Look around you: you'll see we are in the age of the imbecile

The Herald Scotland

22-04-2025

Returning briefly to the challenges and imperfections he earlier alluded to, the 44th President of the United States paid particular attention to the hypocrisies that exist at a political level without ever identifying any of them specifically. But in doing so he demonstrated a hyper self-awareness of how some decisions were capable of being viewed whilst simultaneously showing us that despite this, conscious decisions were being made which defied any logical explanation, or objective scrutiny.
Read more by Calum Steele
I have thought about those words often over the years and especially when looking at political decision-making closer to home. Cracking down on benefit claimants while writing off billions in Covid fraud – hypocrites. Tacking child poverty but introducing a two-child cap on the old Family Allowance – hypocrites. Promising to cut energy bills while the costs continue to spiral – hypocrites, decrying the slaughter of innocents in one war whilst remaining silent on another, and well, you get the picture.
It was inevitable I suppose that the relentless drive for human advancement would stall eventually, that as a species we had achieved all that was going to be possible and the pendulum would start to swing back the other way. It is eminently arguable that 2017 when Obama addressed his audience in Edinburgh was the very pinnacle of human achievement. If you look at the events in the years since you'd be hard pushed not to conclude that whilst we are still firmly in the age of the hypocrite we are simultaneously embracing a new and more dangerous phase in the modern era of man – that of the imbecile.
Imbeciles are not new. They have lived amongst us since the beginning of time and have been largely simple creatures who mean us no harm and cause us little angst. They have occasionally popped up in positions of historic significance as Caligula and his horse show, but by and large they have been inconsequential beings, more to be pitied than admired.
And yet, despite the historic wisdom of humouring rather than entertaining such folk, our nation is suddenly awash with imbeciles in positions of power and influence whose decisions now have a disproportionate influence on our daily lives.
I could just point at Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and claim QED but that would let those who put them there off the hook. From driving a Brexit campaign that hammered our national interests, through to crashing the economy, we are all paying the price for their disastrous stints behind the door of No10, and will be for decades to come.
But for as much as the case against Johnson, Truss, and their enablers is a slam dunk, we have no shortage of qualifying candidates on our own shores too. I mean who could ever imagine that in a nation substantially surrounded by sea anyone would seriously have contemplated banning fishing in our waters? Or that a country as cold and wet as ours would ever entertain the outlawing of actual fire to keep us warm? There's so much more of course and that's without talking of cutting the bottom off school doors, attempts to silence criticism and ridicule by criminalising words, or the dogged refusal to sex rapist Adam Graham as a man lest it bring down a house of cards.
Liz Truss and Boris Johnson (Image: PA) And inevitably it is the collapse of that house of cards that now exposes the endemic layers of imbecility that courses through almost all of our public institutions, and just as alarmingly amongst many opinion formers and shapers, and even some of those who claim to be legally qualified. Imbeciles in parliament are far from new but I must confess to having missed the memo that mandated increasing their quotient or giving them air time for anything other than scorn and ridicule.
The sudden pretence we needed the Supreme Court to tell our police, hospitals, schools, councils, charities what we all instinctively know to be true really is pitiful. It takes imbecilic levels of mental gymnastics to convince yourself that allowing male-bodied individuals into rape crisis centres wouldn't be problematic, or that populating gynae wards with folk seeking prostate exams was a splendid idea. So too the hypothesis that sex at birth is determined by a coin toss rather than looking at what's between your legs, the expectation that victims of sex attacks refer to their male assailants as she when in the dock, or contemplating for a nano-second that recording the sex of rapists as anything other than male was going to pass unnoticed. And all of that is before you get to toilets and changing rooms!
The famous Russian journalist Fyodor Dostoevsky may be nearly 150 years dead but he could easily have been describing modern Scotland when he wrote tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend imbeciles.
Almost without exception every public institution and their not-insignificant oversight bodies failed. They didn't fail by accident – they took leave of their senses and conspired to do so. Every chief, chief executive, and leadership team failed. Every CEO, chair, and board member failed and they all did so at the most basic level possible.
Let's stop for a minute and remember our public services are under the most phenomenal of pressures and face constant calls to reform. What possible confidence can any of us have that any of them are up to the complex jobs in front of them when they got something as simple as this so spectacularly wrong?
Calum Steele is a former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, and former general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations. He remains an advisor to both