The concepts of evil and incompetence are both ways to compress linguistically what are probably both sprawling branches of the same complex social phenomena, that is if we are talking about the role of ruling elites in a complex industrial society.
The elites are a class, or a gradient of interlocking classes with differentials of disposable power, which support each other and share the same interests, and within that combined class are certainly individuals with a chillingly impoverished moral code and an equally chilling competence to put that impoverishment to work, and then individuals who may mean well but who are stunningly hapless and bumbling, and who were bequeathed with far too much power without justification, and then everything in between.
We could talk about the corrupting effects of unearned and inherited power, in which individuals are born with silver spoon in mouth, and who go through life commanding and expecting those commands to follow through, and who never learn to put anything in motion themselves, and then those ambitious ones who in their desire to mimic the master, climb their way up the ranks with deft skills. Or say those individuals who inherit various skills passed down in families or who are taken under the wing of powerful individuals and who are quite talented and capable despite being given the leg up. And so on.
And there is the matter of making use of evil to navigate social systems and mechanisms in tatters after decades of mismanagement and misuse, and then a basic incompetence and failure of care and attention that arises in a climate of spiritual desolation after the systematic exercising of evil in collective affairs, and then these forces beget each other and reproduce each other.
There is also the movement of energy to take stock of. If we conceptualize evil as a sort of process of selfish, harmful, and morally reprehensible living, which necessarily takes place amidst a backdrop of social disintegration, we may very well be seeing an incredible competence concentrated in selfish and antisocial elite actions, a narrow competence which nevertheless sucks the oxygen out of the room, living little time or energy left for maintaining everything else, which manifests and is perceived as incompetence, and yes it all gets very complicated very fast.
What we do see is that evil and incompetent governance may persist outwards, so long as there are estranged, alienated, and dehumanized foreign populations to exploit, whether abroad or domestically, but then these circles of destruction necessarily proceed inwards as the resources in the periphery are depleted or become too unstable, or release forces of destruction larger or more penetrating than can be kept away and insulated from the imperial core. And such a mode of governance, welded into place as a matter of course, cannot easily be reversed.
In other words, the series of political and economic shocks which have been spraying forth in the COVID era are less about the absolute reprehensibility of elite conduct. They've been behaving this way for a long time. The real shock consists in their willingness to saw away at their own bases, their own foundations, as the cycles of destruction reach home in the imperial core.
There have been people disappearing in vans and scurrying under the leering eyes of aerial drones for quite some time. It's just been happening under peripheral dictators, and out far away in the deserts of the Middle East and the borderlands. And there have been all sorts of security portfolios and surveilling profiles on disliked members of the social order. Activists are the latest subgroup in a procession of targets, labeled and coded in terms that were the products of political labor to achieve public acquiescence, such as "terrorist," "criminal," "thug," "gangmember," etc.
Pharmaceutical businesses have been profiting off of abject misery and desperation for ages, and high finance has worked to break down, exploit, and then re-consolidate sectors of society in its own image, sectors disintegrating from its own actions. I could go on.
But amazingly, the ruling elite are now hacking away at that intricate infrastructure of complicity it has struck up with lower classes for centuries, a complicity that even the slaveholders knew to shore up to buttress off those massive forces of social erosion set forth by their brutality and inhumanity, such as with poor whites and racist ideology. Or similarly, the minor concessions given to the working class by capital to stave off communism. Don't get me wrong, those techniques are still well in effect, but the classes that they extend to are narrowing rapidly, as more and more swathes of the middle and lower classes are thrown to the wood chipper.
Soon enough, the ruling elite will run out of even that inner core insulating material too. Long ago they found that building prisons, coding "criminals," and then locking them up served to wipe out all of that complicated human relationality and answer those hard questions of historical harm, justice, and distribution of human equity. It took all of the work and energy out of seeing and recognizing others, so that they could get back to their hard work of exploiting in new and exciting ways. For their narrow and selfish purposes, this process worked quite well.
It may be that the nature of the elite class, and questions of their evil and competence in the context of a disintegrating society are very complex subjects. But as the circles of destruction reach further into the imperial core, and eat into the heart of the imperium itself, why shouldn't the simplifying principle of imprisonment and or/destruction be turned to them?
