Hillary Clinton, so we are told, kept a spreadsheet devoted to her enemies, whom she rated on a scale of her own devising.
[...]
I suppose that keeping your hatreds warm, never forgetting them, and fanning their embers when they threaten to go cold is one way to succeed in life—perhaps the way if you are an ambitious person of no particular talents or gifts for anything but intrigue and bureaucratic infighting.
This is not to say that talented persons never bear grudges or never hate, but their ascent is not attributable solely or even in part to acting upon their grievances or resentments, and they would have succeeded in life even if they had been more sweetly disposed to their fellow beings. Nor do I mean, of course, that untalented people are intrinsically prone to hatred: That, too, would be a logical mistake.
No, the deadly combination is lack of talent and ambition, especially when allied to average intelligence and above. Just as talent has little connection to character, it also has little connection to intelligence, beyond the basic cognitive abilities necessary for the talent to flourish.
[...]
The mediocre triumph because, having little or nothing else to do, they can devote themselves to intrigue, backstabbing, and jockeying for power. In my own little career, I have often seen the genuinely gifted and morally upright pushed aside or thwarted by schemers and apparatchiks who viewed their betters with a mixture of fear and hatred. An apparatchik may be defined as a person who doesn’t mind how long a meeting goes on unless he has another meeting to attend. He is interested in power for its own sake, divorced from purpose though he claims to want it for the good of humanity, but has very sensitive antennae for the power of others. When that power is strong, he retreats; when it shows a weakness, he pounces. Apparatchiks, like the Clintons, never forget; their minds are like filing cabinets.
There are Mrs. Clintons now in all organizations, each according to his or her level. Some dictate the fate of nations and others decide on the most trivial of local matters, but their manner of proceeding is identical. Why, almost everywhere you look, should such mediocrity triumph?
