Author: Simon Sheridan

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

One of the many curious (to use the politest word possible) features of the corona event has been how seemingly all the institutions of society failed at the same time. Governments failed to use their power to counteract the hysteria leading to a panic response that has made everything far worse than it needed to be. Opposition parties failed to critique the government’s failure. The media has resembled a rabid mob egging on a fight in a high school playground. With a few exceptions, the courts have done nothing to protect civil liberties. And the public has also done nothing to stop the worst excesses of the government response, although last weekend’s huge march in London may signify a change there.

As somebody who works in a field where we build systems, I can say from experience that what you really don’t want to do is to change too many things at once. Too much change creates uncertainty and uncertainty itself creates its own problems in what becomes a positive feedback loop. Uncertainty is where we are now. Politicians, who have been making it up as they go for more than a year now, are still flailing around for something to say that will alleviate the anxiety caused by uncertainty. This is leading to radically different rhetoric depending on where you are. In Texas and other US states, things are pretty much back to normal. Meanwhile, Canada has gone into an ultra-strict lockdown apparently having decided to wait for the virus to become endemic before doing so. In Australia, we continue to plumb new depths as the government made it illegal for citizens of the country who have been in India recently to return home adding to the large list of Australians waiting abroad to return to the country that is supposed to protect them. At this point, being the holder of an Australian passport probably affords you less rights than the average North Korean.

In a story that I found mildly amusing, the Mayor of Melbourne this week announced her intention to continue wearing a mask even after corona is defeated (whatever the hell that means). Her reasoning? People are not returning to the Melbourne CBD and it must be because they are still afraid of viruses. So, the Mayor will encourage continued mask wearing to get people to return. Of course, as I noted in my post on the economics of pandemic, the real reason people aren’t returning to the Melbourne CBD is because the Melbourne CBD has been an unpleasant place to go to for almost a decade. Well before corona hit, I was having discussions with co-workers about how you couldn’t get on public transport and you couldn’t even walk on the footpath anymore because there were simply too many people in the city. I’m sure that was great for business and great for the council’s revenues, but it wasn’t good for the workers. They had to keep coming though because of a peculiar quirk in Australian culture which holds that if you are not in the CBD of a capital city, you pretty much don’t exist and can’t possibly make a meaningful contribution to national life. Now that workers have an excuse not to go to the CBD, they are gleefully refusing to go. This has actually led to a boom in business for suburban cafes and restaurants who are more than happy to provide newly localised office workers with their daily food and drink. But the Mayor of Melbourne is being paid not to understand such facts. Being unable to face reality she will continue to wear her mask. Who knows what will come next? Perhaps we will have the Mayor sacrificing a chicken or doing a “people dance” to try and get the consumers to return and once again fill the cash registers of Melbourne city traders.

Of all the institutions of society that have failed us recently, I actually feel for the politicians who have an almost impossible job to do at the moment. The reason why Texas and Florida can do what they have done is because the citizenry in those places allow, if not demand, it. It’s possible the Mayor of Melbourne hates wearing a mask but that is the only thing to be done politically in the current climate.

There is one other group that I believe have found underwhelming in their response to corona and that is the public intellectuals. I exclude from this group the op-ed writers who earn their living from the mainstream media as they are part of the general failure of the media. What interests me more are the independent intellectuals and there are three I will single out here as I think their response to corona possibly reveals something interesting about making predictions. Note that this selection is a very specific set and I make no claim to its general validity, although, with a few exceptions, I have found very few public intellectuals who have done well at helping the public contextualise events. Rather, this group simply represents a few of the intellectuals that I happen to follow. The three in question are Nassim Taleb, John Michael Greer and Chris Martenson.

The latter two of these are members of the peak oil scene, that group of intellectuals who reason about the downward trajectory western civilisation is on caused by the fact that we are still wholly dependent on the finite resource of fossil fuels. Within that scene, Greer is a member of the ‘slow decline’ group while Martenson, if I remember correctly, is more of a ‘fast collapser’. The end result is the same, the difference is merely on whether you believe things will fall apart quickly or slowly. Taleb gained fame partly due to being one of the people to predict the GFC and, apparently, to profit handsomely from it by shorting the market. I outlined Taleb’s response and my main problems with it in part 3 of this series.

Let’s very briefly summarise the position of the three. Martenson responded to corona early on by starting up a daily youtube channel where he spent half an hour or so running through the latest ‘case’ numbers as they grew in various countries. This was in line with his numbers-based approach to collapse. His weekly newsletter at Peak Prosperity features a list of articles each week all showing data points as evidence to why collapse is right around the corner. He used the same format to report on corona. In doing so, he didn’t, as far as I saw, question what a ‘case’ was, how an increase in testing might affect case numbers or what it meant for the virus to be ‘new’. He simply took these as given and began counting. He was doing this well before the mainstream media took it up and as a result was at least somewhat responsible for fueling the panic early on.

Taleb also took the news that the virus was ‘new’ at face value. In his mind, it was because the virus was ‘new’ that no chance could be taken and his interpretation of the precautionary principle was that because the virus could in theory kill you, you must act as if it would kill you. Accordingly, he recommended the public to panic. He showed pictures of himself in an aircraft wearing an N95 mask and face goggles and excoriated anybody who dared suggest that we were overreacting. In so doing, he also contributed to the panic early on.

