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A system, they say, is more than the sum of its parts. Of a structured system, like an engine, a computer or a human being, this is certainly true. But of an organisation, like a committee, a corporation or a government department, it is not. As I have observed throughout my career, a piece of software designed by an artisan usually works. A piece of software designed by a committee usually doesn't - at least, not until it has run about an order of magnitude over schedule and over budget. I wonder what a Rembrandt portrait would look like if painted by a committee of art students instead of by the Master himself.
It seems that the larger an organisation becomes, the less of an intellect it exhibits. Its apparent behaviour becomes more and more that of an idiot. Commercial companies are like this. Government departments, being larger, are more so. The most stupid and simple-minded of all is naturally the largest of all. It is the free market, which is, in effect, the general public. However, the general public is only a passive agglomeration of individuals. It does not act collectively against any single individual. It does not threaten or harm the individual directly. The largest form of collective which imposes itself as a unified entity upon the individual is the 'government department'. And in so doing it usually exhibits the behaviour of a complete cretin.
Its size gives it overwhelming power. However, perhaps the one thing above all which makes it so fearful and dangerous is its mandate. This in effect gives it the authority to operate as, what is in effect, a protection racket.
The local authority, for example, decides what services it is going to provide and the level and quality with which it is going to provide them irrespective of whether any of those who will receive them can afford them or not. I, as an individual, have no choice as to what services I receive or whether I receive them. The local authority is then able in effect to hold a gun to my head and demand payment. If I can't pay, I get my proverbial kneecaps shot off. This is the mechanics of a protection racket. What commercial business can supply its customers with what it thinks they ought to have and then has the right to extort the money from them, under threat, to pay for what it has decided to supply? No need for salesmanship! No competition! No choice!
It is assumed that the reason an organisation is granted such an omnipotent mandate is to enable it better to serve the people within its jurisdiction. But one must always remember that 'he who pays the piper calls the tune'. It is not the people who grant its mandate. It is the government. The government is not the people. Neither does it represent their interests. The government represents the interests of the favoured few who own the capital which finances the spin machine which influences the people to vote the government into power.
Consequently, each of these omnipotent cretins lives to serve the government. It has to justify its existence to the government: not to the people it supposedly serves. Therefore it reports to the government: not the people. It presents its reports in a form which looks useful to the government: not in a form which could actually be useful to the ordinary people within its jurisdiction.
A prime example is my local Training & Enterprise Council. It provides an excellent picture of the local economy from the point of view of inward investors. But it refuses utterly to undertake the simple one-off task of writing the bit of extra code necessary to generate an 'inverse view' from its database which would be of immeasurable value to a local person trying to find the right job.
One human being acting alone makes all his plans and decisions within the confines of his single mind. The human brain is a 100 billion-node network. It is able to process information along a vast multiplicity of threads. It is profoundly powerful, effective and efficient at what it does. It can organise the individual's activities. It can create great works of art. It can fathom ever-deeper mysteries of the physical universe. And so much more.
Committees, on the other hand, do not have this mechanism for massively parallel communication and information processing. Its members are constrained to communicating with each other through the crude and restrictive channel of linear language. This is prone to inaccuracy and misunderstanding. It is frequently incapable of carrying a new, yet obvious, concept or intent. And it is boringly slow.
Within the individual's brain, the 'Laws of Thought' are little understood. That famous work of George Boole addresses but a narrow aspect of the rules by which the mind processes thought. The laws of thought by which a committee operates, on the other hand, have to be expressed as rules written down in a linear script. As a result, they are necessarily and inevitable over-simplistic and inadequate for the all-encompassing purpose to which they are put. For this they are simply not of merchantable quality.
To my mind, the purpose of simple scripted rules should be to act as a framework of guidance for making individual judgements. In other words, the individual committee member or government officer should use his 100 billion node brain to assess each situation directly and render a common sense judgement, referring to the scripted rules only if and when necessary for general guidance.
Sadly, what really happens is that all the front-line point-of-delivery executives follow their organisation's over-simplistic scripted rules with ruthless precision as if they were the sole means of arriving at a decision. They follow the letter of the law: not its spirit. The total intellect of the vast organisation is therefore no more than the set of over simplistic scripted rules whose bland syntax its officers follow with uncompromising rigidity. Their 100 billion node cranial supercomputers act as no more than dumb terminals connected to a system with no more processing power than a roll-driven player piano.
Those who enact the rules in the first place are Members of Parliament and their advisers. These are of a middle to upper social designation - at or above the 'Volvos & patios' level. From their vantage point in the social order, they develop a perception of what those in all social classes and circumstances need and can contribute. However, having no direct experience of all social classes and circumstances of life, their perception is, for the most part, based on theory rather than reality. The truth is, they do not really know. They can only guess. And their guesses are based solely on what is conveyed to them through the symbolic syntax of written reports. If they lack any part of the spectrum of experience of their subjects, then they can never truly understand their subjects' lives, needs, circumstances and difficulties. Hence the rules they enact are inevitably rules designed for an imagined rather than the real world.
Those who enact the rules are the servants of the favoured few who own the capital which finances the spin machine which influences the people to vote them into power. It is not surprising, therefore, that they follow in the spirit of their masters - the spirit of self-interest. Consequently, the rules they enact are biased towards the interests of their masters rather than the people. They seek to minimise what they provide for the poor in order to minimise taxation of the affluent. To this end, they are engaged in an on-going process of tuning their rules so that, by default, they always fail safe on the side of authority at the expense of the individual. And like the terms and conditions of their corporate masters, their rules always place the onus upon the poor to know about, and claim, any benefits to which the rules reluctantly entitle them.
