Tyrant Solipsism

Tyrant solipsism is the mental condition of persons in positions of power and authority who become less and less able to perceive or understand ideas and points of view which are different from their own. Maybe some academic somewhere has a fancy-pants term which means this but I haven't seen it, and somebody has to say it out loud!

This time I have been provoked - the last straw if you like - by a recent mind boggling experience in my part of the Sausage Factory. Great Changes have been afoot for a long time now as the Factory has creaked and rumbled into the twenty-first century. A big problem with the Factory though is that for every good idea that one of the workers has there is a committee somewhere ready and waiting to squash it flat. Sort of like one of the old jokes: "What is a cowpat?" Answer: a pancake designed by a committee.

Oops! I digressed - so easy to do. The thing is the workers in one of the main production lines have been given some completely new machinery for making one of our most, em prevalent, flavours ['popular' would not be a popular word for it]. Certainly this type of sausage is the sort most people end up with. Along with the new and very complicated production machinery have come a whole swag of new ways of doing things AND a brand new computerised reference tool come procedural guides system called "TRAMS". TRAMS is is supposed to be the first and main tool for those of us working in the Phone Orders, Recipes, and Culinary Tips department [PORCT].

TRAMS may be short for Trams an' dentural something or other, I dunno, but it is meant to be the bees knees and totally wonderful. In fact the damned thing is ten times worse than the previous on-line guide book we used. And to think how we used to complain about the old Culinary Express! That's learned us good and proper!

This TRAMS is a disaster because it is slow as slugs to use, is made like a labyrinth so you get lost in it all the time, and splits everything up into tiny micro morsels of information which you can't do a search for, and which are spread out umpteen layers deep without any facility for searching, no map [or 'breadcrumbs" either], and we are instructed NOT to reverse! So it's like trying to drive through a city of one-way streets at night in a heavy fog, with out a map, and your not even supposed to reverse back up to a previous signpost or any intersection we just want to check back on. But no matter how much we complain and demonstrate clearly how totally bad it is, the honchos - Senior Sausage Sages [SSS] - who decided we need it are steadfast in ignoring us. It is like as if some evil magic has blinded their eyes and twisted their noses so anything we say, write, cry, scream[or whimper], or otherwise try to do just seems to the SSS as a nasty smell. Some months ago the SSS enlisted the help of an outside organisation to run a survey of what staff think and feel about their work, managers, and so forth. The SSS were apparently shocked and amazed to discover that we the workers think it them who are on the nose.

So what did the SSS do in response to this report? Firstly spend months cooking up a mass of power points and graphs and buckets of whitewash to show that everything is mostly just fine and wonderful and they kn0w how we can learn to see things that way. But then secondly - which is the thing which has really p****d me off - they spent god knows how much for a trained, professional psychologist to come and talk to each team and basically tell us that we can only be happy if we resign ourselves to our fate.
NB: the Arabic word "KISMET" came to my mind. Wrong message folks!

The theory given was that we must learn to become totally accepting of the abject powerlessness of our situation and admit that we choose to be in this particular job. Othewise we can never bee happy and we will suffer from the affects of stress and it will be our own fault!

Well I don't blame the psychologist woman who was paid to deliver this message; she was clearly not told all the facts about the situation. Either that or she has a somewhat trite and facile view of life. It is one thing to remind people that sanity and well-being requires acceptance of things which are unchangeable but it is quite another to recommend sublime acceptance of obvious neglect, incompetence and wrongdoing in the organisation one works for. Basically the woman skated over and away from the whole ethical dimension of the situation. All the people I spoke to who experienced their team's session with this psychologist were definitely NOT impressed and many were really annoyed. Some just felt more disgruntled and more determined to try and find different employment. Some, like me, felt insulted. I think that if this psychology session was really thought to be a useful thing which will make if easier for workers in the PORCT area to do their work, then it was too facile. If on the other hand it was a deliberate attempt to hose down dissatisfaction and make workers believe that feeling bad about working in the place is all their own fault then it is an example of unconscionable cynicism and furthermore a waste of public monies.

Inefficiency dividend

The Australian Federal Public Service has been subjected to the so-called 'efficiency dividend' for about twenty years now. This has been something like a general and arbitrary 1% cut in funding each year for the last two decades. That makes at least 20% reduction in real terms in the value of resources allocated to sustaining some of the really vital supports of Australian democracy.

I see the results of this now in the "Sausage Factory" where I work. Training is under resourced, the quality of work is becoming harder to sustain, and there are chronic and systematic failures of communication. This makes me think of an Economics lecturer I once heard saying that he couldn't really see what 'dis-economies of scale' might be. He had talked enthusiastically about economies of scale but said he just didn't see where any real problems would come from with continuous scaling up of work organisations.