Greer’s position was more nuanced but could best be summed as silence. In one of his monthly open posts, he even forbade discussion of corona. He suggested that a couple of weeks lockdown would do people good and encourage them to reflect on their lives and maybe even lead to meaningful change for the better. He also predicted that the matter would be over quickly, a prediction with some basis in epidemiology (in fact, some epidemiologists pointed out that it would be over quickly if we didn’t lockdown and that the lockdowns would only drag things out unnecessarily. In hindsight, they were correct). All three positions were wrong but it’s not the fact that they were wrong that I think is interesting. After all, who could possibly have gotten it right? Rather, what is interesting is that they were wrong in quite specific ways relating to predictions that each man had made.

I’m not aware if Martenson made any specific predictions about a pandemic or about the year 2020. He is, however, a part of the fast(-ish) collapse school and so when things started to take off he applied that lens to what was happening. Accordingly, he predicted supply chain breakdowns and other disastrous outcomes. This was in accord with many other members of the doomer-prepper community for whom corona was finally the thing that would prove them right. The GFC didn’t quite do it. The housing bubble didn’t quite do it. But it would be a pandemic that would do it and trigger a global collapse. Taleb is on record as having predicted a global pandemic, something he was not shy about reminding us all about early last year, while Greer has made it a habit for some years of predicting the year ahead and he also does astrological readings about the fates of different countries. Unless I missed it, there was nothing in either his predictions or his astrological readings that suggested something like corona would happen early in 2020. Thus, all three men interpreted corona according to their predictions. Greer’s insistence that it would be over quickly and we would return to business as usual was in line with his predictions for 2020. Taleb’s insistence that a Spanish flu-style global pandemic was breaking out was in line with his prediction. Martenson’s insistence that supply chains were about to break and financial markets with them was in line with his broad predictions.

To be clear, my point here is not that they were wrong but how they were wrong. Taleb and Greer are the more interesting examples because their position was also out of character. Taleb could normally be relied upon as a consensus-breaker. Especially in the case where klueless government bureaucrats and other establishment ‘experts’ are running the show, Taleb for years would apply rigorous critical thinking to a subject and often find the main point of weakness where the argument would collapse. In the case of corona, that weakness is primarily the whole concept of a ‘new’ virus and the PCR test which purports to find that virus. Instead of finding those weaknesses, Taleb took it for given that the virus was ‘new’ and then went way off the deep end by promoting panic.

Greer, on the other hand, could have been forgiven for engaging in a massive exercise of I-told-you-so. Having been one of the most acute observers of the decadence of western civilisation in the last decade or so, all of a sudden all the neuroses, political corruption and propaganda came together at once. Many of the themes that Greer has talked about over the past decade were right at the fore most notably the corruption of institutionalised science, the rising fear and paranoia among the population and the grasping after solutions that benefitted large corporations at the expense of the general welfare. I initially thought Greer’s dismissive response was therefore an act of humility on his part. Rather than sink the boot in, perhaps he was choosing to remain silent and allow his past writings to speak. Another explanation, thoug, is simply that he had not predicted such a world changing event and his position was therefore to downplay the matter.

Of course, this is largely speculation. There may, of course, be all kinds of personal reasons that explain the behaviour of each man but those are not possible to know. Rather, it looks from the outside like a case of rigidity of thinking caused specifically by being a public intellectual engaged in making predictions. To be sure, this is one of the occupational hazards of that job. I have seen this play out on a small scale within my occupational field. What always seems to happen is that a public intellectual gets surrounded by a group of sycophants. This causes a number of problems. Firstly, the intellectual is given levels of adoration or respect that are almost guaranteed to cause ego problems. Secondly, the intellectual is never exposed to dissenting opinions and over time loses the ability to engage in critical thinking. Thirdly, the intellectual is drawn into having opinions about things outside their realm of understanding. Imagine being able to say anything and have a group adoring fans tell you you’re a genius every time. That is certainly a psychologically dangerous position to be in and it’s not hard to see how people might go off the rails or at least be led into error. Taleb definitely seems to have fallen into that trap.

It’s a dangerous business to make predictions and one of the reasons is that in the real world you can get state changes where all the old rules become redundant. Unless you know in advance what those rules are, any prediction you made is likely to be radically wrong. To my mind, this is what is behind the error made by Chris Martenson and others who try to predict what life will be like as peak oil bites. They tend to extrapolate forward based on the current rules. However, what is almost certain to happen is that the rules will be changed. Corona has already shown that as governments have implemented rules nobody would have though possible beforehand. What is perhaps the most surprising is how quickly many people treat the new rules as perfectly sensible and rational. One of the most ridiculous justifications I have heard to defend the current behaviour of the Australian government in leaving our citizens in the lurch overseas is that those citizens knew they were taking a risk by going overseas and now they have to wear the consequences. Really? Who on Earth could have predicted the government would arbitrarily make it illegal for certain citizens to return home or that State Premiers would close borders preventing people within Australia from returning to their own houses? Nobody could have predicted that and nobody did. To pretend otherwise is to engage in the most egregious form of post hoc rationalisation. But that is what is going on now. People are furiously making up stories for why the new rules make sense. They don’t want to admit the truth which is that the world is a chaotic place and becoming more chaotic. For that reason, it’s impossible to know what is going to happen in the next little while. All of the old rules are up for grabs and God knows what new ones will fill their place. This was, in fact, exactly Greer’s message in a post towards the end of last year. Now more than ever it’s wise not to become attached to predictions but to stay mentally lean and be ready for anything.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

A couple of months ago I was visiting friends when a eucalyptus tree fell on my car. I had parked on the street next to a park. It was a very windy day and from the kitchen of my friend’s house we heard a loud crack. This was not the sound of the tree hitting my car but rather the sound of the tree trunk snapping off near its base. We went outside to see what the noise was to find that the top of the tree had hit the car roof. By eucalyptus standards, the tree was not very large; perhaps just under ten metres tall. It put two large dents in the car which, fortunately, did not cost as much to repair as I had expected. All in all, it could have been worse.