The enactors of the rules then encode them into written form. The rules thus become frozen into narrow linear scripted syntax. To the Members of Parliament who wrote them, they convey their view of society and how it should be regulated. However, those who deliver and expedite these rules are different people. They are not Members of Parliament. Some are lawyers and judges. But most are not of or above the 'Volvos & patios' level in the social order. Some are minimally skilled front-line juniors at Jobcentres and DSS offices. Others are VAT clerks and Inland Revenue inspectors. Each necessarily interprets what the symbolic representation of the rules means against the context of his own perception and understanding of life.
Those who make the rules regard the generic individual as even more stupid than the organisations which dispense them. For this reason, they usually encode the rules not into a natural language (eg English), but into a set of questions printed on a tick-box form. What most don't realise is that what is on the form is not English. It is an artificial language which comprises no more elements than there are questions on the form. Anybody trying to use it to claim a 'benefit' is unable to express anything about his circumstances which is not exactly co-incident with one of the questions on the form.
Consequently, what Members of Parliament meant to convey by a given piece of syntax, and what a Jobcentre desk clerk understands by it, are as different as their respective social levels and life experiences. And both are at least as different again from the social level, life experience, needs and circumstances of any given benefits claimant. The rules as enacted are a world apart from the rules as delivered.
I therefore question the fitness of these rules for the purposes for which they were enacted. By what criteria did comfortably paid Members of Parliament and their civil servants determine the amount my family and I 'need' to live on (whatever the word 'need' may mean). Did some of the most prominent of these people first test their rules upon themselves for prolonged periods and document their experiences before subjecting us unfortunates of society to them? Or did they determine the amount merely by thought and theory from the safe distance of their affluent life-styles?
An endless torrent of publicity material continually tries to convince the individual that these omnipotent cretins are there to serve: not to oppress. They present a polite and conciliatory disposition. But this is simply wrapping. Their intrinsic ethos is undeniably authoritarian. Their quest is to subjugate the individual through constraint and denial. By threat of deprivation, they rake those they perceive as idle escapees back into the bondage of corporate enslavement. Although their staff are obviously trained in the psychology of veiled interrogation, their veneer of professional politeness can never hide their organisation's callous attitude of patronising suspicion towards its subjects.
Each government department deals with a client or claimant unilaterally. It does not co-ordinate with any of its peers. At least, their impact on my life bears the character of this being so. The DSS assumes that a claimant is receiving what it understands to be his entitlements from the Local Authority, the Inland Revenue and others, and even different departments within the DSS itself. And it processes a claimant's claim on this basis. That the Local Authority may interpret that claimant's entitlement differently is immaterial. Whether or not he is actually receiving what it deems him to be entitled to is ignored. The onus is always on the claimant to make sure that he does.
One front-line operative (counter clerk) can interpret a claimant's entitlement one way while another in the same department and branch can interpret it differently. The same operative can interpret the same claim differently at different times, depending on how he feels or how tired he is. Whether or not a claim succeeds is influenced also by the level of clerical bloody-mindedness invoked by the personal chemistry between clerk and claimant. And because of the omnipotent power of these organisations, even a small administrative oversight by a lowly minion can all too easily result in the ruination of an innocent individual who is subject to its power.
Of all involved, the claimant is the least equipped and worst placed to negotiate and arbitrate a consistent interpretation of his circumstances and entitlements. Without any universal protector, he is buffeted and squashed between these different autonomous covens of rule-driven idiots with whom he is forced to deal.
In the context of the above, I must however say that I have occasionally encountered a rebel - an operative who is actually human who, despite being critically constrained by stupid rules, strives diligently to help his 'client'. Sadly, such noble beings rarely survive for long. They either get converted to the corporate ethos, or are eventually side-lined by a ruthless rule-worshipping Büroführer.
From the point of view of the subject individual, government organisations clearly do not fulfil their purported purposes to a 'merchantable' standard. In fact, for all too many they are downright dangerous and destructive. From the point of view of their architects (those who enact the rules and engineer the instruments of their delivery) they are perfectly successful. The dichotomy of view results because each evaluates them through different criteria. The first is an individual view. The second is a global view. To the government, these organisations work because (so we are told) they produce the correct result most of the time. They work in the majority of cases. To the unfortunate among the individuals with whom they deal, they simply don't work.
The government view is derived from capitalism. They consider human individuals as a commodity in the same way a wholesaler regards his fruit. Most of his vegetables arrive fresh. A percentage of waste is acceptable. Government agencies (so we are told) deal with most people fairly. A percentage of unfortunates is acceptable.
I once wrote and implemented an accounting system. It processed invoices and other transactions. Would it have been acceptable to my client if my software processed 99% of invoices all right, but allowed 1% to go wild? I think not. Yet it is acceptable for a national insurance system to leave an odd sick individual untreated and destitute while paying out to multitudes who hardly need it. And it seems not to matter when a self-employed person on low income is denied a desperately needed rebate which is granted automatically to a person on the same income working for an employer.
Sentient beings are not inanimate commodities. Every person on this planet is equally precious. The parable of the lost sheep is the perfect model by which the collective should deal with the individual. If the system fails for one, it is a failure: 99% is not good enough.