Restructuring
In the old days, companies endured, and most workers were hired by the day. Now, it is the other way around: most workers can expect to outlive half a dozen company names. Especially in former state-owned corporations, where frequent rebranding is confused with customer service.
Work is currently something done in the odd minutes when not reorganising, restructuring, rebranding, downsizing, upsizing, merging, demergering, acquiring and spinning off. Rapid oscillation between wholly irreconcilable business philosophies, such as exploiting synergies contra concentrating on core competencies, allows employees skilled at gobbledygook to outmanoeuvre those skilled at doing something useful. It also provides a rich living for a class of parasites who ought to be classified as a negative externality but aren’t, because they write the management books.
There is a quotation floating around the Internet, purporting to be from Petronius, on how the moment an organisation begins to function, someone reorganises it so that it doesn’t any more. It is not from Petronius, but from a 20th-century writer. But it’s still a good observation. Why precisely does this happen? My own suggestion (made without having read that writer) is ‘protective coloration’: if an organisation is running well, the incompetent person will be easily visible, he’s the one screwing up his own patch. If, however, the organisation is currently being reorganised, everything will be screwed up, and so the effects of having an incompetent in the house will be impossible to detect.
Management consultants prey on corporations’ insecurity in precisely the same way as therapists prey on the insecurities of individuals. The global economy could be made vastly more efficient at a stroke, in the same way as human happiness could be greatly enhanced overnight: shoot all the consultants and all the therapists.
Climbing the ladder
An average I.Q. is 100, by definition. Most of the readers of these essays, on meeting a person with an I.Q. of 100, will find him mentally rather slow; the rest are being charitable. And yet half the population, again by definition, will be even slower. Where are all these dummies? It seems unlikely that intelligence is so correlated with social class that the duller half are all doing menial work and the brighter half are managing them, since we meet so many moronic individuals in responsible positions. The answer may be that I.Q. measures abstract comprehension and problem-solving, while career success is more about human social manipulation. A person with an I.Q. of 90, but whose whole brain is oriented to monkey-troop politics, will easily outmanoeuvre the innocent genius. It a matter of what kind of intelligence you have, and how much of your total processing-power you dedicate to the task of screwing over your neighbour.
People are good at doing their jobs, or at becoming the boss, but not necessarily both. Craftsmanship and professionalism distract from the serious business of office politics; you can’t watch your hands and watch your back at the same time. The output of any organisation may thus be the net sum of all the actions taken by the players to screw over their colleagues.
Someone once said, ‘If you think your boss is so stupid, ask yourself why he is your boss rather than you being his’. The reason he seems stupid to you is that he does not have the motivations you are attributing to him. If his actions make no sense to you in terms of the interests of the organisation, try reading them in terms of his becoming your boss rather than your becoming his.
The Peter Principle teaches that all the work of an organisation is done by those who are moving up but have not yet been promoted to their ‘position of incompetence’. It may be equally true that all the real work of an organisation is performed by those who don’t understand how to move up. There’s always someone who doesn’t ‘get it’. So instead of playing the game, this idiot does the actual work of the organisation instead.
Companies need people who are good at making money for them, and create posts in which they will do so. What they actually get is people who are good at reaching, occupying and hanging onto those posts. Performance criteria are no help, because the same qualities that enable people to reach these posts in the first place also enable them to blame someone else for their failures therein, or at the very least to leave the sinking ship in time.
When you apply for membership of the Chinese Communist Party, you are asked to name all your weaknesses. A key question is, ‘How will you damage us?’ Would that aspirants to Western management were made to answer such a question honestly.
What does a company do if it sees that office morale is bad? Set up a committee for workplace morale, of course, and staff it with the very managers who are causing the morale to be bad in the first place. But how could it possibly be otherwise? For if the malicious individuals have enough power to make the workplace miserable for everyone else, they have enough power to get themselves onto such a committee; and if they are clever enough not to have been sacked on their way up, they are clever enough to pull the wool over the eyes of the ultimate bosses.
Man was given a brain that he might cover his ass
The advent of the MBAs was supposed to enhance the efficiency of business; this is so only if we posit that a farmer who skins his sheep instead of shearing them is efficient. But there is no doubt that they have enhanced the efficiency of excuse production. The point of soliciting professional advice, whether from astrologers, lawyers, feng-shui experts or management consultants, is not to get things right but to have someone to blame when they go wrong.
