The daily grind

During my working life, the daily grind became more bureaucratic year by year as central government tightened its ever more detailed grip on everything we did. Not an uncommon experience I imagine. Yet on the whole this was not a huge problem as most of us adapt if we don’t look back and hanker for what might have been.

Adapting though – that’s the problem with bureaucracy. Many middle class people have a deep aversion to uncertainty, particularly when it concerns their personal future. Bureaucracies appear to offer certainty in an uncertain world. In most cases the offer is genuine and bureaucrats know it. Government bureaucracies are, to paraphrase Trotsky - vast internal mutual support structures, mutual protection structures more or less isolated from the people they supposedly serve. Bureaucracies like it that way.

Suppose you are a qualified bureaucrat, professionally competent in some aspect of working life. Here’s the dilemma for those of us not especially gifted within our chosen profession. Suppose we assume that 90% of the people within any profession cannot be described as especially talented. This group would be the plodders plus the bottom 10% who shouldn’t even be there. The problem is - the pedestrian majority in any profession may find it easier to be an expert bureaucrat than an expert professional. Maybe a bit of both where the bureaucrat is dominant.

In which case it may be easier to be a bureaucrat scientist rather than a scientist, easier to be a bureaucrat engineer than an engineer, easier to be a bureaucrat expert than an expert. In many cases it may be far easier to be a bureaucrat professional than a talented professional. Perhaps more rewarding too.

Bureaucracy is not intellectually difficult. It doesn’t present us with problems demanding unusual professional proficiency. Follow the system and if the system doesn’t cover the situation pass the problem up the chain or over to the committee. This is the bureaucratic system and it works. It isn’t necessarily satisfying but it works and is easily learned. Learn how the system works and run with it. Or add more rules to the system if you are in a position to do it. Many are.

Observation suggests that bureaucracy undermines professional expertise in just this way. It is easier to be bureaucratically expert than genuinely expert in almost any profession. Bureaucracy creates a slippery slope down which professionally qualified people may slide in relative ease and comfort.

Government bureaucracies are inevitably totalitarian in that there system is the only system. In other words they inevitably evolve an ingrained political culture based around survival. The bureaucracy must survive – this is the prime directive. There are many others all having survival as their prime focus.

Never resolve problems - contain them. Keep hold of and wherever possible expand the budget. Avoid any kind of external appraisal. Delegate responsibility up or down the food chain unless success is assured. Avoid scandal because that attracts attention. And so on. Bureaucracies have an inbuilt tendency to degrade their own professional expertise.

Not a trivial problem.