it happen constantly, and it becomes a topic of public discussion and… condemnation: how the key positions go to people who seem far from the most talented, but who are proven and devoted. Instead of Kolya the workaholic, they appoint loyal Vasya.

And when someone declares that such structures — states, corporations — are inefficient, I want to ask: “Inefficient for whom?” The answer can look very different to the beneficiaries of these systems than it does to the people far from the chains of decision-making. The efficiency of these constructions has been stress-tested across centuries, and the world still hasn’t come up with anything to replace them. And if they work, and work well, while neglecting meritocratic principles in favour of loyalty — maybe it’s worth pausing and pulling a lesson out of that.

Of course, no situation is purely black and white, and every rule has its exceptions (which holds for all the hypotheses we’re tossing around here).

But would you hand a matter your own position depends on to a person of, say, outstanding intelligence — yet unpredictable? Someone who could walk over to a competitor at any moment, and maybe also hand over your trade secrets for a reasonable fee?

Personally, I’ve always held to a principle: once a situation tips into unavoidable confrontation, it’s better to pick a side and possibly lose than to try to stand with both at once — which means standing with no one. Some win today, others win tomorrow, but every victor remembers who was beside them on the hard days.

So how do we apply the “Genius of AND”^[1] here? Exactly — it’s worth striving to have people around us who are both loyal AND maximally competent. That’s how the “factions” we all belong to, one way or another, can climb to ever higher rungs of the global hierarchy.

Here’s to loyal and devoted friends, partners and colleagues! 😎

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1. See the article “On Being Forced to Choose, and a Life Without ‘Or’.” ↩︎