DAYTIME - day job or destiny?

which died of loneliness it seems.

As time goes on however the dysfunctional nature of bureaucracies, whether governmental or mercantile, becomes ever more obvious - to those of us who care to stop denying the truth anyway.

Karl Popper's reasoning about forms of government led him to see the fundamental problem with non democratic social structures is that they cannot deal fairly and effectively with the unforeseen negative consequences of laws or policies. Furthermore, the underlying reason for this is that nobody knows the future.

I have seen a honcho shake her head at this idea - that nobody knows the future, but I'm sure that being female had nothing to do with it. I think many of our leaders and corporate superstars will want to assert that 'we *can* make reasonable predictions!' and this is true, after all that is what they are highly paid for. Popper's insight though is that, no matter how good the policy, there will always be unforeseen consequences because in any particular situation there will always be more things that can happen then we want to occur, and very often there will be more things that can happen, sooner or later, than we can possibly know about before the event. And as KP pointed out there is as much chance of an unforeseen outcome being negative in effect for some one or more people as of being positive.

'So what?' you ask, and the answer is simple: any unexpected positive outcome is a bonus proudly adopted by the authors of the policy if ever they hear about it, but negative outcomes are not so easily acknowledged by those in charge. This is true not just for those at the top of a command structure but usually applies right down the ladder also because nobody likes to give their boss bad news. Even in the most benign of organisations something not going right with the system means extra work for whoever 'touched it last'.

The alternative to democracy is always some form of dictatorship

I have come to the conclusion that authoritarianism is possibly the single most evil legacy from the pre scientific universe.
The thing is, this implies that bureaucracy per se is evil. Many people will smile and say "Of course! Just look what happens; just look at the way bureaucracies stuff things up all the time!" I would certainly never deny this. Other people will weep however because they have experienced more of the deep frustration and feeling of powerlessness that corporate entities can inflict. Many more will neither smile nor weep, they will just shrug and say: "Don't bother, there is no way anybody is going to listen to you; don't waste your breath, don't waste your time trying to change things in this place because you can't beat the system."

In my opinion if we take seriously Karl Popper's explanation of the relative success of democracy then we need to put its underlying implications clearly, then start working on how to change the world!

The starkest way to say this is: Any organisation or social structure which is not overtly a democracy is, or will become, either overtly or covertly, a dictatorship.