Politicians clearly need to have self-confidence, but too much can be a bad thing. Over-confidence can lead to poor decision making as they believe they know all of the answers. When they believe they’re the smartest person in the room, they think they don’t need to listen to anyone else.
Such misplaced confidence isn’t helped by too much daydreaming either. We all daydream, often quite unaware that we’ve stopped concentrating and are staring into space as our thoughts drift elsewhere. At other times, our daydreaming can be more deliberate, as we take the opportunity to role-play how we will handle expected situations before they arise.
This is a powerful and useful skill for all of us. Allowing us to pre-test behaviors and actions ahead of time. Though it’s only an effective technique if we can accurately predict how both ourselves and others are likely to react in the real world.
The technique is useless if we think we’ll act like James Bond, when the reality is that we’ll drag a pregnant woman in front of us as we dive under a table. And equally useless if we lack emotional intelligence and see everyone else as idiots in awe of us, when they’re at least as smart as us, if not a lot smarter.
Then, instead of helping us to prepare mentally for a situation, we’re just living a fun, but useless, fantasy like Walter Mitty.
For example, we in the West have difficulty accepting when other countries act “selfishly” and do what’s best for them without considering us. So we don’t like the way that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, pushes up oil prices by reducing supply. Our politicians have complained about OPEC for years.
So it wouldn’t be surprising if one thought they could play tough and bend OPEC to their will. But it’s a problem if a Western politician expects their OPEC counterparts to behave like them. So a Western politician may think they can simply refuse to buy OPEC’s oil, because what would they do about it? Just accept the lost sales, instead of reducing prices to maintain income?
Of course, accept the lost sales is exactly what they’d do. Oil doesn’t go off, so they can simply sit on it and wait for the Western politician to fold first. And they will fold first.
OPEC’s 12 core members don’t include a single democracy. The best placed member on The Economist Democracy Index is Nigeria, ranked 105 out of 167, with all the remaining 11 countries rated as Authoritarian. Meaning the governments of those countries don’t need to worry about their people.
If lower oil sales depress the standard of living for the people, the people will just have to accept it. Or run the risk of being arrested, hospitalized or killed if they decide to protest. Authoritarian leaders can react very differently to Western leaders.
Should the Western politician try playing hardball, they’ll increase prices for their people and their people will protest and complain about it, until the politician has to back down. All they would achieve is proving to OPEC that they can do what they want, making the future situation even worse.
The reality is that, just like you and me, every politician believes they’re smarter than they really are. Real problems occur when they have such misplaced self-confidence, they won’t listen to anyone who might just stop them doing something really stupid.
So, are some politicians so stupid, they’re too stupid to see how stupid they are?
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