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The Intrusion of Administration

Where the shaman is the mediator between man and the spirit world, an administrator is the mediator between man and his government - and is subject to the same punctiliousness, sluggishness, indifference, corruption, and abuse of power. But in the author's time there was an explosion of middle-men who stand between two individuals: an author must go through an agent to find a publisher, a broker stands between buyers and sellers of securities and real estate, a union reprehensive stands between an employee and his employer, and so on.

Administration his a functional necessity in a cluttered and regulated environment. They generally act on behalf of one party, and to the detriment of both. A good government can be made bad, and a bad one far worse, by administrators.

What has this to do with the topic of thought control by the state? If the totalitarian ruler is the architect of a controlled society, administrators are the builders and operators of it. And in doing so, they are part of a system of control - and to the citizen, the administrator is the government. Insofar as the system of government is concerned, the manner in which they tend to the duties of their office is significant to its impact on the people.

The Administrative Mindset

Administration is not a personality trait, but a role. That is to say that people who act as administrators are behaving in an artificial manner while they are in that role, which is subject to different influences:

  1. The behavior they believe to be appropriate to the role
  2. The behaviors they believe that their superiors expect of the role
  3. The behaviors others who interact with them in that role encourage
  4. Qualities of their personality that they fail or refuse to suppress

The conflict among these influences, as well as the fact that each person's beliefs about the role are variable, make it difficult to generalize about what the role of the administrator ought to be. Add to this the "political" behaviors of any professional role - the behaviors a person undertakes when looking to defend their territory or increase their power, to make a positive impression while avoiding being blamed, etc. - and the problem of defining any role becomes further complicated.

The administrator is the proxy of his employer (or whomever appointed him and has the power to remove him from office) and is expected by others to act as such - to behave as if he were the individual for whom he is serving as a proxy. Administrators are also generally given limited authority - a judge may settle disputes among citizens, but is not in command of the military. Ideally, they will do their work competently and be mindful of their boundaries, but are not always thus - whether it is because of their own desire to have extended powers, or because they accommodate the demands of others that are outside their demesne.

In addition to being their masters' hands, administrators are also their masters' eyes - they pass information back up the chain of command. In many instances there are several links in the chain, and each link passes along only a portion of the information that it received: the private tells the corporal, the corporal tells the sergeant, etc. and much information is lost or distorted by the time it reaches the general. It is through such channels that leaders fall out of touch with their people, and have little sense of what is going on in reality.

In a totalitarian situation, these communications are often severely distorted by fear. The administrator must demonstrate that he is competently and faithfully attending to his role - any information that suggests he might have made a mistake, or that things are not completely under his control, is a threat to his position (and in some instances his life). So administrators are often very vague in their communications. His desire to advance within his organization is tempered, and sometimes entirely squelched, by fear of the consequences that may come of overstepping his bounds or ignoring his orders.

Administration also requires being assertive and assuming leadership, which not all individuals are comfortable with because it involves conflict. Any individual prefers to act as he pleases, and any suggestion or request for him to behave otherwise generally provokes hostility, refusal, and retaliation. Particularly for government administrators in democratic nations, they are in a hypocritical position - pretending to serve the citizens while being tasked to carry out the orders of their superiors that are unfavorable to those same citizens. When people resist, they attack the tax collector, not the politician who insisted on collecting a tax, because the collector is accessible to them and their actions have direct and immediate impact.

Even those administrators who are covetous of power are subject to the same conflict, and even more vulnerable to retaliation because it may be occur to those whom they impose upon that they are acting outside the bounds of their office and will not have the support of their superiors when their victims retaliate. Whereas the normal person is uncomfortable in a role of authority, the power-hungry person is in a state of constant fear, for which he may overcompensate with his behavior.

The author mentions anecdotal evidence of the increase of stress-related disorders in administrators: heart attacks, ulcers, and strokes - not to mention mental aberrations and nervous breakdowns - are all on the rise among white-collar workers in democratic countries. He suggests that this correlates with the increase in the number of individuals who serve as administrators.

Until only recently, government has been by means of threat or force - leaders ruled by threatening their subjects and punishing them, often with physical brutality, for refusing to comply. Even in countries that claimed to acknowledge rule by consent, this has remained the de facto method of leadership until the mid-twentieth century. Presently, it is unacceptable to rule by brutality and leaders are being compelled (by external forces) to rule by consent. This is an entirely new method of leadership, so politicians have much to learn about using diplomacy and persuasion with their own subjects. There is little in the historical record to guide them.

