Perhaps he’s missing on purpose?

A strange phenomenon apparent to anyone who closely follows the public discourse, or indeed the discourse within any large, well-entrenched organization such as a major corporation, is what one might call the “success of failure,” that is, the persistence of elements within a society or organization that manifestly do not work.

The thesis of this piece is that the endurance of these elements can be explained by the fact that they are an effective way to camouflage a bad-faith power structure, and that examining how these failed institutions operate also reveals the fundamental contradictions that explain why power structures often feel the need to operate in a bad-faith mode, rather than engaging in an honest discourse about reform.

Essentially, failed elements within an institution create a structural magnet that attracts and then destroys idealist and reformist forces, much in the way that flypaper attracts and destroys insects. In such a magnet, management/government must appear open-minded and receptive to change when in reality it is not. The primary objective of this structural magnet is the embitterment of employees/citizens who will blame either each other or a faceless, unaccountable “they” for the failure of reform efforts.

In practice, this “flypaper strategy” usually consists of three main elements:

Pictured: New recruits

1.) An explicit rhetoric of “Just Around the Corner”: The organization must always seem on the verge of major change, but these changes must either never arrive or must be made ineffective when they do. This is the hidden driver behind many of the content-free meetings and seminars employees are forced to endure at most companies and government agencies. These time-wasting activities send the message that the problem is a lack of knowledge or lack of training on the part of the subordinates. Of course, no effective training is ever provided, or is perhaps not even possible given the stated goals of the reform effort.

Perpetually ineffective programs of reform also allow an entire level of management to justify its own existence, along with the inevitable swarm of consultants, inspirational speakers, etc., which this level of management often hires from among its social networks. It almost goes without saying that if real reform were ever successful, this class of people within the organization would find itself obsolete. Because of these factors, any such bad-faith “reform-oriented” management and its parasitic consultancy must maintain the illusion of immanent change even when the mission it has set out to achieve is either impossible or, if achievable, detrimental to their continued existence as an employment class.

2.) Use of scapegoating to suppress or deny contradictions: Failed institutions often serve to mask contradictory principles that, taken on their own, support the ideology of wider organization, but must not be considered together lest their essentially antagonistic nature be revealed. For example, in the United States, the contradictory founding myths are Freedom and Equality. Within the current state of the nation, each produces the opposite of the other naturally in the course of the country’s development: Freedom leads to economic stratification and inequality, and equality leads to bureaucratic control and a curtailment of freedom.

However, in order for our society to survive on top of this contradiction, the populace must believe that these two principles are actually supportive of each other. If their true oppositional nature were to be revealed, the tendency to “pick sides” between the principles would lead to an increased risk of social strife. Thus a scapegoat is needed to explain why, for large sections of the public, neither freedom nor equality are available in satisfactory quantities. (Of course, these segments of society do not explicitly ask for an explanation. It is the intellectuals and the professional class, who usually have both freedom and equality in abundance, that articulate the largely incoherent discontent of their “inferiors.”)

Within these conditions, failed institutions are the perfect scapegoat. Currently, in the US government level, this scapegoat role is filled by the public welfare system in general and the public schools in particular. As both have managed to “fail” (or at least, have been portrayed to the public with the required image of failure) quite efficiently, and for some time, we can paradoxically expect these structures to perpetuate themselves into the future quite successfully, little changed in the method of operations, even if a layer of “privatization” is introduced to skim explicitly monetary as well as broader social profits off the system.

If only these systems operated correctly, so the endless cant goes, Americans could have both the freedom of the free-market economy and the equality promised in our founding documents. But alas, they do not work, but rest assured, we are doing all we can to fix them. But this ever-promised fix will be forever a mirage on the horizon.

Another example of contradictory myths can be seen in corporate culture: The conflict between the interests of employees, especially senior employees, and those of shareholders. This is the classic “principal-agent problem” of economics. Inefficient production methods here serve the scapegoat role: “Just as soon as our consultants implement these new efficient Six Sigma methods, there will be enough profit for everyone” etc. Of course, these new efficient methods are either never really implemented or never work as advertised if they are.

After all, any effective innovation is soon copied by competitors and becomes the new norm, so the advantages gained from it are short-lived. However, a policy of promoting ineffective innovations allows contradictory yet conciliatory promises to be made to naturally antagonistic interest groups in perpetuity. In the same way, impoverished parents might promise expensive presents to both of their children, presents that are of course “always never arriving,” to camouflage the fact that in reality they only have the money to buy a satisfactory present for one of them.

The sign actually says “job security.”

