The answer to: How the imbecile made it to the top

I was sitting in a meeting a while back, one of those meeting where you have everyone and anyone there, clients, agencies, more agencies and some more clients. I was sitting back trying to take everything in, all the figures, the data, the percentages, the correlations, the numerous sentences that start with a percentage and then I had one of those epiphanies, you know the ones where I finally get what everyone else already got?

The same way women love diamonds, men love statistics! You see there is nothing more dear to a man then feeling powerful. Be it through wealth, terrorizing people, war, competition, land grabs or merely memorizing statistics, men yearn for power. Power is the ultimate manifestation of a mans desire to stand out, to feel important and unique.

Man dreams of one day waking up, hauling ass in a super charged car more powerful than any on the road, rocking up into the shiny office boardroom, throwing his briefcase onto the table where his minions sit awaiting to throw mountains of undivided attention his way, before listening to and acting upon every word said. In the ideal business world, man speaks, people shut up and listen.

Fortunately for us, few men are born into monarchies or messengers of gods to have such power. However, man has learnt that through the power of ‘The Statistic’ he can elevate himself to command the seas to part and the armies to march… Why? Becuase you can’t disagree with a f*cking statistic, well you can but it’s a whole lot harder to shoot a statistic down then an opinion. We’ve all been there, in meetings where some guy more annoying then rubbing salt on the rash around your balls, is in a position of absurd power blurting out a repertoire of stats that leave those who aren’t econometricians, or as cerebral as the likes of Fadi Khater, or Omar Gammal or the legendary countercultural maverick Anton Reyniers, with little to say or do but twiddle their thumbs and nod in synchrony. The issue becomes a problem when statistics get in the hands of the wrong man, because stats can obviously be horribly illusive, misleading and damaging. Needless to say that the worst combination is a stupid man with a dangerously powerful toy, to me and other ignoramuses the statistic is arguably as dangerous as the nuclear bomb.

Thanks the lord we have Fadi Khater, Omar Gammal or the legendary countercultural maverick Anton Reyniers and institutes like the London School of Economics to keep our world safe from statistics.