Futures Forum: Localism: The uses and abuses of power: "No politician willingly surrenders control downwards."
concerns were reported as to how those in power can be a) complacent and b) contemptuous towards those they hold power over.
Here's an essay with comments on the dangers entrenched in holding power.
The question might be raised as to how these ideas could be applied to the current 'crisis of authority' at East Devon...
Magical
Thinking and Authority
Kevin
Carson | March 23rd, 2014
Authority
is divorced from reality: It does not directly perceive the material impediments
to translating its will into action, or receive accurate feedback about
difficulties encountered in doing so. The reason for this is simple. As Robert
Anton Wilson pointed out, subordinates don’t tell the truth to anyone with a gun
— or anyone in a position to fire or punish them. Robert Anton Wilson -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Power, by
its very nature, distorts the upward flow of information. Or in the words of
systems theorist Kenneth Boulding, “the larger and more authoritarian the
organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be
operating in purely imaginary worlds.” The dysfunctional information filtering
mechanisms of a hierarchy simply screen out any information that doesn’t
correspond to what those in authority want to hear. The
Political Economy of Bureaucracy - Steven O. Richardson - Google
Books; Stumbling
and Mumbling: Power deludes
James
Scott’s book Domination
and the Arts of Resistance is
about how authority relations shape human communications. The book,
like The
Art of Not Being Governed,
is based primarily on Scott’s research in pre-modern social settings. But the
basic principles he illustrates from slaves and peasants, in agrarian and
household settings, is equally applicable to the world of cubicle drones and
pointy-haired bosses.
The
intrusion of power into human relationships creates irrationality and systematic
stupidity. As Robert Anton Wilson argued in “Thirteen
Choruses for the Divine Marquis,”
A civilization based on authority-and-submission is a civilization without the means of self-correction. Effective communication flows only one way: from master-group to servile-group. Any cyberneticist knows that such a one-way communication channel lacks feedback and cannot behave “intelligently.”The epitome of authority-and-submission is the Army, and the control-and-communication network of the Army has every defect a cyberneticist’s nightmare could conjure. Its typical patterns of behavior are immortalized in folklore as SNAFU (situation normal—all fucked-up), FUBAR (fucked-up beyond all redemption) and TARFU (Things are really fucked-up). In less extreme, but equally nosologic, form these are the typical conditions of any authoritarian group, be it a corporation, a nation, a family, or a whole civilization.
That
same theme featured prominently in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which Wilson
coauthored with Robert Shea. “….[I]n a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders
that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the
actual work situation that they never see what is going on below.”
A man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs…. The result can only be progressive deterioration among the rulers.
This
inability of those in authority to abstract sufficient information from below,
and perception of management by workers as “a highwayman,” result in the
hoarding of information by those below and their use of it as a source of
rents.
Radical
organization theorist Kenneth Boulding, in similar vein, wrote of the value of
“analysis of the way in which organizational structure affects the flow of
information,”
hence affects the information input into the decision-maker, hence affects his image of the future and his decisions…. There is a great deal of evidence that almost all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.
Or
in the pithy phrasing of Robert Theobald: “A person with great power gets no
valid information at all.”
In
his discussion of distributed, situational and job-related
knowledge, Scott draws a connection between it and mutuality—“as opposed to
imperative, hierarchical coordination”—and acknowledges his debt to anarchist
thinkers like Kropotkin and Proudhon for the insight. [This] flourishes only in
an environment of two-way communication between equals, where the person in
contact with the situation—the person actually doing the work—is in a position
of equality.
Interestingly,
Wilson had previously noted the same connection between mutuality—bilateral
communication between equals—and accurate information—in “Thirteen Choruses.”
And he included his own allusion to Proudhon, no less:
Proudhon was a great communication analyst, born 100 years too soon to be understood. His system of voluntary association (anarchy) is based on the simple communication principles that an authoritarian system means one-way communication, or stupidity, and a libertarian system means two-way communication, or rationality.
The essence of authority, as he saw, was Law — that is, fiat — that is, effective communication running one way only. The essence of a libertarian system, as he also saw, was Contract — that is, mutual agreement — that is, effective communication running both ways. (“Redundance of control” is the technical cybernetic phrase.)
To
say that a hierarchical organization is systematically stupid is just to say
that it is incapable of knowing what it knows, or making effective use of the
knowledge of its members; it is less than the sum of its parts.
There’s
a great scene in the 1985 movie Brazil. Jackbooted thugs from the Ministry of
Information’s Information Retrieval Department (i.e., the secret police) have
just invaded an apartment by sawing a hole through the floor above and sliding
down firemen’s poles—and then arrested the wrong man based on a computer error.
In the aftermath, the Ministry of Works shows up to plug the hole:
JILL: There must be some mistake … Mr Buttle’s harmless…BILL: We don’t make mistakes.[So saying, he drops the manhole cover, which is faced with same material as the floor, over the hole in the floor. To his surprise it drops neatly through the floor into the flat below.]CHARLIE: Bloody typical, they’ve gone back to metric without telling us.
That’s
the way things work in real life in a hierarchical institution, because it is
unable to aggregate the intelligence of its members and bring it to bear
effectively on the policy-making process. So policies have a myriad of
unintended consequences, and various policies operate at cross-purposes with
each other in unanticipated ways. And to top it all off, the transaction costs
of getting information to management about the real-world consequences of its
policies are prohibitive for the same reason that the transaction costs of
aggregating the information required for effective policy-making in the first
place were prohibitive. But no worries. Because the CEO and his chums in the
C-suite don’t live under the effects of their ass-brained policy, and
subordinates are afraid to tell them what a clusterfuck they created, the CEO
will happily inform the CEOs at other organizations of how wonderfully his new
“best practice” worked out. And because these “competing” organizations
actually exist in an oligopoly market of cost-plus markup and administered
pricing, and share the same pathological institutional cultures, they suffer no
real competitive penalty for their bureaucratic irrationality.
A
hierarchy is a device for telling naked emperors how great their clothes
look.
Because those at the tops of organizational pyramids communicate much more effectively with their counterparts at the tops of other pyramids than with their own subordinates, they tend to adopt “best practices” based on glowing reports from each other, keeping each other clueless as to the actual effects of such practices. Hierarchies are machines for telling naked emperors how good their clothes look.
Anyone who works within a corporate or government hierarchy, and has to do their job despite constant interference and irrationality from higher-ups, will recognize the truth of this phrase from Dilbert: “Bossworld, where the laws of time, space and mathematics don’t apply.”
O’Brien suggested something very similar to Winston Smith in Room 101. “If I see the rock float on water, and you see it, then it floats.” Like the kid in the Matrix who sees the spoon bending despite the fact that it does not exist, the boss “sees” positive effects of her decisions that in fact exist only in her imagination. That’s because, as a result of the distorted feedback they receive from their institutional surroundings, those in authority perceive the larger environment in much the same way as an individual experiencing a psychotic break with reality.
It’s good that people like Manchin live in this kind of imaginary world. But magical thinking is not good for the rest of us. Most of the power of those at the top results from our willingness to obey — the little cop in our heads. We need to kill that cop.
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