pinkfloydpsw's Blog

How do they sleep at night?, we often hear this statement, usually when describing dictators or murderers or those that have harmed a child. I wonder should we extend this measure of questioning the humanity of an individual or a group into other areas, particularly into political ideologues and the manifestations of their policies?

Let us start by ensuring our position, we, us folks in general, hold certain things to be intuitively true, that persons are as they do rather than as they say or wish to be, that although we may endeavour and pretend not to be judgmental we assess all persons at every step and in every deed, that there are mitigating circumstances for prejudices where even we so mild individuals will pick up the baton or the gun, that despite the best efforts of meme authors and overly woolly positivists we pay little heed to the inside of the greetings card and, most importantly of all, let us recognise that we too will mostly act in our own individual interest. Extending this, all too natural, skepticism into all facets of our existence, we find ourselves becoming the masters of suspicion, suspecting in particular the people around us, and wondering what it is exactly that they are fucking up to?

Let me tell you the story of a place I once knew…..

A firm, not untypical but not typical either, this firm has a CEO, a board of governors and a managerial team as well as many workers, the sector is government and the particular remit of this firm is to educate young minds, at least that is what they are supposed to be doing. The CEO has meetings, endless meetings, gathering staff together under the pretense of getting the business of educating done for that day and the days to come; and there it is, the problem term, did you spot it? Business, I did not include it accidentally by the way. So what is wrong with that? You may ask, but if you have to then you may not get the point. Frank Zappa once said “the problem with the music industry is the word industry” and he was right, what he was suggesting was that some human pursuits transcended instrumental and economic reasoning, music is an art and an art is only an art when it is exists for no other reason but itself, it loses its purity and its possibility when it is shoe-horned into a business model where it encounters deadlines, press conferences and marketing drives. The same point can be made of learning, in and of its own sake it is its own reward and needs not structure, codification, rules, punitive measures for non aptitude or prizes for conformity. What we learn by choice and curiosity sticks in the mind much better than what we are presented with, I feel that this is also an intuitive truth.

Back to our firm, we have already identified one particular problem and it comes from the top, our CEO and our management team are not educators like Aristotle, inspirational knowledge seekers like Socrates nor innovators like Mill, they are in the mould of Alan Sugar and Simon Cowell; they seek opportunities for career progression and advancement of status. In this endeavour they may have chosen their field quite wisely, there are of course certain reasons to seek to be employed (I nearly said work there, we will get to that bit later) in the public sector for these managerial types that cannot be present in the private sector because of certain conditions.

It is nearly impossible, if you follow the playbook, to be a failure in the public sector because whatever the outcome of your dealings you can always blame upwards; that is to say that there is always the recourse for a management team to say that government changed the rules midstream and this is why we are in the shit. It’s free money and it comes with few caveats, the government just chuck money at the public sector and entrust to these corporate types that they will spend it wisely, nobody seems to be looking over anyone’s shoulder to see if they have plunged their firm into financial ruin by pursuing wildly inappropriate projects or have been wastefully whittling the cash away on luxuries and expenses while needs go unmet.

Corruption becomes systemic when the public take their eye of the ball, at every level of this sector self-interested career types horse-trade the public good for position and privilege, our firm is no different. The difference in industry is that all actions are accountable and bear responsibility to the needs of the market; people essentially validate the firm and its deeds with their spending habits. This sector also seems to be galvanised by the idea that there is such a thing as a standard way of producing and analysing information (Data)? More likely is it that we establish and perpetuate the practice of standardising ourselves to be of use to commercial products; likely the preference for those products being already assured through a financial relationship rather than by its merits. What is most important is the books, the numbers adding up rather than the social good being served. Schools can educate, police can protect, hospitals can heal and treat the sick but it is all for nothing if the books don’t add up.

We hear stories from all over the public sector of failure, failure to meet totals, failure to follow charters, deadline failure, financial failures etc etc…. What they mean is that there is an idea, an idea that people can be standardised, that there are certain things that we can justifiably say like “Mr Wilson’s cancer treatment should last 61 days and then he will be cured” or “all children of 11 years or more can know calculus and algebra” or “a house fire take 300 litres of water and 15 minutes to extinguish” or “it takes 3 officers to arrest 3 suspects and return them to the station for 2 hours of questioning”, what is wrong with these statements should be alarmingly obvious, they are all false predictions, forecasts that cannot be relied upon. This is what you are supposed to consent to, the idea that there are knowable statistics that can be used to set targets, to make charter promises, to rely upon when it comes to pinpointing failure after the fact. It is well known that data is useful but it is as well known amongst statisticians that large data produced from large groups cannot be relied upon for predicting the future of any single individual, it is also well known that data produced from observing small groups cannot be trusted to form a general rule of large groups.

But what are the consequences of this failure? What is it that happens and how does failure manifest itself in this sector? We can notice if we look closely, I have the answer and it is not at all a surprise, our management team first blame up and then punish down, the rod comes out for the back of the worker, not literally thankfully, at least not yet, but they will suffer. I have seen it myself too many times to sum it up in any other way but cynically. Management lurch from one bad endeavor to another yet ensure the bottom line (the numbers) by stripping away the staff on the ground and asking more of the remainder until workers are giving everything but blood and suffering mentally and physically for their ever decreasing remuneration. A remuneration which is not allowed even to keep pace with the increasing costs of living while management continually reward their own failures with new titles and new positions with which to gain further monies; they throw needed resources and funds at external agencies to assess, report and advise on how better to do their jobs. Can you imagine the look on your boss’s face if you told them you couldn’t do your job properly and they would have to get someone else in as well to do it for you?

What are we paying these idiots for if they cannot do their jobs properly? And we are paying them, don’t for a second think that you are not involved in this process, it is after all your money, your taxes that fund this system. A system that allows for the destroyer of a college to become the advisor of success to another, and the failed replacement of that first moron to slink away with coin in pocket only to emerge as part of the management structure of another unsuspecting educational establishment.

How do they sleep at night?

Paul Simon Wilson