Why are hospitals hotbeds of infection, instead of safe, sterile spaces?
Why do school administrators tinker with the curriculum, resulting in literacy and numeracy rates becoming worse?
Why do organisations like Centrelink (administrators of the dole in Australia) become such massive, powerful bureaucracies?
Dyson doesn’t want to solve the dust problem, they want you to use their products to interact with the dust problem
Dietitians want you to follow their diet plans, not lose weight permanently. If they did, then they’d look into the psychology of why you eat too much, why you ‘sabotage’ yourself etc.
The RMS won’t solve transportation problems, they build more roads and put up more signs
I don’t have that many ‘ah ha’ moments. The lightbulb rarely goes off for me. It is usually more of a case of ‘through the looking glass dimly’. (My last memorable aha moment that actually shifted my worldview, was learning from NN Taleb about antifragility.)
But when I read Clay Shirky’s statement, labelled by another author as the ‘Shirky Principle’, I had one of those rare moments where so many observations/ questions coalesced into that magical thing: a reasonable explanation.
INSTITUTIONS WILL TRY TO PRESERVE THE PROBLEM TO WHICH THEY ARE THE SOLUTION.
It makes perfect sense, right? No person wants to make themselves redundant and irrelevant. No one wants to see their place of employment disappear, and their life’s work evaporate. And institutions are nothing but a collection of individuals, so organisations will always act in their self-interest and survival. It is coded into our DNA.
Individuals may occasionally want to solve a problem. Their may be some utility in being the hero and ‘solving the problem’. But those intentions are usually swamped by inertia and the desire to retain the organisational raison d’etre.
Also, it is unlikely to be the conscious, articulated approach to ‘preserve the problem’. School administrators don’t declare their intention to create a system that will require more and more schooling and reduce educational performance. Doctors don’t want to kill patients.
The desire for maintaining the problem and thus surviving and remaining relevant is so deeply embedded in our psyche, and so universal amongst all human beings, that it is completely unconscious. (Not even sub-conscious, and not even ‘taken for granted’ because we would have to be aware of it for us to take if for granted.)
The desire to survive is so self-evident it is unrecognised.
Which brings us to the big, cultural issue of politics and government — for these are the institutions that affect all of us.
Both the left — and the right side of politics are equally condemned by the Shirky Principle.
The ‘right’ wants to conserve the status quo which gives them access to power and decision making and complete control over a passive populace, at the expense of innovation, growth and change and even social responsibility.
The liberal/left side of politics is hell-bent on identifying marginalised victim groups for which they can act as saviours. It is completely insane to make needy people welfare-dependent, but when you understand that the liberal left sees government as being the ultimate dispenser of welfare, it makes sense. The ‘welfare system’ becomes the hothouse in which the Left grows their future voter base.
Your garden variety socialist will scoff at the idea that their good intentions serve only their own ‘survival’, and not those of the poor suffering souls they seek to help, but just because they don’t recognise it, doesn’t make it untrue. Having a sound moral motive does not make something right. (Even a pedophile will say they love the child, but it is still wrong.)
Governments keep on legislating, because, institutionally, they have a job of enforcing the legislation. There will never be ‘less’ government and you will never get rid of the government ever again.
If there was such a thing as a true democracy, we would have been able to vote for less or no government. We seem oblivious to the fact that our ‘democracy’ only allows for the choice of oppression by the left or the right as the only alternatives. When you can only vote for different forms of oppression, is it really a free, democratic vote?
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
If that is the way it is, means there is an important and very depressing corollary to the shirky principle:
As soon as a problem is addressed by creating an institution in response, the problem will never go away.
Think now of those institutions that exist to solve our problems around drug control, climate change, immigration or any social issue addressed by any charity. It is truly pessimistic if the corollary holds true; but it is the logical consequence. If the Red Cross doesn’t want global conflict to disappear and the FBI doesn’t want international crime to disappear, and ASIO doesn’t want spying to stop; will the world ever get to be a better place?
Government is the parasite that has found the perfect host — our insecurities. And we only have ourselves to blame.
