Why does mediocrity thrive? A delectable writer asked. I thought the answers were self-evident. However, if it is not, here are some details to help us all. And it is simple.
Mediocrity thrives because it has the numbers, the bigger numbers. All life is contention, dualist, dialectical. In one instance, it is quantity against quality, in another, it is the male and feminine in their game of wits, and yet in another, it’s numbers in play against genius. One may recall that the Chinese built a whole philosophy out of this duality – Daoism. And to the best of our knowledge, nobody has contradicted them. Life is a dualist gambol.
If we now returned to mediocrity, one thing is certain. It is that numbers are not entirely useless. Numbers count. In fact, on counting as procedure in itself, we are all condemned to depend on numbers. That is, numbers are the very framework we count with. And, most times, life is nothing other than a numbers game, or perhaps even a numbers racket. 
In fact, were it not for numbers, mathematics, the queen of the sciences, would not have amounted to much. In other words, we are as mathematical, as scientific, and thus as developed as the numbers we play with.
Numbers or mathematics explain why out there in life mediocrity is a greater force than genius. Simply put, mediocrities have the numbers; they alone command the majoritarian votes, rule the parliaments, even purpose to rule the waves, if the devil will let them.
At this juncture, one can say the matter is simple, is numerical. It is that every man votes for his kind. And that is all what democracy, what representative governance, comes to. So, by lore, only mediocrity may rule. This follows the singular logic that representative rule, that is democracy, demands we vote for our kind. Anyway, have you ever seen any genius in power?
Geniuses? Geniuses are at best lone wolves, they can’t club together. They don’t even have the numbers to so do. So, they are bound to lose out, one after the other, each without alliance partners. “All victory,” Mother A’Endu says, rightly even if not righteously, “is in alliances. Every unallied general is no greater than a weak and tepid recruit.”
But the genius of mediocrity, no puns intended, is in the herd, in their overwhelming and indestructible herd of numbers, and even numbness. In other words, in the end: Mediocrity counting on numbers alone must rule the rest of us, not excluding pure geniuses. Thus, if you are a genius, the smart bet may be on you self-willingly submitting to being ruled by mediocrity. If you want to rule, the smart choice is to stall further self-development and remain a mediocrity. That’s a “mathematical”axiom, you may erect your universe on it.
That’s all we have to say for now, till in your genius you become humble enough to be ruled by mediocrity. That humility is reverential of God. God’s gambit is in creating many of them, the mediocrities, like He did the beetles. Or will you now fight God or kill off the many species of beetles? Will you?
Lest we forget, hope you do remember Fatai Rolling Dollars? He put things even more musically: Ekere si number wa/we pass them by numbers. This is the iron lore to winning in the great game that is life. All else is in humour. Note Bene:https://punchng.com/why-does-mediocrity-thrive-2/
Is the Nigerian genius a singular?
Too often one reads or hears members of the Nigerian intellectual and artistic glitterati speculate that Nigeria is not developed because her best and brightest are not ruling. In plain talk, that is, the geniuses are not the ones in power. To them, the rest of the world, the developed world, from China to Singapore, where ostensibly the best and brightest rule, are proofs of their thesis. Of course, by best and brightest, by geniuses, these power punters and speculators mean themselves. Well, they might just be geniuses, but is their thesis right?
Anyway, the facts point that there is nowhere in time, space or history that the best and brightest, the geniuses, actually ruled. The reality of this is not even conceptually imaginable. Let us illustrate with a graphic, if not dramatic, exposition of the implausibility, of the best and brightest ruling.
Great Britain is perhaps the lead founder of the modern democratic order. Their invention of constitutional monarchism is perhaps the greatest leap ever taken towards the electoral equality of man, at least, the white man. Little else compels democracy than the equality of men and officially circumscribed powers.
For a long time, it so happened that in Britain they had a certain exam. It is called Tripos. The exam is to determine the most intelligent graduand [in mathematics] in Britain in any one year. Mathematics, by the way, is the mother of all sciences, of all knowing. So, a mathematical prodigy is the closest you can get to an all-knowing man. Or at least, the man who is as deeply informed as perhaps the gods themselves.
Now, whoever wins out finally in the Tripos is styled a Wrangler. So, Wranglers are men who took the national math trophy for a given year. So, as brains go, the Wranglers are it.
Perhaps, you are beginning to suspect the historical scandal? No Wrangler ever made it to becoming the Prime Minister of Great Britain. We can’t recall if any Wrangler put himself up to be so elected. However, one thing is clear, none was for his brains invited to enter the politics of his era.
So what happened? The cleverer and more plausible answer is that these Wranglers went about the most important things and duties of life. These are duties and briefs that are of finer and of greater purchase than wallowing in politics, including becoming Her Majesty’s prime ministers.
One recent Wrangler example comes to mind. Ronald Fisher, for such was his name, went on to lay the foundations of modern statistics. As is apparent, no prime minister comes close to him in influence and good works. His work permeates all life as you know it, from health to wealth creation and maintenance, from agriculture to ballistics. And his successors, including Andrey Komorogov, for instance, are some of the glories of mathematical science. Komorogov, Russian, was one of the big names that ensured Soviet dominance and power in science and, thus, politics. Yet, Fisher, or any other Wrangler, never made it as Prime Minister.
This Fisher-Tripos-Wrangler example in Britain is what happens in any other country despite optical illusions. The best and brightest, the geniuses, are into the manning of the greatest productive plants in the universe – brain powers. They don’t soil their hands begging for votes or being thugs for power. Why rule a nation, when you can create whole new imagine-nations? Is that not the moral equivalent of God descending from paradise to run the earth, with politicians?
Additionally, there is what economists call the law of comparative advantage, we are told. It just doesn’t make sense that the best and brightest should sweat the common stuff, like being leaders, crooks or politicians. This is for the simple fact that only they have the gifts to forge new imagine-nations. In other words, it serves them and humanity best that the common, all too common, peoples do details work, like politics, soldiery, being patriotic, being fools, while they monopolise the franchise of being the best and the brightest.
Thus, by the law of comparative advantage, it pays genius best and his society most if he self-restrained himself from joining issues with mediocrities on the matter of ruling nations. As Mother A’Endu will say, “of nations, let the mediocrities rule. Of imagine-nations, let the geniuses create.”
Mediocrities are called to rule nations by the justice of their overwhelming kind and numbers. The best and brightest are called to create imagine-nations. This is by the logic of their being the elect, the priesthood, and not goyim, the efulefus, fools, politicians, soldiers, carpenters, police, writers, journalists, etc, of the world.
Mediocrity thrives because, despite denials, man is decidedly a tribal beast. Man lives by his kind. A sense of solidarity for his kind is his common, all too common, standard. Thus, mediocrities prefer to hang together, even in hell, than be led to paradise by another genius, say, the best and brightest, the ‘’Levites’’ or Ndi-Agwunedus.