My friend said I should see if the local council would pay for the damages. I had a vague recollection that damages were not normally paid for this kind of thing but I decided to have a look on their website. It turns out the council does allow applications for damages but the internet discussions I could find on the issue said it was not worth pursuing. A tree falling on a car is considered an act of nature and the council is not legally responsible, so I didn’t bother with an application.

Some people apparently think this rule is unfair. The tree was on council land and council are paid to maintain the trees. So, it should be their responsibility, they argue. However, this loses sight of the bigger picture. If the council is forced to pay every time a car is damaged by a tree on their land, they are very likely to conclude that it’s simply not financially viable to have trees at all. They might decide it’s cheaper in the long run to cut them all down. Imagine a suburb devoid of trees. Not only would it be incredibly ugly, it would get extremely hot in summer. The birds, insects and other creatures that depend on the trees would disappear. The whole point of the suburbs, the whole reason people moved there in the first place, was to enjoy ‘nature’. To remove the trees would defeat the entire point of the place but that would be the logical outcome of making council, a group of human beings, responsible for what are essentially acts of nature.

An objection could be made to this line of reasoning that council doesn’t need to chop the trees down, it could just spend more money on them. They could go out and hire an army of arborists to take care of the trees and we’d have the best of both worlds. There’s two problems with that. Firstly, it would cost a fortune. How many residents would be willing to accept a massive increase in their council rates to pay for such a scheme? The second problem is practical and relates to what can actually be done by the experts.

I once did a short course on horticulture at Melbourne University and one of our lecturers was Melbourne’s foremost tree expert. He told one of his war stories about a situation at one of Melbourne’s richest private schools. He had been called in to provide advice about the issue of whether some eucalyptus trees should be removed from the school playground. Some of the parents were insisting the trees were an unacceptable risk to the students. The school did not want to fell the trees partly because it’s very expensive to have a twenty metre high tree taken down (we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars) and partly because one of the trees had substantial heritage value. During the discussion, the parents demanded a guarantee that the tree would not fall or shed its branches. The horticulture expert said it was possible to be very sure that a tree would not fall as a tree must first get very sick or even die before falling and that would be quite obvious from looking at it. In relation to the risk of branches falling, there was less certainty as shedding branches is part of the lifecycle of a tree and can happen even though a tree is otherwise healthy. No guarantee could be given but with proper care and attention the risk was very minimal. This was unacceptable to the parents and the school caved in and had the trees removed, something which annoyed the horticulture lecturer. Surely the beauty of the tree, the shade it provides and the intrinsic connection between man and nature which is implied by our appreciation of trees in the first place made the risk worthwhile. What was the alternative? A school play area made entirely of concrete? Well, that’s more or less what the students at that school got.

The point of the story is that, even if you had an army of arborists, even if you have an arborist for each tree, you could not guarantee that a branch will not fall or even that the tree won’t fall. It is simply not within the power of man to know such things with certainty. It you were to hire such an army of arborists, you won’t entirely remove the risk and, in fact, you reduce the risk only a miniscule amount from where it already is. In any rational cost-benefit analysis, the plan simply doesn’t get done.

The concept of an act of nature thus has two parts. Firstly, it represents an understanding of the limitations of human knowledge. Secondly, it mitigates against outcomes like chopping down all the trees because, by acknowledging the limits of human knowledge it also acknowledges the limits of responsibility that may be borne by humans. It protects people from blame and therefore removes the risk of excessive intervention in order to avoid said blame. In this way it acts to protect the commons from intolerant minorities who use the threat of blaming those in power to gain concessions at the expense of the common good.

We can now use this concept of an act of nature and what happens when you forego it to see what has happened with the corona event.

Viral disease, and disease in general was, for most of human history seen as an act of nature. Nobody other than quacks tried to intervene for the simple reason that nobody knew what the cause was and intervention almost always made things worse. The breakthroughs made in the last hundred and fifty odd years have given us incredible new powers to fight disease. In relation to viral disease, the number of people dying, in particular among the young, has nosedived. But all the gains had already been made by the 1970s. In the last fifty years, deaths from viral disease have remained steady and almost all the deaths are now among the elderly for the very simple and obvious reason that as you get old your immune system, and your body in general, becomes weakened and can’t stave off disease so well. There has been no medical breakthrough to stop the aging process. We accept dying of old age as an act of nature. To do otherwise is delusional. But that’s exactly the delusion we got into at the start of the corona event. Remember how if you didn’t agree with the measures you wanted old people to die? That was the sign that we had thrown away the concept of an act of nature entirely.

