A Shibboleth for Leaders

“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” - Charlie Munger

In the Bible, a shibboleth was a word that two tribes used to distinguish members from one another. One tribe couldn’t pronounce the word correctly so they could be identified and prevented from espionage. I first learned about shibboleths from a short story when I was a kid about robots creating body doubles of humans and infiltrating human civilization. The humans eventually realized that robots wouldn’t give up on a task so asking an unanswerable question like, “What rhymes with orange?” would cause them to self-destruct.

We need a shibboleth for modern times to disqualify leaders. Anyone who thinks that “the ends justify the means,” “don’t let a crisis go to waste,” or “it didn’t work because they didn’t do it the right way” should raise red flags in any electorate.