- A Government Run By Losers

Suppose you were a high IQ loser. A high IQ doesn't typically correlate with being a loser, but for the sake of argument, let's suppose it's because you failed to mature properly. So your self-absorption and immaturity cause people to distrust your (usually) overly emotional reactions, and people generally find you difficult to deal with in a business setting. So there you are - a too emotional high IQ loser, who tends to take things too personally, is often grating on others, and is so insecure that it can't help getting in the way of your professional relationships.

If you were that person, what kind of career do you think you'd chose? I think sales is pretty much out because the art of selling is really about being able to make people like you, and as an insecure high IQ loser, people generally think you're a pain. Business operations and accounting are probably out too because they are fields which require being meticulous. You don't like being meticulous so you find the whole thing boring, and you're particularly put off by the way others in the field never seem to understand that you are a special case and deserve special treatment when you make a mistake.

In fact, most areas of business require more focus on the tasks at hand than you are usually willing to give them. You can do it as well as anyone, but you simply aren't interested. By your world view the world should bend to what you see as a top priority rather than you having to modify your priorities to adjust to it. So business in general probably isn't a good fit for you career-wise. The same is true of medicine. the law is a little more flexible, but not much. So if business and other similar fields won't work, what else is there?

Well there is really just three areas. The first is the military and while that might work if you're a particularly physical person, they still won't let you have the kind of special treatment you feel you deserve. Then there is the last two - government, and academia. Each offers real strengths as a career choice for someone with your specific mindset.

For instance working in government you get to boss around all those people in the private sector who think they're so much better than you because they can run a business and you can't. If you think they're getting 'uppity' then it's just a matter of coming down hard on them with all the legal tools you possess. Let's see how great they feel while their painting white stripes around the perimeter of their business roof just in case someone goes up there without knowing where the edge is. Let's see them submit waste water for bi-weekly testing of contaminant's for the next 3 years. And if they're still getting out of line, then we can find out how they'd enjoy a full scale investigation of their x___insert possible code violation here___x .

Then there is academia. You can't boss anyone around in the academy (other than your students who don't agree with your philosophy) but it does have other benefits. For instance, there is absolutely no downside to being wrong, only to being conservative. Throw out any wild idea at all and so long as you can make a reasonable argument for it, it's treated with the same weight as demonstrable truth. Nowhere in the world is their less of a downside for error. So if you are creative, but don't want the pressure of having to be correct, academia is the place to be.

You don't have to be a loser to choose one of these career paths, but there is certainly no penalty for choosing them if a loser is what you turn out to be. It's not like working in the private sector where you have to 'right' all the time or watch the company fail. There isn't any of those kinds of pressure. And in recent years, the pay in both government in academia isn't that bad. Decades of political lobbying and the boomer generation which swelled the ranks of government and academia like no other, has assured that the 'all in' compensation is not only equal to the same job in the private sector, it's usually better.

Team Obama is an executive branch which is populated almost exclusively, by people who have never worked in any area except government and academia - the domain of high IQ losers. So when they try to implement a plan to fix the economy it turned out exactly how you would expect it to, given the people who conceived and implemented it. It was a fantastically expensive failure. The money was spent in the worst possible way to achieve anything but political goals, and even those it only minimally met because it garnered so much negative press from it's financial failure. But if you are going to vote for "people who can't" just because they make a good speech and look the way you want them to, then what exactly did you expect?

We have a chance now to elect "people who can". They've proven then can by actually doing things. And if we ever want to be anything except high IQ losers ourselves, we should hire them.