The Reluctant Administrator

Government employees have a dim reputation in virtually every culture and over centuries of history - they are officious, overbearing, difficult to work with, and essentially useless. The author considers some of his own experiences dealing with government officials, and found behaviors that support the stereotype. He has also encountered these behaviors not only in government employees, but in nonprofits, industry associations, commercial organizations, and even social clubs.

People accuse these bureaucrats of being lazy, but the author believes that it is fear. They wish to avoid being blamed or criticized, and are often punished for making decisions and taking actions that are within their job description - and so they avoid doing anything. They are very skill at having pointless conversations and making noncommittal statements, of dragging their heels and obstructing process that will bore or frustrating people into withdrawing from them and avoiding them in future.

There's an extended bit that contrasts two members of a committee - a brash young man who seemed passionate about getting things done, and a reserved older member of the committee who seemed dispassionate but was entirely effective in squelching the younger man's ideas and squelching his enthusiasm. It stands to reason that people like the young man either wash out of administrative careers or lose their souls over time.

The Bureaucratic Mindset

In a situation in which terror is used to keep the population in line, it is often also used to keep the administration in line as well, and the individual administrator is no longer interested in accomplishing goals, but in keeping himself safe. The most effective way to do this is to develop a bureaucratic mindset in which tasks and procedures become the primary focus.

A bureaucracy is highly useful to a totalitarian leader. If he fails to deliver on his promises, then he has the bureaucracy to blame. The bureaucrats, meanwhile, focus their primary attention on avoiding blame rather than accomplishing goals. This is generally done by a strict adherence to rules and procedures with extensive documentation to demonstrate that they did as they were told - nothing less, nothing more, and nothing different. "Just doing as I was told" is a defense that generally works.

(EN: the bureaucrat is in a no-win situation - if the situation or outcome is unacceptable, he is to blame. If he exercised independent judgment rather than following orders, he is to blame. If he followed orders rather than exercising independent judgment, he is still to blame. Whom is the scapegoat for any failure is left to politics: if he is more popular than his superior, his superior will be punished; if not, he will be punished - and because people rise out of favoritism, the superior is usually more preferred by the administration.)

As to how bureaucrats become the way they are, the author tends toward the idea that they are made that way by means of fear. A person generally takes a position because he means to do well, but after being threatened or punished constantly, he adopts a defensive posture. So while some people aspire to become compliant members of a bureaucratic system, most enter the system with idealism and ambition and have it beaten out of them - whether by being punished randomly, or subjected to intolerable procedures, tedious duties, and a sea of red tape.

The bureaucratic machine feeds many negative human characteristics: lust for power, indolence, moral indifference, mental rigidity, and competitiveness. It is first of all attractive to the manipulative and power-hungry, because a position "in the government" implies they will have authority and control over others. Others are attracted because government jobs are notorious for coddling the lazy and indolent. Others still because being a government official has a certain social esteem attached to it.

There is virtually no model of an efficient and effective government administration, largely due to a lack of measurability and accountability (which also exist in commercial and nonprofit organizations, but not to the same extent). The bureaucrat does not thrive by being efficient and effective, but by being diplomatic and tactful - to have the appearance of doing something while not doing anything, and to give the sense of having agreed without making any commitment at all. Commitment, especially, is to be avoided because it becomes an expectation and a measurement. When one promises and fails to deliver, it is noticed; when one gives the appearance of agreeing to be supportive of an idea, there is no evidence of success or failure.

Those who attempt to get things done are weeded out, and often by their colleagues because to commit to doing something within an organization requires the cooperation of others, who must also make commitments. The person who intends to get something done finds that he is blocked at every turn - there is a procedure he must undertake, paperwork he must submit, committees who must be attended, and so on. The system is rigged against taking any kind of action whatsoever.

He finally mentions a 1951 report to various organizations that proposed better hiring standards for government employees, which identified all of these problems and more. However, the author sees little sense in this: hiring better people into a toxic system will not fix the system, but merely poison the people. Better they be left to find work in the private sector, where they can be useful.