As of March 2020, the public, or at least a very passionate section of it, was no longer prepared to accept any risk in relation to respiratory viral disease. The government, after a brief push back, decided to pretend that it had the answer to the problem in the form of lockdowns, hand washing, social distancing and masking to name just a few. Many public health bureaucrats are on record from before March 2020 saying that such measures are ineffective but that hasn’t stopped them getting on board and now pretending that they are. It was as if my horticulture lecturer had told the parents at the school that he could, in fact, guarantee that a branch would not fall on their children if such and such measures were done. He would have to know that the measures were useless but, given enough political pressure, he might play along. It’s not just governments now pretending that they have the answers. Employers have a corona policy detailing how they will keep their employees safe and shops and other public venues have their own measures.

All this behaviour is driven by the small but passionate minority who demand that others protect them from viral disease. Such people are just like the parents in my lecturer’s story who demand that the trees be cut down. In such cases, it is up to governments and those in power to stand up for the greater good but in our modern democracies, intolerant minorities have seemingly gained disproportionate power. Partly this is because vested interests have realised that they can co-opt the power of intolerant minorities to bend governments to their will. Partly it’s because the internet has allowed such groups to easily share information. The parents at a school are already networked and able to get results. The internet has allowed geographically separate intolerant minorities to network and get results too.

In any case, there are two problems with our corona response that are directly analogous to the problems with local councils and trees falling over and that follow directly from throwing out the concept of an act of nature. The first is financial. This issue is self-evident. Governments have loaded up on trillions of dollars of debt. Imagine how different corona would have played out if government had required citizens to pay for the whole thing upfront. Instead, our politicians tell us the testing and the vaccines are ‘free’. This kind of self-deception has become very common in modern democratic societies. Corona is different merely in the sheer magnitude of the deception.

The second problem is practical. Just like my lecturer said, there can be no guarantee that a branch will not fall off a tree. Similarly, there can be no guarantee that any person will not come down with viral respiratory disease. Governments were initially happy to allow the possibility of such a guarantee in the form of a vaccine but this was always a fantasy. It’s only now that the holes in this fantasy are starting to appear as we hear about yearly ‘booster’ shots and the fact that the ‘vaccine’ will not protect against infection in the first place. It was as if some group of arborists came into town and offered a treatment for the trees which would guarantee that the branches would never fall again. And we believed them. Only the branches continued to fall and the arborists changed their tune telling us we have to buy another treatment and we’ll have to buy a new treatment each year. The branches will keep falling but they will fall less frequently, whatever that means.

Of course, there’s no way to stop branches falling off trees and there’s no way to stop respiratory viral diseases from circulating. We already knew that. We’ll have to once again accept these basic facts of life as acts of nature and get on with it. We could do it tomorrow if the political will was there. Texas, Florida and others have already shown that. For the rest of us, we will just have to wait until our government feels able to allow reality to once again intervene in public affairs.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

In the previous post in this series, I reflected on some of the problems with bureaucracy as an organisational structure. However, as a couple of commenters pointed out (cheers to Irena and Roland), bureaucracies do serve a purpose and a certain type of activity is all but impossible without them. So, I thought it would be worth clarifying where bureaucracies go wrong and also being more specific about when and how bureaucracies become Kafkaesque.

Bureaucracies are great for building bridges or shipping things from A to B. They are, as a general rule, not so good at dealing with human beings for the reason that they are apt to treat human beings as objects. If, as Immanuel Kant said, man is always to be treated as an end in himself and never as a means, bureaucracies have a nasty habit of doing the latter. This is due to a phenomenon known as Goal Displacement. Bureaucracies might begin with an explicit mission to serve the interests of the customer but over time they come to serve their own interests and treat the customer as a means to those interests. This mindset is captured beautifully in W H Auden’s poem “The Unknown Citizen”.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Anybody who has had to deal with a government department to achieve some trivial task only to be thwarted by pointless rules knows what it is like to be on the receiving end of Goal Displacement. The rules are there to serve the bureaucracy and not the customer. That’s the first way in which bureaucracies go wrong and it’s this that Kafka was chiefly concerned with i.e. the propensity of bureaucracies to treat humans as mere objects. Perhaps the ultimate expression of that can be found at the concentration camps where the Nazi bureaucracy kept immaculate administrative records of the people they were sending to their death.

Another way in which bureaucracies go wrong is when they get too much power and attempt to apply rules to inherently complex domains. We are seeing exactly that kind of overreach right now as public health bureaucracies dictate to medical professionals what treatments to use for corona. In most western countries, nurses and doctors have been explicitly warned by their professional bodies not to speak out against the vaccine. To do so is to risk losing your career. Similarly, alternative treatments such as ivermectin have been ruled out despite the fact that a number of doctors have found them to work. We are seeing the results of this right now. Australia this week followed European countries in restricting the use of the Astra Zeneca vaccine due to the risk of blood clots in some recipients. In the normal course of events, where the side effects of a vaccine are well known, a doctor would be able to recommend to individual patients whether a vaccine was safe based on the patient’s profile. With the corona event, doctors have been sidelined and the whole thing is being run out of the bureaucracy which can only operate according to rules with all the clumsiness and confusion that causes. What we are seeing now is a direct result of replacing skilled professionals with bureaucratic mandates. James C. Scott in his excellent book “Seeing Like a State” outlines a number of case studies where this exact error was made. Literally tens of millions of people died in the 20^th century from giving bureaucracies too much power in this fashion. That’s the second problem with bureaucracies.

