The Gregorian revolution gave rise to a form of organisation that was gradually stamped out all over the Western world and then to its followers. Constitutional monarchy: A pyramid with a chief executive at the top with the rest of the pyramid made up of checks and balances on the chief executive (whether explicit or implicit) and a pyramid of code: Laws, rules, precedents and so on.
That pyramid of code kept the entire structure unitary. At any time in such a vast structure, contradictions would turn up, but they’d be buffed back into some semblance of unity by the pyramid of code. Today if two parts of government are doing something differently, if that creates practical or political problems, there’s a structure in place to sort it out — administratively through executive orders or judicial interpretation of existing law. This keeps the structure unitary at any given time, and also makes it cohere through time, as precedents are made, followed and/or overturned. Everything is in principle explainable as part of a unitary order.
In words worth pondering, Ivan Illich attributes to such structures “the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history”. They are “the repository of the society’s myth, the institutionalization of that myth’s contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality”.
One might take such a simple and capacious statement in many different directions, but let’s just focus on the way in which the pyramid of code operates as if everything can be made explicit and as if the words within the code are or can be made determinative of any question. In a way the rule of law is built on this myth — that and certain traditions such as the independence of those declaring and administering the law.
The pyramid is a pyramid of accountability. So when something is done, if challenged it must be justified according to what’s in the code. An officer makes a decision because they take a dislike to someone, but then justify it by reference to whatever they can find. And large organisations are endlessly performing their accountability. They have plans and strategies and people are explaining how they’re addressing them with whatever they’re doing.
But what if people were just role-playing these functions, and the reality was different — that when strategic objectives and policies change people just keep doing what they were doing and back-fit that to the words of the new strategy or policy? And what if this subtle subversion went on for so long that the passage below summarised the experience of most people working within any proximity to one of these pyramids of code.
I spent 10 years of my life writing. I wrote neighbourhood plans, partnership strategies, the Local Area Agreement, stretch targets, the Sustainable Community Strategy, sub regional infrastructure plans, funding bids, monitoring documents, the Council Plan and service plans. These documents describe the performance of local government and its partners.
I have a confession to make. Much of it was made up. It was fudged, spun, copied and pasted, cobbled together and attractively formatted. I told lies in themes, lies in groups, lies in pairs, strategic lies, operational lies, cross cutting lies. I wrote hundreds of pages of nonsense. Some of it was my own, but most of it was collated from my colleagues across the organisation and brought together into a single document. As a policy, partnerships and performance officer in local government, this was my speciality and my profession.
Why did I do it? I did this because it was my job.
What then?
That was the first thing I thought of when I watched the wonderful mime above. The mime exploits a set of presumptions we can’t help making and shows how arbitrary they are. The man looks like he’s being constrained by fixed points and using them to pull himself here and there. But we know that that something else is going on. Just as if a values statement says “we strive for excellence in all we do” we somehow know that’s not true, but we might not admit it to ourself. And then the organism operates according to quite different rules. Things expressed as ends, become means as a new set of high level strategic statements are adopted and then the lower downs get to write business-as-usual procedures out as if they were the product of the high level statement. But they’re not.
And so, as the years become decades and the decades become generations, various foundations of thought — like the difference between ends and means, values in the abstract and values demonstrated in actual choices — come unmoored. Today, it’s hard to escape the feeling that more or less everything floats freely. Meetings begin with statements which one might imagine are of immense consequence “we on Gadigal land, never ceded”. But they’re but they mean nothing at all. They’re “fudged, spun, copied and pasted, cobbled together and attractively formatted.”