The Performance of Not Knowing: Weaponized Incompetence and the Architecture of Complacency

Weaponized incompetence is often dismissed as a minor interpersonal irritation: a partner who “doesn’t know how” to complete basic tasks, a colleague who perpetually misunderstands instructions, or an institution that claims logistical impossibility in the face of moral obligation. Yet such dismissals obscure the deeper reality: weaponized incompetence is not merely a failure of capacity but a strategic abdication of responsibility. When repeatedly tolerated, it becomes a structural force that sustains complacency, redistributes labor inequitably, and preserves existing hierarchies under the guise of limitation.

At its core, weaponized incompetence operates through performance. It is the deliberate or cultivated display of inability that shifts accountability onto others, often those with less power, fewer resources, or greater stakes in the outcome. The result is not just individual frustration or burnout but a broader normalization of disengagement that corrodes collective responsibility and dulls expectations of institutional care.

From Individual Behavior to Social Pattern

In private life, weaponized incompetence often appears mundane. One person consistently avoids emotional labor, household management, or caregiving by claiming confusion or ineptitude, while another compensates to keep systems functioning. Over time, this dynamic hardens into expectation: one party becomes responsible by default, while perceived incapacity absolves the other.

What makes this phenomenon particularly insidious is its plausibility. Unlike overt refusal, incompetence invites sympathy. It reframes avoidance as vulnerability and allows power to be exercised without appearing coercive. This logic does not remain confined to domestic or interpersonal settings; it scales seamlessly into workplaces, public institutions, and governance structures.

Organizations routinely invoke bureaucratic complexity, funding limitations, or procedural rigidity to justify inaction, especially when action would require redistributing power, labor, or resources. In these contexts, incompetence ceases to be an individual trait and becomes an institutional posture. The message is not that change is undesirable, but that it is regrettably impossible.

Weaponized Incompetence and Disability

Within disabled communities, discussions of incompetence are necessarily fraught. Disabled people have long been subjected to assumptions of incapacity, weaponized to justify exclusion, paternalism, or heightened surveillance. For this reason, critiques of weaponized incompetence must be precise: the issue is not the existence of limitation, but the strategic invocation of inability by those who retain choice, authority, or access.

A striking asymmetry emerges. Disabled people are routinely required to demonstrate competence beyond reasonable standards to prove deservingness of accommodations, autonomy, or credibility. Meanwhile, nondisabled individuals and institutions are often granted leniency for failing to learn, adapt, or include. Inaccessibility is framed as unfortunate rather than negligent; exclusion is treated as accidental rather than systemic.

This disparity reveals weaponized incompetence as a tool of power. Those already marginalized are denied the right to limitation, while those already advantaged are permitted to disengage from responsibility without consequence. The result is not only exclusion but also the normalization of lowered expectations for institutional performance where disabled people are concerned.

Complacency as a Collective Outcome

The most damaging consequence of weaponized incompetence is not ineffi ciency, but complacency. When inaction is normalized, urgency dissolves. When responsibility is perpetually deferred, harm becomes ambient rather than exceptional. Over time, communities learn to expect less from institutions, from leadership, and from one another.

This complacency is often defended as realism. We are told that systems are slow, that progress must be incremental, and that expectations must be tempered by feasibility. Yet realism becomes a convenient shield when it is selectively applied, used to moderate demands for justice while never constraining the preservation of comfort or control.

I have encountered this dynamic repeatedly in spaces where advocacy is rhetorically embraced but materially resisted. The language of support is abundant; the follow-through is not. Requests for access, reform, or accountability are met with sympathetic acknowledgment and procedural deferral. The failure is framed not as unwillingness, but as inability, and thus rendered unchallengeable.

Disrupting the Performance

Confronting weaponized incompetence requires more than identifying individual bad actors. It demands a recalibration of what we accept as reasonable limitations and who bears the burden of adaptation. It asks us to distinguish between genuine constraint and strategic neglect and to refuse their conflation.