There is a third problem which I touched on in my last post where I talked about a pointless job I once had in a government bureaucracy. I was perhaps a little too flippant about the psychological problems caused by such jobs when I alluded to the psychological suffering I experienced during my very brief stay in the job and also the fact that government bureaucrats tend to take a lot of mental health leave. To be clear, such jobs cause real psychological damage. The reference to Kafka is relevant but the nature of the trauma has a different origin to what Kafka was describing. These jobs, the psychological effects of them and the organisational dynamics in bureaucracies which give rise to them have been described very nicely by David Graeber with his concept of bullshit jobs.

To recap: what I am calling “bullshit jobs” are jobs that are primarily or entirely made up of tasks that the person doing that job considers to be pointless, unnecessary, or even pernicious. Jobs that, were they to disappear, would make no difference whatsoever. Above all, these are jobs that the holders themselves feel should not exist.

Bullshit jobs cause real psychological trauma but, more importantly for understanding of our current cultural malaise, they might make up perhaps 40% of the total jobs in western nations at the moment. Our hysterical overreaction to the corona event must have a source somewhere and one of the sources is surely the latent trauma caused by bullshit jobs. This is especially true because it has been the salary class that has been most hysterical about corona and it’s also the salary class that works the lion’s share of the bullshit jobs.

In his book, Graeber does a good job of explaining how bureaucracies create bullshit jobs all by themselves due to politicking and internal dynamics. However, I think he misses the main cause of the rise of bullshit jobs and it’s worth sketching out that history so we can understand why we got to where we are today.

In my opinion, the most important fact which explains why we have bullshit jobs is that industrial societies have been in a massive economic surplus for more than a century. We have too much of everything. This is noticeable in the burgeoning waistlines of the citizens of western nations. It can be seen in the rise of the McMansion. It can be seen in storage companies who offer us a place to leave our stuff cos apparently our McMansions don’t have enough room for it all. Marie Kondo owes her living to the fact that we have too much stuff and apparently need somebody to tell us what to do with it. More important though is the way we got so much stuff. We got it by having machines do the work. Industrialisation always created unemployment right from the start. The standard wisdom states that the newly unemployed simply go on to better jobs. All those unemployed miners become factory workers and when the factory jobs disappear they all become software engineers until eventually everybody in society will be the CEO of a company living in a mansion and sailing their yacht to the Bahamas over the summer holidays. What happened in reality is that we eventually automated our way into a situation where there was a shortage of jobs that produce things of real value. But we still needed to have jobs because having a job is one of the foundational elements of our culture. That’s where bullshit jobs came along to fill the void.

One way to understand this is to think about how it could have been different. In his brilliant 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness”, Bertrand Russell makes the case that society should be organised in such a way that we all have to work as little as possible. That’s right, the 4 hour work week is not a new idea. That this could be done was shown during WW1 when essentially the entire economies of European nations were centralised around the war effort. The bureaucracy turned out to be quite capable of organising boots, uniforms, helmets, guns, food and medicine for the soldiers during the war. Russell and others reasoned that it could provide shoes, clothes, household products, food and medicine for citizens during the peace. Moreover, if this was done, the amount of work required of citizens would be negligible. We could all do a few hours work a week and spend the rest of the time pursuing truth and beauty. I think there’s all kinds of psychological and social reasons why that vision doesn’t work but it does make logical sense. We could still do it today if we wanted to but we have taken a very different route.

In the immediate aftermath of WW2, western nations still had a relatively small number of bullshit jobs. There was a large manufacturing base and many jobs for clerks, office administrators, bookkeepers and the like. At the same time, the consumer economy kicked into gear and the advertising industry worked to increase the demand for products which helped create jobs to make the products. This created a long period of stability all the way into the 1970s when several things happened to spoil the party and caused the number of bullshit jobs to explode.

Firstly, there were the oil shocks and the associated stagflation of the 70s. Secondly, globalisation began and the west started offshoring manufacturing jobs to Japan and South Korea. Thirdly, the computer revolution began automating away many of the clerical and administrative jobs. The result of these three developments was that a huge chunk of steady, reliable, dependable work was lost. But the most important thing about that work was that it was valuable. This doesn’t mean the jobs were easy or exciting or high status. It just means they had inherent value. Even a miner toiling away at back breaking work each day can at least point to a product that is of value the he or she helped to create. Having a job which creates something of actual value is intrinsically satisfying but we shipped those jobs overseas. In 2000, China was allowed into the WTO and the internet caused even more real jobs to be lost. All this led to the situation we are in now where, according to Graeber, 40% of jobs in western nations are bullshit jobs.

Let’s look at the difference between a real job and a bullshit job. Let’s say you were a bookkeeper for a manufacturing company in the 1950s. Your job had a real reason to exist and tangible outputs that were required. Thus, your performance could be judged objectively. You either balanced the accounts or you didn’t. You either did the Thursday pay run or you didn’t. You either got the tax files right or you didn’t. This objectivity gives you a certain level of autonomy because your performance is straightforward to evaluate and can’t be easily fudged for political reasons. Such objective criteria don’t exist in a bullshit job. What exists instead is politics and ideology. With a real job, you can get better over time and take pride and satisfaction in increasing your skills. With a bullshit job, it’s just an endless parade of political maneouvurings. It is this which is behind all the woke ideology that comes out of universities and corporations these days. It’s all there to sort out the internal politics of bullshit jobs. Note that practically every story about some crime against woke-ism features somebody getting sacked. Getting or losing a bullshit job is not based on performance but on fealty to the ideology.

