Zman had a piece the other day on saving face/oriental managerialism:
This idea of face saving is not entirely alien to the West, but it is not a natural thing the way we see it practiced by our elites. Western societies are moral societies, held together as much by a set of agreed upon codes, passed down from one generation to the next. Publicly shaming someone for his failure to live up to the prevailing moral code is part of reinforcing that code. Letting someone save face undermines this so it is not natural in Western societies. We punish the sinner.
This oriental idea of face saving is behind the phenomenon of failing up which has come to define the modern managerial class. Someone like Victoria Nuland, for example, has been a failure at every stop in her career, but at every stop she has been allowed to save face and move to some new position. You can be sure she will assume a spot at a think tank or university. If Trump wins in November, she will get a media gig to criticize his handling of Russia.
Zman
This woman has been a menace her whole career.
The norm for Western society, with regards to someone like Nuland, is she would have been flushed out of the system as a warning to others. Go back far enough and she may have been killed or exiled. Maybe after she had demonstrated enough contrition she would be rehabilitated to a limited degree. That would include publicly admitting to and accepting that she was a failure. This is now alien to the managerial elite, even though it remains the norm with the Dirt People.
Zman
Victor Davis Hanson goes into this from time to time. These people never suffer consequences for their actions and failures. Part of the problem here is that these Nuland types have never had a job outside of the gubermint. Biden, of course, is the king of this, probably followed by Obama.
But it’s not just government types. Anyone that works for a large, sclerotic corporation has seen this as well. I had a friend that worked for Alcatel when they bought Lucent. A few months later, we were chatting and he said I wouldn’t be able to believe the people they put in charge. “They’ve had billion dollar failures and they just give them more to do”.
Oh yeah I would. I had seen it firsthand. And this was before DEI, or at least at the very beginning of it.
Things won’t change until these people are frog-marched to prison or jailed.
Inspected By Pat 