We’re doomed. It’s partly the fault of the staggeringly successful campaigns of doubt and denial over the last thirty five years, that are still happening – the fossil fuel propaganda campaigns like the one just starting up (Noor, 2024). Those campaigns stopped us taking action that would have delayed the onset of the ferocious warming we are seeing (and you ain’t seen nothing yet).
But there’s a far deeper problem than opposition by almost pantomimely-obvious villains. It’s a problem which anyone who’s been an “activist” for any length of time, especially in local issues, will understand. Douglas Adams, at the beginning of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has the hapless human Arthur Dent protesting that the Council never told him about the plans for a bypass that would destroy his house in time for him to lodge a complaint. The dialogue goes like this –
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
Billy Bragg sang about it
“God bless the Civil Service,
The nation’s saving grace
While we expect democracy
They’re laughing in our face…”
It’s the problem of what we now call the Professional Managerial Class (though faceless bureaucracy obviously goes back a lot longer). I just want to pick up on three recent examples, but there are so many others that you could choose from (see Vaughan, 2023 for a brilliant account). My examples are all United Kingdom, but I believe the same dynamic plays out everywhere. One is the Grenfell Tower atrocity (Macleod, 2018) where residents were trying their absolute damnedest to get clarity and openness and the council and the arm’s length management company. And were given the runaround stonewalling blocking them and then the building caught fire. So many people died.
Secondly, the Lucy Letby horror where an ICU nurse was killing babies. The doctors who figured it out pleaded with management to bring in the police, were stonewalled and ultimately were forced to offer an apology to Letby! Why? Because the people running the hospital were more interested in its (and their) “ good name” than in protecting patients.
Finally most “recently”, in terms of attention but longest in terms of how long the shit’s been going on, is the Post Office Horizon scandal, where lives were ruined people committed suicide, bankruptcies, reputations destroyed etc. Because, well, frankly, the people at the top of the Post Office were looking at their bonuses which would only get bigger if they could go ahead with the privatisation. And if they had to admit that the computer system was a dud, well, that would impact on the value of the company. And so they just kept turning a blind eye (or worse), they just kept passing the buck. And worse.
But the problem is not (just) some evil overlords. The problem is that civil society is in the grip of opaque structures. But the problem is also the people running these systems. But these are not “bad” people, per se – it’s because they are rewarded for certain ways of being and seeing.. There are incentives, you can call them perverse incentives, if you like, but really, if they are the norm, they’re not “perverse”.
What to do about this? Well, the traditional thing is, let’s have more regulations, well, “let’s have a clear out and hire other people.” But those other people will have the same incentives. The “systems” will endure. They will absorb critique and critics (check out this example from the US!).
So you would need to change the incentive structures. But at the same time you also need to strengthen the incentives for people to dissent, and say “this isn’t good enough. Something’s wrong here.” Everyone’s got mortgages, kids wanting new video games, sneakers or just food in their bellies. And the cost to individuals, if they do blow the whistle is enormous. Whistle-blowers generally get shafted. It’s basically the equivalent of their bodies being put up on a giblet at the turnpike, as a warning to everyone else. “You can either shut your mouth or have your head cut off, it’s your choice”….
So unless you’re willing to disincentivize shitty behaviour and incentivize or protect good behaviour you’re going to get the same response.
Seventy-two people died at Grenfell. Letby killed, I think was it seven babies. And Post Office, there were I think four direct deaths. On one terrible level these are “rookie numbers,” as it were. But each one is such pain, ripples of pain and despair… Pulling back, what’s happening to our species, and all the other species on this planet, the amount of death, the amount of pain and suffering is frankly beyond calculation. The Sixth Extinction is just really beginning. As I have been fond of saying for a while now, “The second half of the twenty-first century will make the first half of the twentieth century look like a golden age of peace, love and understanding.” Getting to 2050 more or unless unscathed is now looking like a stretch target, of course.
Here we are, unable to speak up, because the bureaucracies will wear you down, weigh you down (1). These bureaucrats will all the while think that because they are winning that this is evidence that they are clever
They think that they are good, but they’re not. In the Grenfell situation, or the Countess of Chester, or the Post Office, it’s exactly the same mentality because it’s exactly the same reward structures; make sure that your political masters and/or bureaucratic masters are not inconvenienced, and you will be rewarded. Don’t do this, and you will be swiftly and effectively punished.
(Brooks and Wallis)
The consequences are different in the short-term, but in long-term, they add up to the same thing.
So, unless you have the rigorously effective civil society, organisations watchdogging and forcing these organisations to be transparent and admit their mistakes and actually learn from them (saying “never again” doesn’t count, because there’s always an again), you will get the same results. And those organisations have to renew themselves, resist becoming stale, becoming complacent, becoming captured by those they are challenging.
Since it seems, based on the last fifty years or so, that we can’t have formidable ferocious civil society organisations (because it always devolves into smugosphere and emotacycle and the rest of it,) we will get the same results. Working people and all the other species we “share” this planet with will continue to get the shitty end of the stick.
And on so many levels I’m glad I did not have children; I don’t need to look into their eyes and say, “yeah you’re toast.” Those of us born between 1950 and 1975 or 1980 (the date is fuzzy) – we were the ones who could still have – should have – turned it around. We didn’t and now everything is completely fucking fucked.
Footnotes
- So a trivial example, I put in a Freedom of Information Act request to Greater Manchester Combined Authority. They arsed me about repeatedly, not giving straight answers.. I started putting in more frequent ones, and they then plated the vexatious requests card. I’m taking it to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
References and other reading
Brooks, R. and Wallis, N. 202? Justice Lost in the Post: How the Post Office wrecked the lives of its own workers. Private Eye
Flinders, K. 2021. Fujitsu escaped huge lawsuit because Post Office behaved so badly in Horizon scandal. Computer Weekly, November 4.
MacLeod G. 2018. The Grenfell Tower atrocity, City, 22:4, 460-489, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2018.1507099
Noor, D. 2024. US oil lobby launches eight-figure ad blitz amid record fossil fuel extraction. The Guardian, January 10
Vaughan, J. 2024. From Hillsborough to the Post Office Scandal. Labour Hub, January 14l
See also
Associationalism – Associationalism or associative democracy is a political movement in which “human welfare and liberty are both best served when as many of the affairs of a society as possible are managed by voluntary and democratically self-governing associations.”[1] Associationalism “gives priority to freedom in its scale of values, but it contends that such freedom can only be pursued effectively if individuals join with their fellows”
Interstitial Democracy – Interstitial revolution is a theoretical means of societal transformation through progressively and strategically enlarging spaces of social empowerment. Interstitial revolution (or transformation) builds on the concept of prefigurative politics which has a long history in anti-capitalist thinking, going back nearly two hundred years in the anarchist tradition. Prefigurativism is neatly summed up by the early twentieth century Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World which declared: “By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the old.
Monitory Democracy
https://article-14.com/post/the-rise-of-monitory-democracy–64defdff16867
marchudson.net 
So true, so very true.