This does not require perfection, nor does it deny complexity. Rather, it insists that those with power remain accountable for learning, evolving, and acting, particularly when their inaction disproportionately harms others. Refusal to build competence is not neutrality; it is a choice with consequences.

Here, disability justice offers a critical reframing. Rather than locating responsibility solely in individual capacity, disability justice emphasizes interdependence: the recognition that all systems function through shared reliance and that access is produced collectively or not at all.

From Excuse to Obligation: A Disability Justice Call to Action

Approaching weaponized incompetence through a disability justice lens requires shifting from individualistic notions of responsibility toward frameworks grounded in interdependence, collective access, and anti-carceral accountability. Capacity is not an inherent trait possessed by institutions or leaders; it is a collective condition shaped by resourcing, design, and willingness to adapt.

From this perspective, repeated institutional failure cannot be dismissed as an unfortunate limitation. When access barriers persist, they signal not an absence of ability but a breakdown in shared responsibility. Institutions that profess commitment to inclusion while deferring implementation reproduce exclusion through neglect. Disability justice calls for moving beyond symbolic alignment toward shared obligation, where access is treated not as an accommodation granted to a few, but as a public good co-created with impacted communities.

Operationalizing collective access requires more than consultation after decisions have been made. It demands governance structures that meaningfully include disabled people in planning, evaluation, and leadership. Clear timelines, transparent metrics, and mechanisms for feedback are not bureaucratic formalities; they are safeguards against responsibility dissolving into abstraction. When accountability is diffuse, incompetence becomes plausible. When accountability is shared and explicit, progress becomes measurable.

Equally important is an anti-carceral approach to accountability. Disability justice rejects punitive models that rely on blame, exclusion, or symbolic discipline. Addressing weaponized incompetence does not mean seeking retribution but insisting on processes of repair, learning, and structural change. Institutions must be expected to respond to harm by adjusting systems, not by issuing apologies that leave underlying dynamics intact.

This reframes accountability as an ongoing relationship rather than a singular corrective act. Mistakes will occur; complexity will remain. But repeated failure without adaptation constitutes neglect. Civic responsibility, in this sense, is not about fl awless execution but about demonstrated commitment, the willingness to listen, to redistribute resources, and to evolve in response to those most affected.

Conclusion: Beyond Performance and Into Responsibility

Weaponized incompetence thrives in environments where discomfort is avoided and accountability is negotiable. It fl ourishes when explanation substitutes for action and apology replaces repair. Challenging it requires a cultural shift away from excusing harm through professed inability and toward evaluating impact, effort, and responsibility.

In a society shaped by shared vulnerability, competence is not proven by what institutions claim they cannot do, but by what they choose to learn, build, and sustain together. Moving beyond weaponized incompetence, then, is inseparable from embracing interdependence and from recognizing that access failures are not individual inconveniences but collective shortcomings.

The question is no longer whether we are capable, but whether we are willing to treat responsibility as a shared obligation rather than a burden to be quietly passed along.

Note of Thanks

Thank you to those who have chosen to spend time with this piece and to sit with the discomfort it may raise. Thoughtful engagement, especially with ideas that challenge habitual explanations and institutional norms, is itself a form of collective labor. In a landscape where indifference is often easier than inquiry, your willingness to read, refl ect, and remain present matters.

This work is offered in the spirit of shared responsibility rather than individual indictment. If it resonates, unsettles, or invites reconsideration, that response is part of the process disability justice calls us toward: learning in relationship, grappling with complexity, and refusing the quiet transfer of responsibility that allows harm to persist. I am grateful for readers who understand that sustained attention is not passive consumption but an act of participation in building more accountable and accessible systems.

Ian Allan

Self-Advocate for The Arc of Northern Virginia

Ian Allan is a self-advocate with a deep commitment to policy literacy, systems change, and disability justice. Through The Arc of Northern Virginia, he works to ensure that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are not merely served by systems, but are actively shaping them.