Well I think there is one word mainly which covers most aspects of dis-economies of scale: communication. That is, real communication goes down the tubes within organisations as the size and complexity of the enterprise grows beyond a certain threshold. The standard bureaucratic answer to the extra efforts needed to keep an ever growing organisation going is to major on the establishment of COMMAND and the ever more detailed management of an exponentially growing corpus of official procedures. Micro management - majoring on minutiae - seems to become an end in itself and the ever more detailed prescriptions of procedures take on the aura and gravity of the Word of God. What can common sense and community do in the face of a seemingly remorseless and unstoppable depersonalisation of relationships? They go underground that's what. Networks, in so far as any do exist, become the means for escaping from the baleful influence of the command structure rather than a natural, organic complement to official chains of command.

When communication dies in an organisation, productivity dies with it. I just wish the Prime Minister and Treasurer of this country could realise that "the fat" has long since gone, now it is just nerves and muscle that are being carved off.

"Vatican should learn from Galileo mess" - what a hoot!

The Vatican will never learn from Galileo - I mean ... excuse me but we are talking 360 years or so before they decide it might be wise to, ... um, acknowledge ... that maybe they backed the wrong horse!

Apparently a prelate is saying the Vatican should "learn from the Galileo mess" [http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre5614dl-us-pope-science/]. But they caused it! The mess that is; the rest of the world has been absorbing and growing with the discoveries of science for more than 400 years now, but the popes and the cardinals? I don't think so.

I seem to remember reading somewhere in the last year or so that Pope Benny 16th [right number?], who was after all the head of the Inquisition while he was still a cardinal, still thinks that the way the Inquisition treated Giordani Bruno in the year 1600 was more or less OK. His words, as reported, were sort of along the lines of: "Yeah well that's how we did things in those days ..." But Giordani Bruno's "crime" was simply that he publicly asserted scepticism.

Because he would not recant and publicly state that everything the Church teaches is absolutely true, they stripped him naked in a public square somewhere in Rome, vilified him, flogged him, tortured him, then burned him alive, and Benny the Boss still thinks that is OK?. My guess is that Galileo knew damned well what happened to Giordani Bruno 33 years earlier and decided to kow-tow and pretend to renounce his assertions about the movement of the Earth about the Sun and so forth. He knew that the Copernican theory was the only reasonable way to explain what he and others could see through telescopes, but he knew also that the thought police were only interested in power, not truth.

The reason the Church had to kill Giordani Bruno was because the Catholic church is a command structure which holds power over people only for so long as they don't start questioning its authority. Its apparent legitimacy comes from people believing the doctrines without question. Unfortunately its doctrines are the products of a pre-scientific universe so there is an intrinsic dissonance attached to membership. This is why the Catholic church has always needed thought police, in the form of the Inquisition, to search out and silence or destroy those who would upset the establishment by asking awkward questions. They needed to destroy all other forms of belief which challenged their power as well. So for example Jews were also subject to intense discrimination and persecution and Muslims likewise. [This doesn't imply that Jews and Muslims as believers are any better than Christians. Modern history shows clearly that the purported benefits of any unquestioned belief system are always outweighed by the drawbacks.]

When Pope Benny 16th implies that it was OK "... at that time ..." to publicly torture and kill a dissident in the most agonising and humiliating way possible, it implies to me that he has not understood the implications; either that or he is himself an evil and despicable person who has nothing of real value to offer the human race.

What are schools really for?

The thug's definition of power is:

The ability to make things happen;

The civilised person's definition of power is:

The ability to get others to accept your description of the world.

This provokes questions such as:

• Who describes my world?
  
• Who describes your world?
  
• Who describes our world?

We send children to school to learn. But, to learn what?

The usual response to that question is something like: to learn useful things that will help them survive in society and have a good life. OK, that's pretty good, as far as it goes, but answer me this:

• Where is the scientific evidence that shows clearly and unambiguously that schooling is the best way to cater for the needs of children?

My point is that most schools are bureaucratically organised production facilities. Yes, I know that most people would not like to put it that way. But surely it is clear that children are corralled, restrained and constrained by people - teachers and their assistants - organised on the basis of economies of scale through specialisation of function.

There are clearly many children who do not survive this experience very well, and for whom the outcome of their schooling is clearly not what was intended. Given that each of us lives only once upon this Earth, who does this system serve, if it does not serve all children properly?

The curse of the command structure

This concept is the reason for this blog.

The basic insight I want people to look at and discuss is that all large organisations are built around a pyramid shaped power or command structure, but command structures are NOT communication networks. Discuss? Hey, prove it wrong if you can!

"Hierarchy of authority" is a more fluffy way of saying command structure. This means that each person in the organisation officially reports to just one direct superior but that each person above the very base level may have one or more people who report to him or her. This is true of armies, monasteries, government agencies, commercial and industrial firms and corporations, and educational institutions. "Old news" you might say, but "hierarchy of authority" misses the deep problem.

The deep problem is that communication - I mean real communication - is a two-way process, and bureaucratic command structures do NOT function well, if at all, as channels for the two way, equal to equal, interchange which is essential for real communication to occur.