The story of Sammy
I was once introduced to an expatriate, let us call him Sammy, who proudly identified himself as a ‘businessman’. The business in question was Import-Export. It all sounded very grand, but what it all boiled down to was that Sammy spent his days in a squalid little office full of junk that he had successfully imported from his home country, half a world away, and completely failed to sell to a living soul. This was partly because no one with two working brain cells would buy it, partly because he seemed to have no plan for getting it sold, other than to the friends-of-friends who incautiously allowed themselves to be brought to his den. Sammy had nevertheless persisted in these ‘business operations’ for decades, supported by his wife; don’t ask me what she saw in him. Had he been a native Englishman in the UK, he would probably have spent those decades exiled to the garden shed, so as to ‘get him out of the house’.
Sammy struck me as a perfect example of what we might call the cargo cult of business. Although he did not have the remotest idea of how to make his own money, he was nevertheless quite convinced that, by creating a tatty office and faithfully sitting there, and by printing business cards that called him a manager or director, he would attract the attention of the god Mammon and be vouchsafed riches. That is, the outward imitation of the forms of business would cause the inward grace to descend. It was a religious rather than a rational enterprise, and so neither hard work nor good sense was required. Now, the question is: how well does this scale – how far up the business ladder does the cargo-cult mentality extend?
The invention of memory
There was once a young lady who was enabled, through the technique of repressed-memory recovery, to recall regular rape by her father, resulting in two coathanger abortions. Funnily enough, somatic examination demonstrated not only that she had never been pregnant, but that she was virgo intacta. I do not know how she herself reconciled the memories that had been ‘recovered’ with what one imagines she must have known about her own body; but there again, she may have been told that ‘denial’ was a typical symptom of long-term sexual abuse.
Plenty of people claim memories from their earliest childhood, which is very odd, since long-term memory of events (as opposed to objects, people and skills) resides in the hippocampus, which as a matter of hard anatomical fact does not form until around the age of about two. The public desperately needs to be informed that implantation of false memories in other people is actually quite easy. This has been demonstrated in both the laboratory and police interrogation rooms. There is a simple technique, which anyone can use on anyone else; I am almost tempted to post the recipe.
(note to self: fiddle date-stamp to end of 28 December)
Manhood as a gender-neutral virtue
The word ‘manhood’ used to mean certain desirable qualities of a human being, such as courage, fortitude and self-control. There is, of course, no reason whatsoever why women cannot possess these qualities too. If ‘manhood’ was intended to imply that the qualities came more naturally to individuals of the male persuasion, therefore, this was an insulting untruth.
Yet it is not in fact certain that it was always so intended; for ‘man’ has not one but two opposites, namely ‘woman’ and ‘boy’. When a male person was told to ‘be a man’, this did not necessarily mean that he should stop behaving in a ‘womanly’ manner, it could equally well have meant that he should grow up and act like an adult. On the other hand, it is true that for example a pain-averse individual might also, in the old days, have been reproached as ‘womanish’. That this was wildly unfair was pointed out as long ago as in Euripedes’ Medea; for that character claimed that she would rather stand in the front line of battle than bear another child. Another weight on the wrong side of the scales was the use of ‘manhood’ as a euphemism for the penis, thus setting up an equivalence between anatomy and the virtues. We might say, therefore, that the word ‘manhood’ was ambiguous, in that it seemed unsure whether courage, fortitude and self-control pertained to adults only, or to males only.
In recent times, however, it has been so solidly assumed that the word is entirely male-chauvinist in inspiration and content that it has virtually disappeared in its primary sense. It is now used solely by bad romance writers whose publisher’s guidelines forbid the word ‘penis’. The consequence of this may be that the human virtues once denoted, properly or improperly, by the word ‘manhood’ are now more difficult to talk about and to advocate. It is a knee-jerk assumption that anyone nostalgic for the ‘manly virtues’ must be wanting to confine women to the kitchen, if not to the rape camp.
These days, the compulsory praise of ‘strong’ women certainly rewards courage and fortitude, though whether it advocates self-control and courtesy is considerably less certain. This is because the contemporary cult of the strong woman co-exists with the equally contemporary cult of sentiment, without anyone ever pointing out that these two things are actually incompatible. What used to be called ‘manhood’, in the sense that was in fact open to both sexes, requires the possessor to do things that ran against the demands of feelings, because sometimes ‘a human’s gotta do what a human’s gotta do’.
(Note to self: fiddle date-stamp to 6 October)
The Answer is Forty-Two
Question: Why don’t American fundamentalists go the whole hog and burn sexually active women at the stake, on prime-time television?