Now that we know what a bullshit job is and why they are there, the final piece of the puzzle is to ask why bureaucracies feature so many bullshit jobs. The answer is simply that bureaucracies lend themselves to expansion. This is actually a strength of a bureaucracy; it scales easily and allows things like bridges and damns, which require a large amount of coordinated labour, to be built. But, in a society where there are not enough jobs that create value to go around, bureaucracies can just as easily expand by creating bullshit jobs. It’s not hard to see why this is the case. Small business, for example, almost never creates a bullshit job because the money to hire any new employee comes out of the owner’s pocket. In a bureaucracy, you’re spending other people’s money. And what you’re buying as an ambitious middle manager is political power, new employees who will be faithful to you. This is why bureaucracies have become synonymous with bullshit jobs in the modern world. We needed to create jobs and we didn’t have enough good jobs to go around so we created bullshit jobs and the bureaucracy is the most efficient organisational form for doing so.

Because bullshit jobs cause psychological distress, many modern bureaucracies have become little more than trauma factories. Just a couple of weeks ago I saw a random social media post by a salary class woman who was ‘terrified’ that things were about to go back to normal. What she meant was, she was going to have to go back to her office with all the psychological problems that go with it. The call for a ‘new normal’ was, I think, a thinly veiled cry for help from such people. What they really need is a proper job. One of the things I think that Bertrand Russell got wrong was he underestimated the extent to which most people need genuine economic fulfilment. That is, we need to know that we are creating value of some kind and we need this value to be socially recognised by others. A social hierarchy based on this creation of value is inherently stable. But a social hierarchy based on bullshit jobs is not. The rise of bullshit jobs has given our society a paranoid and anxious disposition.

The increase in bullshit jobs is behind the increasingly hysterical public discourse in western nations in the last few decades and is also a big driver behind the corona hysteria. This should not be such a surprise. Back in the 1990s, anti-globalisation campaigners warned of exactly this outcome. One of the most eloquent of them was Sir James Goldsmith and his warnings have largely come true. It’s no small irony that the virus supposedly came from China which is supposed to be the poster child of globalisation. It would be equally no small irony if one of the results of all this was to put globalisation into reverse. That would actually help to solve the underlying problem and we could get rid of our bullshit jobs and start doing work again. For the same reason, the absolute worst thing that can happen right now is that globalisation somehow gets patched up by various shenanigans and we try and lug its carcass around, Weekend at Bernie’s style, for another decade or so. The sooner we admit the failure of globalisation, the better.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

One of the happy accidents of my life is that I’ve worked in a variety of jobs in a variety of organisational types. I’ve worked in retail, government, agriculture, hospitality, call centres, small manufacturing, large manufacturing, volunteer organisations, university, legal offices, startups and large corporates. I’ve done all kinds of work from backbreaking manual labour to production line box stacking to cushy office jobs. So, it’s from some depth of experience that I can say that the worst job I ever had was in a government bureaucracy.

I accidentally found myself inside the belly of the beast when the consultancy I was working at started chasing the sweet smell of government money. The project we were working on was completely pointless. I know this for a fact because, not only did it appear to be completely pointless to anybody with two functioning brain cells, but I got to meet the people who were going to use it and they told me straight up that it was completely pointless. That was the first problem. But not only was it pointless, we were building according to a specification that some other company had written. Like all specifications, this specification was wrong but we didn’t have the power to change it. Nobody did. So, although everybody more or less agreed it was wrong, we had to build the software according to the documents. The result was going to be pointless and wrong but government employees were going to be forced into using it. That’s the way things work in government bureaucracies.

To be made to follow rules that you know to be absurd causes a peculiar kind of existential angst. It took me all of two weeks to start looking for a new job and, fortunately, I was able to find one pretty quickly so my stay was short-lived. Years later I ran into a couple of government employees at a random social event. They told me they were both on extended mental health leave and apparently that’s common in their line of work. Doesn’t surprise me much after having seen what goes on there. If there is a hell, it probably looks like a government bureaucracy.

Since that time, I’ve had experience in different kinds of bureaucratic organisations. Based on this experience, I define three types of bureaucracy according to the type of market they are in and the corresponding culture which arises from the interaction of the bureaucratic structure and the market type. Government bureaucracies are the most pure type whilst others differ in interesting ways. Here are the three types:-

Type	Market	Culture	Primary Type of Employee
1	Government monopoly	Strict adherence to rules	Lobotomised Rule Nazis
2	Private monopoly	Follow the rules because you can’t change them. Heroes save the day	Heroes
3	Oligopoly	Freedom at technical level but not the mission level	Autonomous technicians

My thesis here is that a pure bureaucracy can really only happen in a government monopoly and the further you get from that context the less a nominal bureaucracy functions as one. The reason government is the purest form of bureaucracy is precisely because it has no competition and therefore has no real need to respond to the real world beyond the vague signals that come from political manoeuverings. The primary type of employee in a pure bureaucracy is the Lobotomised Rule Nazi. The characterisation of the Lobotomised Rule Nazi is Kafka’s great addition to our literature. I had read Kafka prior to working in government but I had no idea that such a person could exist in real life. They do and they are among the strangest people you can hope to meet. The Lobotomised Rule Nazi follows the rules no matter what. When you try to point out that a rule is nonsense, illogical or actively harmful, the Lobotomised Rule Nazi looks at you with big, blank eyes and simply doesn’t understand the question. A rule is a rule. It must be followed. No correspondence shall be entered into. Have a nice day.

