Once upon a time you didn’t need to know how everything worked. You could trust that the people who did - the engineers, the doctors, the civil servants, the politicians even - knew what they were doing. You didn’t have to understand the money system or climate models or geo-politics. You just had to believe that somewhere, someone competent was in charge.
But that confidence has gone, I don’t think there is any single reason for it; the world has grown too complex to grasp, the volume of available information and opinion is incomprehensible and the people in charge no longer seem to understand it either (or, the darker side of this is that some ‘experts’ deliberately deceive). Everything feels fragile: economies, elections, even the weather. We’re told to trust “the science” or “the market,” but neither are things we can easily see or test for ourselves. The language of authority has become easy to fake.
So what’s left? We decide what to believe based on whether it feels right, whether it fits our tribe, whether the person saying it looks like someone we trust. The world has become vibes-based. In some senses this was always true, the markets have always run on vibes, the confidence given to a stock or the price we’ll pay for a particular designer brand, but now it’s everywhere. A politician’s clip on TikTok now matters more than their policy. A journalist’s “energy” outweighs their evidence. Even truth itself has become subjective.
The result is paralysing. We all know that things are going wrong, but we don’t know enough to explain why - we’re told one thing and we see something completely opposite in reality. We have access to more information than any time in history, and somehow we understand less.
Perhaps this is at the core of the crisis of competence: not just that the people in charge don’t seem to know what they’re doing, they’re just like us. We don’t know what we’re doing either and we can’t tell the difference anymore. Or maybe we never could. All the world really is a stage.
There’s still competence out there, but it’s got lost amongst the performance, we need to find a way to get that back in our lives because we can’t live on vibes alone.