I recently took my son to the stage play of Yes, Prime Minister. … The decades have made a huge difference in the sensibility of the new production … . The series ran through most of the 1980s, a period that contained its share of tumult. … But somehow the dramas were genteel, reflecting battles between those privileged enough to be in the system. Waste in government continued, powerful people and time-servers were protected when they should have been exposed and dealt with. But one could be forgiven for thinking, at the end of an episode, ‘it was ever thus’. 1 on, as the moral dilemmas piled up in the stage-play, the governors conspired against the governed.
It’s hard to put one’s finger on it, but to speak loosely, I’d say that when I joined the workforce fifty-odd years ago, life inside that workforce was about 80% the lifeworld — just getting on with people, doing one’s job whatever it was. I was in Canberra and got a holiday ‘bridging’ job in the ACT over the summer hols. I was part of a small team administering rebates to people on their public housing rent for various reasons of need. (Rosemary who I was assisting was a very nice person and had loved being a nurse. She didn’t love this, but it was OK and it paid better.) In any event, although it was administrative, it was still a concrete system, not unlike running public transport or a newsagent. At least inside the beast, you could tell whether anything too silly was being done.
The other 20% was, if you like ‘the system of the system’ which hierarchies are preoccupied with. Reports to superiors and so on, though given how concrete what one was doing was, this worked reasonably well. I guess it wouldn’t be hard to find stories of fairly comprehensive waste to protect some superior’s view of things. But there was little high farce of the kind so beautifully sent up in Utopia.
I’d never accuse this world of being ‘high performing’. It was quite mediocre, but it was human, it muddled through, one wasn’t encouraged to have tickets on yourself. There was a tea lady of some standing who came round every morning and afternoon. Nor do I want to suggest that such an office wouldn’t contain antagonisms — perhaps quite deep ones. But there was quite an ethic of getting on and helping out. And that contributed to a deep kind of egalitarianism. Seniority was respected but not fawned over. And commonsense was a strong anchor in life.
Fast forward to today and the degree of farce is just off the charts. At the tail end of the world I’m describing, we did away with national anthems beginning movies and toasts to the Queen at the very most pompous events. Now everything is populated with new pieties. Each meeting — often each speech given at a function — is preceded by an acknowledgement of country. People are constantly involved in farcical activities — of the kind satirised in Utopia.
Almost certainly their workplace operates with a whole anti-thinking apparatus up in lights — mission and vision statements and ‘values’ statements. If you’re at one of these events it is not a good move, for your blood pressure, your self-respect or your career to say that you don’t think that the values of an organisation can be written in a list hung in the foyer — that values aren’t like that. That values might have names in our language, but they are present in our lives as choices.
Now even after fifty years of development such things still don’t take up that much time. But they are central to the official governance of the organisation. I don’t think of them as causes so much as symptoms of something much deeper. They’re the tip of a large iceberg in which;
- What is said and what is done within and by organisations are able to float pretty much freely away from each other;
- There was always plenty to object to in the worlds of mainstream politics and media, but today they are mostly infantile — including most ‘quality’ media coverage of politics which is glorified racecalling.
- Government reports are full of bland-out — pleasing words “improve”, “reform”, “sustainable”, “accountable”, “transparent” and on and on, and only someone who wasn’t paying attention thinks those words mean what they say. They could mean what they say, they could mean the opposite. Unless I’m deep in some issue, I don’t read government reports because they can’t be understood without being an insider. The same goes for corporate reports. And come to think of it, would you get much more than a fairly predictable schtick from the annual report of a major NGO?
- Back then, discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation could live a fairly robust existence within the ‘commonsense’ of the workplace and this was obviously a very bad thing. So in major respects things are better than that today. We also go after things like bullying in the workplace. And there’s a lot of it about. So going after it is certainly a laudable goal. But it’s a very difficult goal and we don’t proceed as if it were. The upshot is that we’re giving lots of power to people who can game such systems — bullies in fact. Should we give up on anti-bullying? I’d hope we wouldn’t need to, but I think it’s quite likely that — perhaps after a few years where the new arrangements help a little — the systems become gamed by bullies so badly that they do more harm than good. Have we set these systems up to help us know if things are going awry? Nope. We’ve set them up as we always do — as elaborate role plays with accountability theatre to the higher-ups. What could possibly go wrong?
- These dot points are just that — a few scattered thoughts. Many more phenomena could be itemised — perhaps I’ll do that as they occur to me.
I won’t claim to be able to articulate it much beyond what I’ve said here. It’s bugged me that I can’t do better for ages, but watching the Utopia clip above spured me to note it, because, it’s trying to make a similar point.
- A generation