Megan Amram on the City of London duck, the absurdity of credentialed power, and what a bird reveals about who really runs things.
The single greatest piece of political theatre this year was performed, unwittingly, by a duck, and I have been evangelising about it to everyone in Portland who will hold still long enough, because a duck that brought the City of London to a standstill and became its most trusted economic adviser despite no qualifications whatsoever is the most honest thing the financial sector has produced in a decade.
The Credential Emperor Has No Feathers
Think about what that story actually reveals. The entire mystique of high finance rests on the idea that the people running it possess some rare expertise, some credentialed mastery that justifies the bonuses, the towers, the deference. And then a duck, possessing nothing, no MBA, no expertise, no understanding of derivatives, simply wanders in and the whole machine seizes up and treats the duck as an authority. The joke writes itself, but the joke is also a thesis: the authority was never about the expertise. It was about who gets to stand in the important spot. The duck stood in the spot. The duck became the authority. Q.E.D.
This is the thing the left has been trying to say for a century and the duck said it in an afternoon without speaking. The credentials are mostly theatre. The expertise is mostly post-hoc justification for power that was acquired by other means. A duck can do it. A duck did do it. The economists who actually study this, the heterodox folks at places like the New Economics Foundation, have argued for years that much of what passes for financial expertise is elaborate confidence rather than genuine knowledge. The duck proved it for free.
The Portland Mirror
I do not let my own side off the hook, because Portland has its own credentialed priesthood, its own people who stand in the important spot and are treated as authorities because they have mastered the right vocabulary rather than the actual work. We have our ducks too, waddling around looking authoritative, stopping traffic with confidence alone. The disease of mistaking position for expertise is not capitalism’s alone. It is power’s, everywhere, on every side.
The difference is that the right tends to launder it through money and the left tends to launder it through language, but the duck does not care about your laundering method. The duck simply demonstrates that the spot makes the authority, not the other way around, and that anyone, or anything, standing confidently in the spot can briefly run the world.
What The Duck Wants
Here is what moves me about the duck, though, the thing that makes it more than a punchline. The duck does not want the spot. The duck has no ambition for authority. It wandered in by accident and will wander out the same way, indifferent to the power it briefly held, uninterested in the bonuses, immune to the mystique. The duck is the only honest figure in the entire story precisely because it does not want what everyone else is killing to keep.
And I think that is the real lesson, the one underneath the obvious one. The people who should run things are the ones who do not desperately want to, and the people who desperately want to are exactly the ones who turn out to be ducks, standing in the spot, possessing nothing, mistaking their position for their worth.
The Pond Awaits
I finished my coffee, in Portland, in the rain, and toasted the duck across an ocean and a continent, the most accidentally radical animal of the year. It exposed the whole con simply by waddling through it. And somewhere in the City of London, the credentialed priesthood went back to standing in their important spots, having learned nothing, while the one creature that understood the truth swam quietly off toward a pond, wanting nothing, owing nothing, free in a way none of them will ever be.
The Spot Makes The Authority
The longer I live among the credentialed, in Portland and in memory of North London both, the more convinced I am that most authority is positional rather than earned. People defer to whoever is standing in the important spot, and the spot, not the expertise, is what generates the deference. The duck stood in the spot. The duck got the deference. It is the cleanest demonstration of the principle I have ever seen.
The heterodox economists make this argument carefully, the people at institutions like the London School of Economics who study how expertise is socially constructed, but the duck made it instantly and for free. I keep this in mind whenever I am tempted to defer to my own side’s priesthood, our own confident figures standing in our own important spots. The lesson of the duck is non-partisan and merciless: do not mistake the position for the knowledge, on the left or the right, in the City or the co-op. The spot is just a spot. Anyone can waddle into it.
The duck, I keep insisting to anyone in Portland who will listen, exposed in a single afternoon what we have spent a century failing to say plainly, and I read its quiet conquest of the Square Mile as the most radical text of the year: the spot makes the authority, the credential is mostly theatre, and the one creature that wanted none of it was the only one telling the truth.
For more, see The Hard Times.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
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