In a private corporation that has a monopoly, things work differently. Such companies still need to be relatively responsive to their customers because, unlike with government, their customers usually have the option not to use the service. This minimal need to satisfy the customer changes the internal structure and culture of the bureaucracy. There are still rules and regulations in place and people are not free to question them. However, the need to get the product to the customer at a reasonable standard creates the need to get around the rules. This is done through heroics and so the Hero is the primary type of employee in Type 2 bureaucracy. These are people who work long hours and pull all-nighters to get projects over the line. They do this because the rules of the bureaucracy hinder effective work. The sociologist Max Weber once said bureaucracy was the most efficient form of organisation. I’m not sure what he was smoking because bureaucracies are hopelessly inefficient. For all but the most simplified activities, following the rules doesn’t work. Trying to explicate and then follow rules is like a centipede counting its feet. The Hero overcomes the crushing inefficiency of following the rules by simply working harder. The Hero doesn’t attempt to question or change the rules, they just persevere in the face of them. In Type 2 organisations, a hero culture arises which rewards that perseverance.

This brings us to the third market type: the oligopoly. In these markets a bureaucracy has at least one competitor to deal with and even this modicum of competition substantially increases the need to be responsive to market signals. The hero culture of a Type 2 bureaucracy can work in these environments as long as your competitor is also Type 2. But if your competitor discovers that productivity gains can be had by hiring skilled people and giving them the autonomy and responsibility of managing the technical demands of their work rather than imposing rules on them, they will beat you. This dynamic creates a third type of bureaucracy which has the basic bureaucratic structure but which does not impose unnecessary rules on its workers. Such companies attract skilled technicians who are able to think strategically. They are system builders, not heroes. Within the technical sphere of the business, they are given significant freedom but this freedom is bounded and does not extend to questioning the mission, the project goals or the business strategy. This leads to problems which are captured beautifully by the SNAFU Principle. Without honest feedback from the lower levels of the organisation or customers, the upper levels cannot respond to problems with the direction of a project. Thus, even Type 3 bureaucracies, although technically competent, never produce anything innovative and rarely much of any value beyond their core offering. They are structurally incapable of questioning the product direction and responding to feedback in a meaningful way. Like every bureaucracy, they cannot learn.

Although Lobotomised Rule Nazis, Heroes and Autonomous Technicians are the driving forces within each bureaucratic type, they are not the majority. Rather, they are the most important type within each organisation because they define the culture that is needed for that organisation to survive. Accordingly, the types are not transferable between the three bureaucracies. Lobotomised Rule Nazis can only survive in a government bureaucracy. In a Type 2 organisation they would stop things getting done and in a Type 3 they would remove the autonomy of the technicians. Heroes do not work in Type 3 bureaucracies because the emphasis there is on fixing the system not working harder to perpetuate it. For the opposite reason, Autonomous Technicians cannot work in Type 2 organisations where they will be endlessly frustrated that the system cannot be fixed. And neither the autonomy of the Technician nor the drive of the Hero can find a home in the bloodless, robotic environment of a pure bureaucracy.

What about all the other people who work in a bureaucracy? The ones who are not, by psychological predisposition, Lobotomised Rule Nazis, Heroes or Autonomous Technicians? Well, they are people who just follow along with the prevailing culture. They might be happier elsewhere, but for whatever personal or circumstantial reasons, they simply learn to fit in. Dostoevsky once said that the human is the animal which can get used to anything. This is, of course, true in an evolutionary sense. We humans have been able to survive in almost every natural environment on the planet. It’s also true in a social sense. As the Stanford Prison Experiment showed, people can learn to fit in to any role. We also don’t like to rock the boat. In another famous psychological experiment, the researchers set up a room full of actors and a screen. On the screen in the room were shown three lines: A, B and C. Line A was clearly longer than line B which was clearly longer than line C. The test subjects were brought into the room one at a time and the experimenter asked each person to say out loud which was the shortest line. Each of the nineteen actors answered B. Then came the test subject, the last person to answer. The test subject must have known that line C was the shortest but to say so would be to publicly contradict the nineteen people who came before them. In the overwhelming majority of cases (I think from memory it was about 80%), the test subject also answered B. That’s the psychology of man as herd animal. We prefer not to stand out from the crowd and, all else being equal, we will sacrifice the truth to do so. It’s this psychological fact which allows the cultures of the different bureaucratic types to work. Margaret Mead once said that the only thing that has ever changed the world is a passionate minority. That’s true but it’s also the passionate minority that continues to drive the culture while the majority just follow along.

Taking all this together, you have bureaucracies in economic or political niches which attract certain personality types who have what it takes for the organisation to survive in those niches. Because the survival of the organisation requires these types of people, they are celebrated within the organisation and determine the prevailing culture. The historical rise of the bureaucratic organisational type brought the Lobotomised Rule Nazis out of the dungeons and into the light where they found a niche for themselves running government agencies. The Hero psychological type and the Autonomous Technician also gravitate to where they fit in best and where their natural disposition is rewarded most.

