Rules, Rules Rules

Because that's all they can do.

I was pleased to be invited to appear on the Coffee and a Mike podcast last week, hosted by Michael Farris. We mainly discussed issues raised in my last few essays, including loss of hope and despair, and what we might do. If you really have nothing better to do with your time, you can find the podcast here:

These essays will always be free, but you can support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and the links to other sites that you frequent. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️

And thanks again to those who continue to provide translations. Versions in Spanish are available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting some Italian translations, and has set up a dedicated website for them here. Now, where were we?

Once upon a time, I was sitting with group of military officers listening to a lecture about the landings in Gallipoli in 1915, the prelude to one of the great British military disasters of the First World War. The lecturer handed round copies of the operational orders given to the Brigade commanders for the landings, and they were indeed very comprehensive. Each Brigade had an objective, but there was also a mass of detailed requirements: how many rounds of ammunition each man was to carry, what should be taken for the pack animals, issue of rations and so forth. What was missing, asked the lecturer?

It was fairly obvious when you thought about it, but it took a few seconds for the penny to drop, and then one of the military officers said, ”what was the purpose of the operation?” And indeed, that was what was missing. In all the mass of detail, no-one had thought to tell the commanders what the higher objectives of the operation were, which is why the one Brigade that actually achieved its objective then returned to the ships, because they had no orders about what to do next. But every man did have the right amount of ammunition.

It’s easy to criticise British military leadership in the First World War, and there’s a whole series of popular culture stereotypes about stupid Generals, some of which are actually justified. But we’re dealing with a systemic problem here, which follows on from my discussion of the purposes of organisations a couple of weeks ago, and in fact is relevant to my argument last week about the inability of the West to distinguish between different levels of conflict. I want to enlarge on those points here, and to argue that our modern society proliferates ever more rules and laws because those in charge have abandoned any concept of higher and longer-term purposes, and are in any event intellectually and personally incapable of conceptualising and pursuing them. The pointless rituals and formalities that make up so much of modern life, and the trivia into which political and intellectual discourse have descended, are symptoms of the need to appear active while being unable to do anything of importance, and to replace traditional concepts of common sense and custom with the kind of obsessively-detailed rules that Liberalism is so fond of, and which provide well-paid jobs for the Professional and Managerial Caste (the PMC).

If we nod back to the Gallipoli example for second, it was obvious that the objective—knocking Turkey out of the war and opening a second front in the Balkans—was a sensible one, and historians today find fault much more with the execution than with the concept itself. There’s an interesting military sociology point here: the British Army before 1914 had had more than fifty years of colonial wars with small-unit actions, where junior officers had to decide what to do on their own. This made the Army of 1914 very good at the tactical level. But by the same token its officers were completely unused to thinking in terms of large-scale operations with strategic objectives, so they fell back on doing what they knew. The German Army, in some ways the most developed, had commanders who were used to commanding very large units, and planning and exercising their use for high-level strategic objectives. Their Army operated on the principle that subordinates were given a great deal of latitude towards defined objectives, and, since they had all been trained the same way, they would tend to act consistently without the need for detailed orders.

It’s not hard, I think, to see how this kind of dichotomy exists in organisations today. As I’ve said before (discussing corruption, for example) Liberalism distrusts any form of tradition or informal system of ethics, and has none of its own, and thus seeks to meet the need with detailed rules. These rules cannot cater for every situation, so new rules must be added, and these new rules create conflicts with old rules, which have to be addressed by even newer rules, and so on in an ever-increasing spiral of complexity, which eventually has to be sorted out by highly-credentialed and highly-paid specialists. This is inevitable once you adopt the idea that ordinary people are inherently incapable of resolving issues for themselves, and that they therefore need formal and explicit guidance, and even direction, on everything. Whilst genuine expert guidance can sometimes be helpful in everyday life, in recent years it has entirely taken over basic functions of life and society in the West, without adding anything to the outcome.

Now the subject of rules and bureaucracy has been explored by others recently, notably by David Graeber, but here I want to take a somewhat wider perspective. My argument, briefly, is that in its enthusiasm for modernisation and rationality, Liberalism has created a conceptual vacuum where informal rules and common assumptions used to be. This has to be filled with ever more rules, but rules can never take the place of established conventions and provide no guidance on how to behave when unexpected events occur. Organisations, and even society as a whole, thus become less capable, as they are increasingly only able to follow rules, and are less and less able to address problems that in the past would have been pragmatically manageable. There develops in turn a belief that the solution to any problem is more detail and more precision in rules, which is hardly, of course, the way to manage a political crisis. An excellent example of this is the recourse to sanctions against Russia since 2022: because the seriousness of the situation exceeds the capacity of western leaders to deal with it, they take refuge in one thing they know about, even if sanctions are recognised be useless and even counter-productive. And of course all the effort that goes into drawing up endless lists of sanctions is redirected from other, more useful, pursuits, and strengthens the hand of the technical experts at the expense of those who understand politics. This is why the West has learned nothing during the crisis with Russia, and indeed forgotten some of the little it did know.

Now before we go any further, I am going to offer something that may surprise you: a defence of bureaucracy and rules. Weber, for all that he was writing about Ideal Types as usual, correctly identified some of their main advantages, which have essentially to do with fairness and predictability.  If you need a visa for foreign travel, and whether you get one or not depends on how the consular official happens to be feeling that day, if the tax inspector who evaluates your tax return applies their personal standards of analysis, which might be different from their colleague at the next desk, then you would have a legitimate complaint. In this sense, rules are nothing more than the writing down of a common understanding of how things should be done. For that reason, organisations left to themselves tend to have the fewest actual rules compatible with their proper functioning. When I joined the British public service, there were remarkably few “rules,” in the popular sense of the term, and the pay system, for example, was very simple and completely transparent. By the time I left, rules had proliferated everywhere to the point where they got in the way of actual work, and the pay system had become so complex that nobody really understood it, and its bizarre consequences were widely resented. What had happened, of course, was the invasion and occupation of the public sector by those who were selling rules and procedures from the private sector.

So the fundamental distinction is between rules that set down in simple terms how an organisation is going to work to achieve its objective, and rules that try to dictate how work will be done, irrespective of what the work is, or what the purpose is. Because purveyors of the second type of rule tend to come from outside, and are in search of money, power or both, rules that are entirely process-determined come to predominate after a while, and the organisation is so busy chasing its own tail that it forgets what it is actually for. An organisation that asks “have we ticked all the boxes?” and not “are we doing the right thing?”is an organisation in trouble. Moreover, the insidious thought starts to develop that because you are ticking all the boxes, the organisation must be functioning well. Yet in reality, you can tick all the boxes in one of these fashionable schemes like Investing in People (which I find to my surprise is still going) and still have an unhappy and resentful staff in a non-functional organisation.

I’m not sure if it’s better or worse now, but there was a time when senior managers would gather people together and ask questions like “why are we all here?” or “what is the mission of this organisation?” To which the only honest answer, of course, was, If you don’t know that, why are you in your job?  But the belief that organisations had to have precise defined sets of objectives, cascaded to all levels, was rapidly adopted throughout the western world, and left a trail of havoc behind it. It was a typical example of the Liberal impulse to take things which are basically simple, and to turn them into highly complex processes which demand time, effort and money, and the employment, of course, of members of the PMC, whose only real skill lies in ticking boxes and getting others to tick them, and who are incapable of contributing to the real objectives of the organisation. And these objectives are often simple, or at least simple to express. The result, of course, is a great deal of useless and counter-productive work, if “work” is really the word. I was told a story of a department in a British government Ministry, largely concerned with negotiations of different kinds, which was told it had to provide its masters with some kind of quantifiable objectives for the year. In vain, apparently, they pointed out that negotiations are a collective activity that by definition depends on your partner or partners, and not something where success can be quantified. Ultimately, and in desperation, someone came up with the idea of reducing the number of security breaches, where confidential documents were left out on desks by mistake, and that was accepted. I don’t know how the rest of the story turned out, but you can imagine the pointless waste of resources that that entailed.

The reality is that most detailed rules are unnecessary, unless they concern, for example, legal provisions, complex tax questions, or issues that are highly personality-dependent. But even above and beyond the detail, there are often general rules drawn from experience and common sense which people understand and generally stick to. For example, if you work in national or local government and deal directly with the public, you would traditionally have been socialised into the understanding that you should try to be polite and patient in your work. But that’s not good enough, and there is no money in it or jobs for non-specialist PMC types. So you will get something like the following

“(Organisation X) has zero tolerance for rude or uncivil behaviour by staff. Discriminatory or hateful conduct against customers because of gender, colour, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or degree of ableness  will not be tolerated. All customers should be treated equally, with special concern for women, children, the elderly, the differently-healthed, the differently-abled, sexual minorities, minority racial and religious groups and other marginalised and vulnerable populations.”

That started as an attempt at parody, but maybe it isn’t. The fact is that once you start down that road, you turn what should be a simple guiding principle into a bureaucratic nightmare, which doesn’t even benefit the “customers.” It’s also a substitute for sensible management, and one of the dirty secrets of the PMC is that they are actually lousy at management, because management in the traditional sense is something you learn from experience and emulation, not from an MBA course. Once again, incapacity to actually do the job is hidden by a cloud of meaningless garbage.

This is just one example of some of the real problems of personnel management and leadership which, in the traditional sense of the term, means getting people to work happily and effectively together for a common objective. This is actually quite difficult to do, and in general is not done at all these days, because it involves experience, empathy, patience and other things that are not taught on MBA courses. How much easier to treat human beings as “resources,” like money, furniture and IT equipment. For any organisation, recruiting, identifying and promoting the right people, and then putting them in the right jobs, was once a major preoccupation. It isn’t now, because it’s too difficult, and MBAs don’t see the need anyway. Evaluating people, looking at what they can do and what they might be capable of, ensuring they have the right experience and training, is complicated. How much easier, and how much more powerful it makes you, to simply dictate that positions will be filled in particular ways. So a senior executive, who couldn’t lead a troop of Boy Scouts, nonetheless dominates the process of recruitment and promotion, according to racial or other quotas. That’s easy, because it’s just about numbers: have we got enough of this or that group? The result is that, whatever you think of diversity initiatives, they mean that management of organisations has progressively passed into the hands of amateurs, who can’t actually manage, but can at least count to ten.

And this is true more generally. You might think that detailed objectives and evaluations would improve management, but actually the reverse is true. Why? Well, apart from the obvious cost in time and effort, it’s almost impossible to find quantifiable objectives that actually have significance. Take medical trials for example. You would expect that detailed objectives would be set by deep experts, wanting to make sure that everything was effectively run. But no, it’s much more likely that what will be evaluated is the number of trials conducted, the number of doses administered, whether interim reports were presented on time, whether the right impact statements were produced, whether the right safety assessments were carried out, and whether the budget was respected. Everything, in other words, except what was important. Such procedures give amateurs control over the work of experts, and ruin organisations because they make them obsessed with procedure. Nothing is more deadly, according to doctors I have spoken to, than the “Protocols.” You take this medicine this many times a day for this number of days, and you have this treatment every month for three years, because that’s what the book says. It doesn’t matter who you are, all that matters is the Protocol, because if that has been followed then the doctors cannot be held responsible if something goes wrong. And if it’s not in the Protocol, you can’t do it, even if it makes sense.

Consider the management of Covid, in all its complexity. It’s generally accepted that Covid was too big a problem for western governments in their enfeebled and PMC-infested state, actually to manage. In something like panic, they set out to find not necessarily the best solution but the easiest. After ignore it, and then play it down, fear set in, and they looked around desperately for measures which were easy to quantify and keep track of, even if they weren’t very effective. Vaccines were the answer, because you didn’t actually need advanced public health knowledge (which the PMC in general doesn’t possess) to introduce them. And therefore the “management” of the crisis featured public relations campaigns, collection of statistics, vilification of critics, and boasting about numbers of jabs administered: all skills the PMC possesses, or likes to think it does.

If the PMC approach to managing such a crisis ignores common sense (deal with infectious diseased transmitted through the air by preventing people breathing them in in the first place) it not only discredits western governments in the eyes of the citizens, it also discredits public health more generally: thus the return of measles, for example. But the wider problem is the fixation of the PMC’s Liberal agenda with rational management of things it thinks it understands, rather than with the application of common sense and experience. Health (and revealingly, not “medicine”) is an area where there is a huge amount of data from hundreds or thousands of years of n=a gigantic number observation. If the same plant is valued for the same health-giving or medicinal qualities in several different and unconnected civilisations, well, then, there might be something worth investigating. If this or that technique or therapy is recommended by people you know and trust, then you might as well try it. If Chinese doctors have been trained in the same way for thousands of years, if they diagnose problems according to common analytical methods, and if their remedies are anecdotally at least as effective as western medicine, well then it would be worth taking account of them. Being a complete layman, I assumed that when doctors talked about “Evidence” based medicine, this was the kind of evidence they meant. But apparently not: what they mean is primarily Random Controlled Trials, and nothing else, as this very helpful article from the indispensable Naked Capitalism site makes clear. The problem is that many public health measures are not susceptible to this kind of approach, and in any case many of the results are enthusiastically interpreted and applied by PMCers with at best a limited grasp of statistics. Do you know the joke about why you shouldn’t carry a parachute in a light aircraft? Random Controlled Trials have not been conducted to discover whether they are effective.

