The emotional bureaucrats
I return from my summer holidays to sad news. One of the contemporary thinkers I most admire passed away unexpectedly on the 3rd of this month, the cause of which is unknown at the time of writing.
David Graeber, in his book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, tells us that the rules created by bureaucracy are mere "instruments through which the human imagination is crushed and shattered". He also tells us in the same book that bureaucracy is the cause of an existential violence that disrupts our ability to imagine, to create, to play and even to think clearly. "Bureaucratic procedures(...) have the extraordinary capacity to make even the most intelligent people behave like idiots."
We can infer that Graeber's bureaucracy is like a forced, fabricated nihilism, which pushes us towards meaningless actions, with no purpose other than the fulfilment of imposed rules through the mindless repetition of certain rituals. The consequence, as we can observe and experience in our daily lives, is the diminishing of the condition that makes us human: our capacity to create and to imagine and to think ourselves. In this increasingly secular and value-free world, if God was killed by Nietzsche, meaning and creation were left to bureaucrats and their rules. The search for the right role (which role?) is an activity that is leaving us all in roles.
The world of work loves rules, procedures, stamps and chains of approval. Fertile ground for the growth of bureaucracy, which has as its great ally the paradigm of control. It is no wonder that in the business context we resort to metaphors that compare people to machines. For example, our skills are divided into hard and soft, just as in a computer a distinction is made between hardware and software. It turns out that in a computer nothing is mouldable. Any fault can be traced back to the damaged command. Therefore everything, even errors, can be controlled. The absence of flexibility and absolute control are the dream of every bureaucrat.
Perhaps it is neither strange nor coincidental that in the world of psychology and psychiatry the word "rigidity" is used to designate a certain type of behaviour or way of thinking and feeling. They are those aspects which are difficult to shake, which are inevitable and whose existence appears as fundamental for (over)living. They appear, precisely, to protect something which is considered fragile, inconstant, uncertain and, therefore, causing suffering. Better a known fear than an unknown (possible) freedom. One of the ways of eliminating the suffering that comes from what is not known, from what is devoid of meaning, is to remove all meaning through control mechanisms. It seems that organisations do not function so differently from people (2).
Psychological and affective rigidity has become somehow acceptable in this world, as has bureaucracy. They continue to be prized in the corporate world, even though it is officially said and communicated that we are moving in another direction. Even those who do not tend to be rigid, in the world of work, and especially when ascending the pyramid of power, another great ally of bureaucracy, are invited to practice this type of behaviour, curtailing the autonomy, creative potential and trust of the people with whom they work. The world of work supports emotional bureaucrats: those who absolutely need to guarantee certain conditions in order to achieve a certain result; those who are adherents of "it has always been done this way because this way works"; followers of "my way or no way". They do not exist only at work, far from it, but they feel very comfortable there.
The global situation we are currently living in has accentuated these traits, both at home and in the office, spaces that now blur for so many. This is not surprising. There is still much that is unknown about our present and about our future. And, as I have already mentioned, one of the preferred ways to combat what one does not know is not necessarily to seek to know more: it is to control what one thinks one knows. Of course, this limits learning; it makes it difficult to contemplate other points of view beyond those we already know. This is why, even sometimes well-intentioned and with a declared purpose of helping people, some managers are opting for practices such as "inviting" their people to have the computer camera on during office hours, intruding in the personal sphere, questioning about or questioning every moment "outside the office". However well intentioned they may be, these kinds of practices are not helping people. Quite the opposite.
León Grinberg, an Argentinian psychoanalyst, left us the following idea: the degree of (mental) health is proportional to the "tolerance for ambivalence, equivocation and ambiguity"; on the contrary, pathology will be the imperious need to control and to foresee.
We need people like David Graeber who had the courage to shake the rigid foundations of bureaucracy and thus contribute to global health, which we need so much now.
Written for Link to Leaders on 11 September 2020; published 15 September 2020.
1. Not that I consider religions to be the only nor the main source of principles.
2. I wonder what the disciplines of "organisational behaviour" are needed for.
