@agtra
Exactly. The whole saying of "sometimes truth is stranger than fiction" exists for a reason, there is plenty of actual real history that, if one read about it in a book labeled "fiction" would be universally considered unrealistic/unbelievable. But that's humanity for you. Sometimes people really are that dumb, and throughout history to the present leadership often isn't meritocratic. They can as easily succumb to motivated reasoning and other fallacies as the rest of us, or sometimes even
more easily precisely because they don't have anyone to counter-say them and the way they climbed to power itself blinds them to flaws.
I mean, don't have to look at much of history even and worry about historical account bias, we've got the present. Modern corporations are essentially the monarchies/constitutional monarchies of the first world (for good reason fwiw). While generally stripped of coercive power and kept on leashes, a lot of the power dynamics are similar. And if you look at huge corporate screw ups, by CEOs paid tens to hundreds of millions, often the really crazy thing is how dumb they are. Like, everyone with even a bit of skill, institutional knowledge and history could see it coming, that the wheels would inevitably come right off a few years down the line, but leadership did it anyway. And then the wheels came right off a few years down the line. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