What these examples have in common is a patrician, credentialed, distaste for the experiences of ordinary people, for the value of wisdom and tradition, and indeed the importance of sheer common sense. Much of the PMC’s professional life consists of playing with numbers, without necessarily understanding how to do it properly, still less what the numbers actually apply to, or what the consequences of using them are. This has turned the management of institutions (and society, as we’ll see in a moment) into the crude measurement and enforcement of often arbitrary targets and rules, unrelated to real life

All this is made much more problematic, by the rather schizophrenic way in which the PMC approaches rules. Their heritage, if we can call it that, is in the adolescent rebellions of the 1960s, which were, for the most part against “rules.” And it’s true that, say, sixty years ago, there were more overt “rules” in society than there are now. For example, schools enforced uniforms in most countries, which was felt to be an unacceptable encroachment on personal freedom and choice. But schools that abolished rules about uniforms soon found that they were replaced by informal rules generated by pupils themselves, usually under the influence of the media and advertising. Everyone has stories from the 1980s and later of children bullied unmercifully because they didn’t come to school in the latest expensive trainers. What used to be rules established by parents (“you’re not going to school dressed like that!”) are now rules established through the Internet. So in France, I gather from teachers in the front line, there are now TikTok videos showing how to make clothes that almost, but not quite, violate the law against overtly religious dress at school. So half of the girls (I was told) turn up in these, while the other half turn up in cut-off tank tops that would be thought provocative in a discotheque.

What the PMC didn’t realise, was firstly that “anarchy, no rules OK!” was a joke, not a political programme, and that secondly in the absence of formal rules, two things happen. One is that informal rules are then made by the most powerful (prisons are largely run by gangs these days, after all), the other is that people establish rules for themselves which might not be those that the PMC would wish. “Rules” in universities were one of the first things to be thrown on the bonfire in the 1970s, especially those regarding personal conduct. But a frightened PMC has been obliged in the last couple of decades to introduce rules that make everyday life in North Korea look relaxed. by comparison. Whereas in the past there were often simple rules which people took pleasure in violating (“no visitors in your room after 10pm” for example), these days students are likely to be subject to highly complicated but vaguely-expressed rules, whose application is largely subjective and often random, and which are the result of competing power groups each trying to influence the behaviour of students and staff in different ways. You might think it would be sensible to get people together to discuss common-sense rules for living collectively: but the PMC doesn’t do sensible, and the people who administer universities these days don’t have the management and personal skills any more to think beyond simple clichés and the appeasement of various power groups.

This is a particular case of the attempt to control institutions through detailed rules, rather than asking how they can best and most happily function. It’s always been the case historically that people make friends, and find romantic partners at work and at university, probably more than in any other environment. A worthwhile organisation has therefore always had rules like “don’t make an **** of yourself” or “don’t abuse your position,” but the PMC doesn’t do common sense and good judgement either. Indeed, I sometimes think that the PMC is against the concept of judgement entirely: it only trusts what can be extracted from a spreadsheet, or read word for word from a long and complex document. For example, the last couple of decades have seen the widespread entry of women into the workforce in prestigious and well-paid jobs (since few struggled to become coal-miners), and often in environments of aggressive competition with men for money and power. A sensible organisation would have looked at this, and considered how it could be managed with the least dislocation and with the greatest benefit for the staff and the organisation. But the PMC doesn’t do sensible, and so the response, if you can call it that, is based on long, complicated and generally unenforceable “policies” usually drafted by outside lobby groups. We’re back again to organisation that don’t know what they want, and arrogantly spurn all experience and all pragmatic solutions.

I’ve never myself particularly enjoyed working at home, and I don’t think that “virtual offices” function very well, given the fact that personal contacts account for much of an organisation’s effectiveness, and that in any case such things as recruitment and promotion are really impossible to do virtually. But I wonder whether the reluctance to return to the office that has been so much a feature of post-Covid isn’t linked, somehow, to the mass of poorly thought-out and badly applied rules that people in organisations have to put up with today. How much easier to be at home, to limit your interactions with colleagues to email and chat, to provide as few occasions as possible for people to complain about your conduct, and to fly as much as possible under the radar of the Thought Police. It’s a pretty sad comment on the state of organisations, but then I’m suggesting here that the notional role of organisations is too difficult for most of them to perform, so they spend their time torturing their workforce instead.

