Expertise Blindness
Leland Dennick’s Open Mic essay (“Conscious Confusion,” Sept. 6) brought to mind a concept that may or may not have been introduced decades ago by the writing partner of corporate guru and Ivy Leaguer Tom Peters, Stanford business school lecturer Robert Waterman. The two wrote In Search of Excellence to spread the word on what they thought the best companies were doing to stay on top of their respective industries. They sold a lot of books.
The idea Waterman presented, if memory serves, was “expertise blindness,” which happens to someone who thinks he’s so smart that he ignores anything contrary to his own observations, even when he’s plainly out of touch. The Buddhists call it believing your own bullshit. There is a lot of that going around.
Craig J. Corsini
San Rafael
Spirit of the Law
Let’s talk about the “insurrection clause” of the Constitution. Lawyers and judges can argue “the letter of the law” until blue in the face as to whether this provision disqualifies Donald Trump from holding office again.
But how about “the spirit of the law”? The spirit of the law looks at what the law is really trying to get at. Do you think our highly moral Founding Fathers would qualify Trump for a second term of office, even if they had no idea about the outcome of his four criminal trials?
In other words, if they only knew what we know today? Various newspaper watchdogs and fact checkers cataloged over 30,000 distortions, exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies over the course of his four-year administration. Does Trump meet even the minimum standard expected for the lowest position of political leadership in America, let alone the highest? You tell me.
Kimball Shinkoskey
Santa Rosa