Answer: Because, as the women’s clothes burned away, their breasts would, before being consumed, be briefly exposed, thereby causing immense spiritual harm to the innocent children viewing this salutary entertainment.
The tonsure and the headscarf
The Mormons believe that your family group stays with you for eternity. All members of a family must then be saved or damned together, which suggests either a peculiar coordination of spiritual states, or else that everyone rides the patriarch’s coattails to heaven or hell, whichever he deserves. God cannot, therefore, be regarding the other family members as independent beings, but only as annexes or property of the patriarch. That would actually accord with the meaning of the Latin familia, namely household, a man’s slaves.
In the contemporary European fuss over the iniquity of hijab, people have forgotten two things: first, that there are plenty of Christian fundamentalists who wear the headscarf too, and second, that in the days of US slavery, women of colour wore the headscarf to denote servitude. One wonders what if any connection there may therefore be between the Christian headscarf and the Peculiar Institution in the western world’s most volubly Christian nation. In Ancient Rome, the badge of slavery for men was the tonsure, which was then adopted by the Christians, most of whom were originally slaves, to show that they were kristodouloi, slaves or servants of Christ. If the female tonsure in the Old South was the headscarf, therefore, modern fundamentalists may be using it not, as Muslims would, to prevent the triggering of male lust by the sight of hair, but to denote a symbolic servitude. But then to whom – to God or to their husbands?
A alliance of wannabe alpha males
Many strains of evangelical Christianity lay great emphasis on the doctrine that wives must submit to their husbands. Some of the teachers take care to counterbalance this with the doctrine, out of Ephesians, that the husband must sacrifice himself for his wife; others do not. We may contemplate the possibility that men whose natural inclination is to treat their wives as equals or even defer to them will be converted, and so reluctantly convinced that they were mistaken, and that it is the will of God that they take all authority within the marriage. It is, however, altogether easier to contemplate the possibility of men being converted to fundamentalism precisely because it offers them the headship over their wives – without the bother of imposing it by strength of character or brute force. The same applies to the demand for unconditional obedience by the children. It may be suggested, therefore, that this flavour of religion may function as a sort of trade union for fathers and husbands who are not only abusive, but lazy as well.
When a 14-year-old girl begged Warren Jeffs, the leader of the breakaway Mormon extremists, not to marry her off to her cousin, he replied, ‘Your heart is in the wrong place. This is your mission and duty to do.’ Had the context been other than polygamy and statutory rape, there would be nothing whatever unusual about Jeffs’ words. All fundamentalist leaders and elders talk like this, all the time: ‘Your heart is in the wrong place’ is one of their favourite phrases. The anatomical assertion takes the place of argument or even a polite request, and invariably means that your actions are not sufficiently in their own interest, or in the interests of the other male heads of household, together with whom they constitute the ruling caste.
It is a national convention of the Bradford house-church movement; the hall reeks at one and the same time of sexual pheromones and denial. One man delivers a tirade against a TV show on the grounds that the wife served as a cop and the husband was unemployed and let her support him. Now, I had seen that show, and so knew that in fact the husband worked long hours as a building contractor. The most charitable interpretation was that the speaker had based his sermons on hearsay; indeed, such venues would be rewarding for any collector of urban legends. A less charitable interpretation is the pia fraus. Another man tells me that my spiritual progress requires shaving my beard off, as I am clearly hiding behind it. Well, I think he is hiding, too; he is an ugly little runt in an oversized spiritual-authority costume trying to play the alpha male. Who knows, if the women listened to his preaching on female submission, it might actually work.
No families for Jews and democrats
The ‘Family Values’ code becomes easier to unpack after contemplating the recent ‘League of Polish Families’, which indulged in anti-Semitism and praised Franco. Apparently, then, Jews and Spanish democrats do not live in families, or else families are only to be protected when they are neither Jewish nor democratic. In the US, the ‘Family Values’ language appears to affirm that the Wall Street and the Pentagon represent the best interests of families, even when actually impoverishing working men and women or making the rubble of family dwellings bounce; contrariwise, evils such as pacifism, socialism and anti-imperialism are threats to the American Family. This suggests that pacifists, socialists, anti-imperialists and general social critics do not live in families, or do so only in order to undermine them from within – no doubt while stroking white cats.
In 1945, as the Red Army was advancing on Berlin, Hitler was obliged to intervene to prevent Goebbels divorcing his wife and marrying the Czech actress with whom he was having an affaire. For the Third Reich stood above all for Family Values! The fact that these Family Values were not in the least offended by fifty million dead, most of whom were surely members of families, may provide a clue as to how literally the expression should be taken.