Some would argue that all this is becoming increasingly a feature of society as a whole, and that people increasingly find that relationships with others, or for that matter with institutions, are just too difficult and potentially dangerous. In the end, it’s just easier to spend the evening at home with a take-out pizza and Netflix, even if it’s less satisfying than a meal out with friends or a partner. But in some ways that’s a good example of how traditional norms have vanished, but have not not replaced by anything except confusion. Let’s say you and a business colleague have lunch to talk about something professional. In my day, the man would always offer to pay, because that reflected both his likely higher salary and more important position, and a vanishing but still influential sense of chivalry. (Indeed, when I was young, men frequently complained about how many things they had to pay for for women, since custom demanded it.) More recently, there is a sensible rule which says that the man should make a gesture indicating willingness to pay, but ultimately defer to the woman’s wishes. But I mention this example particularly, since in the last couple of months I have read both that an offer to pay in a restaurant by man can be perceived as a micro-aggression, and also that the lack of such an offer can be considered a micro-aggression as well. So in the end, why not just exchange emails? It’s less efficient, of course, but also less dangerous for both sides.

I’m far from an uncritical enthusiast for social rules of the past, whether private or institutional. But they had the priceless advantage of providing a common point of reference, and so a common vocabulary and set of concepts. Indeed, one of their main uses was furnishing a set of ideas for young people to reject, and to try to circumvent. School uniform may have been compulsory, but there were always ways of cheating, like wearing your tie at half-mast, or making sure your shoes were scuffed and filthy. There were ways of testing parental patience, and wise parents didn’t try to enforce rules too rigidly. The result was to help in the process of what Jung called “individuation”: the process of becoming an individual, which for most people doesn’t conclude until the early twenties. Today’s adolescent political culture is, I’m convinced, largely the result of the absence of formal rules for middle-class youngsters to rebel against.

Whilst working-class families tended to enforce rules more strictly, children of middle-class parents increasingly found that they had nothing to rebel against, and so had to seek out new ways of shocking their parents. One of the slogans of the 1968 student rebellion in France was “let’s invent new sexual perversions:” old perversions apparently were now not shocking enough. ( As it happened, one of the chosen perversions was pedophilia, which was a popular cause among left-wing intellectuals in the 1970s.) But the children of the children of such people now find themselves thrown, with little warning, into a world of highly complex and sometimes unwritten rules, covering every aspect of personal behaviour, and whose unwitting violation can end their academic or professional careers. No wonder the incidence of depression and even suicide is so high among the children of the PMC. What did they think was going to happen?

Well, they were naive. It’s unfortunately true that making and imposing rules on others is something that is disturbingly common, especially among the more credentialed. The PMC tends anyway to attract authoritarian personalities (it’s pretty much a requirement for entry into the Inner Party) and it is convinced not only that it is right and superior, but that its credentials give it the right to push the rest of us around. But because it rejects all accumulated wisdom and common sense, it is obliged to try to fill the existential void with more and more detailed rules and regulations, in the vain hope that one day it will have covered all the possibilities.

So long as organisations have no real idea what they are for anymore, and as they are increasingly incapable of carrying out even the functions they cannot escape responsibility for, they will proliferate rules to give the impression of activity, and to control those who work for them. PMC cadres who see organisations they work for just as assets to be looted, cannot with a straight face demand loyalty and hard work from their staff, which is probably disillusioned and angry anyway. In such circumstances, rules, and especially arbitrary rules adopted because of pressure from outside, are the ideal mechanism of control. It is not necessary to evaluate the competence and performance of staff, only their willingness to jump through ideological hoops. Since this virtually dictates that competent people will leave or retire, and incompetent people will be promoted, it is no surprise if most organisations are in deep trouble.

Common sense is not an infallible guide to what works best. You may perhaps say that traditional norms and practices reflect traditional power relationships, and you would not necessarily be wrong. But as I have pointed out on many occasions, “power,” in the sense made famous by writers like Foucault, is just a morally-neutral mechanism for actually getting things done. Such features as hierarchies of experience and aptitude, or traditional rules for personal interactions, can legitimately be criticised, but to demolish them and replace them with nothing is a certain recipe for making organisations, and society, non-functional. If organisations still retained some sense of purpose, and if the West retained any notion of a genuine society based on more than transactional  relationships, this would be less of a problem. But we are stuck with organisations that have generally forgotten what they are for, run by people who are only there to loot them, and all living in a society where life is increasingly just about commercial transactions. When you cannot give people hope, when you cannot provide them with a vision, when you cannot even do something as simple as suggesting a larger purpose in life, rules, rules and ever more rules are all you have to fall back on.