It seems that we have now solved the mystery of why seemingly useless institutions endure. Societies founded on contradictory premises use failed institutions to prevent these contradictions from coming to light and destroying the overlying culture. (In this way they constitute a form of “frozen dialectic,” or rather, constitute the armature that keeps the dialectic in its frozen state.) This is not a matter of any kind of conscious conspiracy. There is never any wicked cabal at the top suppressing the natural virtue and potential of an organizational culture. Rather, this is a phenomenon that arose through simple Darwinism: Those societies that cannot contain their contradictions tend to destroy themselves in apocalyptic confrontations of their opposing myths. The groups that have avoided this fate therefore must have developed an effective cultural immunity to this process, and often the deliberate maintenance of failed institutions serves this purpose adequately.

But this is not the end of the story. The success of failure serves another purpose altogether, at once more subtle and more fundamental than preventing a destructive “clash of myths.” This purpose is revealed by a darker rhetorical theme that provides the bass line behind the upbeat “Change Is Just Around the Corner” tune of managerial optimism…

On the surface, perhaps.

3.) A pervasive rhetoric of “permanent crisis”: It appears to be an iron law of history that any society that views itself as having achieved a permanent plateau of success will at the next moment begin to decay, becoming fat, lazy and weak from the spoils of its previous strength and vigor. No civilization of the ancient or medieval world escaped this fate — but it appears that modern organizations, both polities and corporations, have developed a (partial) immunity to this decay. In other words, the success of failure staves off its converse, the “failure of success,” which, as Toynbee found, is the timeless destroyer of all civilizations.

At first this appears intensely paradoxical. How can failed institutions ever make their organizational host stronger? The mechanics are as follows: Under a pervasive rhetoric of “perpetual crisis,” a society never allows itself to feel successful, no matter how much it has actually achieved. It is not allowed to begin the process of decay that comes from self-satisfaction because it is never allowed to have this satisfaction. No matter how stupendous its achievements, no matter how secure its immediate position really is, it must always be made to feel that certain disaster is just around the corner if its original vigor is not maintained.

There are two main methods modern nations have employed in maintaining this perception of perpetual crisis. The first was/is the Permanent Foreign Threat. This proved effective for some time, but too often the passions it provoked resulted in actual war, and in the nuclear age this became untenable. Of course, many still want to cast the forces of “terrorism” in this role, but the attempts to use a manifestly non-existential threat to promote national unity and concentrated effort have, by now, quite obviously failed.

Scary, but not scary enough.

This points up the need for a different kind of threat to maintain the crisis atmosphere: The Permanent Internal Threat. This could be an unpopular group within society such as homosexuals, Jews, “liberals,” “the brass,” “the politicians,” “the rich,” etc., that can be blamed for the perceived weakness of society. But this is still a dangerous course of action — after all, if actual people serve as scapegoats , they can be directly attacked, either financially or physically. Unpopular politicians can be voted out, minorities can be denied rights, etc. However, the perception of crisis must persist even after these measures have been taken, and if the scapegoating of actual people is promoted, then the society is on the path that leads to Salem, Auschwitz and the guillotine, and thus to its quick destruction via conflagration rather than a slow death through decay.

After all, the logic of sacrifice needs continual victims. Imagine a victorious but internally chaotic Nazi state trying to find someone to blame once all the Jews were gone. It is hard to imagine them not turning on each other in short order, as the Soviets quickly did once any real resistance to their regime had been eliminated.

There’s more where that came from, right?

Far better, then, to scapegoat an organization. Then it is “the system” that is at fault. The classic American example is Congress. Americans hate Congress, but love their own congressmen, re-electing them at an overwhelming rate, sometimes even after they have been revealed to be corrupt in the most literal sense of the word. Another good example from the US is that the overall opinion of the public school system is harshly negative, but most people believe that their local school is an exception, because they personally know the teachers and administrators. It is always a nebulous “system” that is targeted in the modern American blame-game, never the individuals “on the ground.”

So the conversation around the American dinner table tends to take the form of “The teachers at that school are mostly hard workers, they just don’t have the (resources, manpower, proper training, involved parents, take your pick) to succeed… and our congressman is an honest man, but he’s fighting against (lobbyists, the bureaucracy, the party, etc.) and can’t get anything done,” rather than what has occurred in other modern countries, especially in Europe before World War II, which essentially amounted to drawing up a list of enemies that very often included the local officials and functionaries.

This mentality, then, leads neither to fanaticism or revolution, but rather to the Holy Grail of bad-faith “reform” — permanent, and permanently failing, “innovations,” the inevitable collapse of which sustains the rhetoric of never-ending crisis. The society in the grip of this type of rhetoric guards itself against decay by employing a constant low-level smoldering of anxiety that is never allowed to reach full flame. The effect is similar to the medical phenomenon wherein allergy sufferers, though miserable because of their symptoms, actually have a lower rate of many serious diseases because their immune systems are always on high alert.

So, in the end, the failed institution is a threefold blessing to the society that maintains it, at least to those in charge. It defends an effective power structure from serious challenge by making it appear to be ineffective, it defends an inconsistent social mythos from collapse by making it appear to be consistent, and it defends successful civilizations from decay by making them appear to be unsuccessful.