Let's hear it for human incompetence; a huzzah for those humiliating limits that cap our very best efforts; the Thanksgiving turkey, burnt; the dropped phone; the blank page that refuses to spontaneously produce a good idea. Let's give thanks for those business ventures born of enthusiasm, long since fizzled out, whose social media pages (with four to sixteen followers) still haunt us. And let’s give glory to God for the car we thought we could fix up; for the nickname we earned in high-school and will never, ever live down; for our inescapable inability to Get It Right. Enjoying the thick dish of human incompetence, anticipating hearty seconds and thirds, we rebut one of the principal evils of American society: the spiritual incapacity to admit that we are not gods.
This denial (present in every outraged reaction to getting called out) achieves an exquisite form in the self-congratulatory culture of start-ups and entrepreneurship. Here, all success (defined, loosely, as making more rather than less money) is attributed to the powers of individual effort; to ingenuity, teamwork, and creative decision-making. The tech-bro, the venture-capitalist, and the financial guru (that is, the West Coast, broadly speaking) mate Disney’s believe-in-yourself mantras with early-capitalist rags-to-riches fantasies to produce a language of supreme competence (one in which normal words are replaced with words like “hack” and “strategize”).
In fact, the success of these Californian gods comes from the loans they managed to score from their dads, banks impressed by their down-payments, or “venture capitalists” who wear t-shirts under their suit jackets. There really is no need to pretend that the power of the human spirit was the real “force” that ushered in whatever smartphone app currently accrues their cash. People don’t build companies through some mystical, entrepreneurial know-how. They do it by having money (or “access to capital,” as people who live in Seattle would say).
The greatest evidence of this? The unholy heaps of money spent on learning how to make unholy heaps of money; the scam expressed by the bad joke: “Give me $1,000 and I'll teach you how to get rich.” The Get Rich market, in which those with financial know-how purport to give the secret of wealth to lower and middle-class know-nothings, is the fruit of the belief that financial success, like math, is reducible to principles that anyone can put into action: Want to be the next Jeff Bezos? Just believe in your team; take risks; have fun along the way; keep an eye on expanding markets; buy cheap and sell dear (and have access to your parents' personal savings to make any of these tactics even remotely effective).
The wild success of this grift is the surest sign that it isn’t true. If hard work, creativity and human competence produced “financial success,” then the sheer volume of preaching to this effect should have already produced a nation of millionaires. Why are fewer and fewer getting rich at the same rate as more and more are hearing the good news that anyone can get rich? The net effect of a hundred years of get-rich literature, from prosperity pamphlets to TED talks, has been wealth inequality like the world has never seen. The only real fruit that blossoms from disseminating the secrets of the wealthy to the everyday Pittsburgher has been to initiate him into a ritual of self-flagellation by which he is obliged to disavow the blind luck, large inheritances, and injustices that actually produce profit, and blame his own incompetence instead: “It’s my fault, really. I just don’t know how to recognize an opportunity; I don’t have hustle; grit escapes me; I said ‘yinz’ on that conference call; my deliverables didn’t sparkle; my dreams have not yet been broken down into their constituent, achievable goals; I didn’t invest 10% of my income when I was seven years old.”
The Scriptures, for their part, take a bleak view of human competence. For a man to become rich is a brief, passing illusion, usually facilitated by injustice: “A rich man will exploit you if you can be of use to him” (Sirach 13:4). Where success is extolled it is as a blessing from God and not as the product of human ingenuity: “The success of a man is in the hands of the Lord” (Sirach 10:5). The get-rich-quick scheme that God proposes would hardly make the bestseller list: “Do not wonder at the works of a sinner, but trust in the Lord and keep at your toil; for it is easy in the sight of the Lord to enrich a poor man quickly and suddenly" (Sirach 11:21). Imagining ourselves as edgy entrepreneurs who can beat the system by creativity and hard work just isn’t the biblical mood: “How can he who is dust and ashes be proud? For even in life his bowels decay” (Sirach 10:9). The Jewish people are uniquely ordained to praise human incompetence and destroy the lie that besets all paganism: that men can be like gods. Within the Scriptures, human incompetence is not simply admitted, it is mandated as a way of life and inscribed in the very law of God.
A quick way to see this is in the prescribed incompetence of the Jewish king. Human kings attain their splendor by being able to successfully operate armies, to amass property, money, and progeny, and to maintain a culture that believes the king to be something higher than his subjects. All of this is banned in the book of Deuteronomy, where the only king that God will have for his own is an incompetent one: “He must not multiply horses for himself...and he shall not multiply wives for himself...nor shall he greatly multiply silver and gold...he may learn to fear the Lord his God, by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them; that his heart may not be lifted up above his brethren…” (Deuteronomy 17:14-18).
As with the king, so with real estate. In our nation, a man is savvy if he invests in land and acquires property. The book of Leviticus demands that the Jews practice a structurally incompetent form of real estate in which the land is distributed by God and can never be sold in perpetuity. Every fifty years, no matter how many fields, barns or forests one’s entrepreneurial hands managed to scrape together, all productive property was to be returned to its original, familial owners. The Jubilee Year, that greatest of all resets, is a festival of ordained human incompetence; the sound of its trumpet is a dirge to all those who would posture as something above their brethren; who would enjoy the “lord” in “landlord.”
In our nation, success is made by sleeplessness. We are to “rise and grind” if we are to get ahead. In God’s nation, sleeplessness is a curse for idolaters (Wisdom 17). The Sabbatical year, like the Sabbath day, is a divine limit on the aspirations of all hard work and bootstrap-pulling: “[T]here shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard” (Leviticus 25:3). In our nation, competence is expressed by meticulousness and careful calculation. If you want to succeed, you must make an accurate list of your assets and liabilities. You must plan your next move. You keep track of every dollar. In God’s nation, such competence is close to craftiness. God demands a little more slovenliness from his holy people: Farmers were not to pick their crops so carefully that they left none behind (Leviticus 19:9); rulers were not to know exactly how many people they ruled (2 Samuel 24); armies were denied the latest and greatest military technology of the horse and chariot; they were likewise prevented from including too many soldiers, lest Israel imagine that it was human competence and not divine help that wins the battlefield (Deuteronomy 20).
Divinely planned incompetence, by which the human person remains “little less than a god” (Psalm 8), is the genius and glory of Israel, and so it is little wonder that, under the law, the effects of incompetence were to be forgiven, effects we call “debt.” Debt, of course, is the status of every human being who is born into this world utterly unable to pay her family back for their “services rendered.” This primal incompetence is reiterated on a microcosmic level every time we cannot pay someone back in some smaller matter. In America, this liturgical reliving of our existential incompetence is viewed with abhorrence and delight: abhorrence on the part of the debtor, delight upon the part of the creditor, who can profit off of debt by charging interest on his loan. The idolatrous denial of human incompetence is what fuels our debt-economy: so long as we are ashamed to be revealed as incompetent, we make interest payments; so long as our inability to actually afford this or that good must be denied, we willingly take on more debt; so long as we believe “we can do anything we put our minds to,” we are politically incapable of enacting debt forgiveness (which would admit that we cannot); so long as the creditor works on the profit motive, seeking to maximize his entrepreneurial spirit and extracting all possible profit from the opportunity that debt presents, he will never, ever enter into the state of incompetence which would limit his aspirations. Not so for the nation of Israel, who were to “take no interest or increase, but fear your God; that your brother may live beside you” (Leviticus 25:35).
America needs its Jubliee. But until we learn to love incompetence like the God of Israel, we won’t get it. Hail, hail, human incompetence, then, which always screws up — and which always needs the help of God.