Despite their differences, what all bureaucracies have in common is the removal of personal autonomy and the replacement with rules. It is this which most explicitly separates bureaucratic work from, say, small business or self-employment. Let me give a quick concrete example from my experience.

When I was backpacking in Europe, I got a job working for a bank in Glasgow, Scotland. The bank was a Type 2 corporate: a private enterprise with no meaningful competition run according to a strict bureaucratic model. My job was to call small business customers and try and sell them new credit card machines. This is what is known in the call centre world as ‘warm calling’. You’re not just calling somebody trying to sell them a random thing that you have no idea that they want. Rather, you’re calling existing customers and selling them a related product. All in all, it wasn’t a bad job. For most of the people I was speaking to, the product was going to save them money and therefore they were grateful to get the call.

From the customer’s point of view, getting a call from somebody at their bank is the perfect opportunity to raise whatever other problems they might have been having with the bank’s services. People I spoke to would often ask for help with such problems and, as I got to know the people who worked in the bank better, I was usually able to solve the problems for customers quite quickly. One day, my manager heard me solving somebody’s problem on the phone. You might think he would have been happy at the initiative I had shown. Not at all. When the call was finished, he told me that I was no longer to ‘waste time’ with such things. I was to sell the credit card machine to the customer and that was all. If they asked about other problems, I was to refer them to the bank’s customer service department. The small window of autonomy I thought I had was slammed shut. In a small business, you are incentivised to solve customer’s problems because good will is good for business. In a bureaucracy, you are incentivised by whatever rule or metric somebody has come up with. It’s the same mindset that leads bureaucracies to block people from browsing certain websites, or installing software on their computer or even taking “excessive” bathroom breaks.

Given that lightning overview of types of bureaucracy, the environmental conditions they exist in and the culture that results from the tension between the organisational structure and that environment, we can now tie this analysis in with our present circumstances.

With the corona event, we have all been sucked into a Type 1 bureaucracy. This makes perfect sense given that it is government bureaucrats who have been running the show. All of the Type 1 elements are there. Removal of personal initiative and autonomy? Check. Follow the rules or else? Check. Contradictory rules and rules that violate common sense? Check. No way to question the rules or get an explanation for the reasoning behind them? Check. Be treated like a cog in a machine instead of a fully fledged human being? Check. Complete change in mission without any explanation why (“2 weeks to flatten the curve”)? Check. The list could go on. As the events of 2020 unfolded, it was like I had been taken back to my time working for the government but, unlike with a crappy job, there was no way to quit.

We are all now living in a Type 1 bureaucracy because that’s what government is. Thus, we are all now indelibly sucked into the Kafkaesque world of a pure bureaucracy where we are nothing more than potential carriers of a virus to be lumped into groups based on a test result or a vaccination status. The Lobotomised Rule Nazis are in charge now. The Queensland Chief Health Officer gave what I consider to be one of the perfect examples of that mentality late last year. Tom Hanks and his entourage had been allowed into Queensland to shoot a movie. This happened at exactly the same time that news came out about grieving relatives who weren’t allowed to cross the border to attend a funeral and another family unable to visit a dying family member in hospital. The CHO was asked how it was fair that a Hollywood movie star was allowed in while Australian citizens were not. With a straight face, she stated that Tom Hanks brought in millions of dollars for the economy. That’s the kind of bloodless response that only a career bureaucrat can give.

For those of us horrified to now be caught up in this Kafkaseque nightmare, the good news is that Type 1 bureaucracies are hopelessly incompetent so none of these schemes is going to work. More specifically, the one thing a bureaucracy can do arguably better than other organisational types is move objects around; shipping things from Point A to Point B. For that reason, a bureaucracy is exactly the type of organisation that can handle a vaccine rollout. During the wars, when bureaucracies came into their own organising supply lines, the soldiers were subject to numerous vaccines. We know bureaucracies can handle that and can expect that part to get done reasonably well. But I would expect the vaccine passports and assorted other pipe dreams are going to flop spectacularly, not just in their implementation but in the second order effects they cause. That’s also the bad news because politicians need things to appear to have ‘worked’ so they can get out of this mess intact. They will continue to allow the Lobotomised Rule Nazis to run things until it’s politically safe to stop. When will it be safe to stop? That’s a question that nobody knows but one thing to bear in mind is that all the problems that will be caused by these ridiculous bureaucratic schemes will at some point become a political fact and will give politicians the incentive to stop.

There is one other glimmer of hope. Government bureaucracies are used to having no competition. They get away with incompetence because their customers cannot go anywhere else. But, at least in the USA, the different states have already started to go their own way. Florida governor DeSantis came out explicitly against vaccine passports this week just like he has eschewed the rest of the accepted ‘wisdom’ in the last six months. A number of other states in the US have followed suit. Just like with Sweden in Europe and, to a lesser extent, NSW in Australia, there is now a point of difference and the ability to compare outcomes. There is also potentially freedom of choice. Don’t want to live somewhere where you need a piece of paper to go about your life? You might be able to move somewhere where you can. Will that state of affairs hold? Will it deliver us into a Type 3 situation where the competition forces government to allow us to retain some of our autonomy? Only time will tell.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona