What is your Stupification Point?

Posted on May 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

Malcolm Gladwell has a piece in this week’s New Yorker on the nature of espionage and asks some very penetrating questions about the psychology of the business: essentially once you’re in the hall of mirrors is there anything or anyone you can really trust or accept at face value?  It’s very much worth reading and also an amusing read, because Gladwell makes his points while reviewing what looks like a really fun book on the WWII exploits of the British intelligence service, Operation Mincemeat.

But what I really thought was worth sharing were some more overarching points about the business of intelligence or sensemaking. (I really don’t like to use the term intelligence because I think it has too many negative or at least questionable connotations.) Gladwell notes the point made by political scientist Richard Betts that in intelligence analysis there tends to be an inverse relationship between accuracy and significance. Boy, does that ring true, although I would just generalize Betts’s point by applying it to just about all knowledge activities. We almost always can be most specific about that which is least significant. This actually relates to the phenomenon of attaching disproportionate importance to activities you can count. To wit: When trying to fix something, as managers we tend to concentrate our efforts on the parts of the process we understand well, even though those parts may not really be what are causing the problems. I’m sure you’ve  suffered through this in your organization. Some large problems are identified but you and all your coworkers know intuitively that the solutions offered–often rolled out to great huffing and puffing–just don’t tackle root causes.

Gladwell also points to the work of Harold Wilensky, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley who has done some groundbreaking work over his career but whose book, Organizational Intelligence, which Gladwell quotes from, appears to be out of print.

As Harold Wilensky wrote in his classic work “Organizational Intelligence” (1967), “The more secrecy, the smaller the intelligent audience, the less systematic the distribution and indexing of research, the greater the anonymity of authorship, and the more intolerant the attitude toward deviant views.” Wilensky had the Bay of Pigs debacle in mind when he wrote that. But it could just as easily have applied to any number of instances since, including the private channels of “intelligence” used by members of the Bush Administration to convince themselves that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

I’ve been searching the internet all morning for more on the book Organizational Intelligence, because anyone who made the wonderful observation above has got to have more to offer. Sadly, I can’t find it, although, as is the way of the internet, I was next-linked to this very nice presentation by Richard Veryard. He asks a wonderful question: what stupifies your organization?

Each organization has its particular form of stupidity–It is up to the consultant (or the above average manager) to recognize the way that stupidity manifests itself and to find a way of doing something about it.

I would just note that organizational culture is probably the number one factor that stupifies organizations.

This presentation is chock-full of gems. “Stupidity is not making errors. Stupidity is repeating them.” I also love his discussion of the Algebra of Intelligence. Intelligence is not arithmetical: “lots of intelligent pieces doesn’t add up to an intelligent organization.”

So to summarize, what did I learn in the last 24 hours about intelligence (sensemaking), organizations, and networks?

  1. Closed networks have a hard time determining if what they know is really significant. (In part because determining significance invariably requires perspective and context, which can only be gained from a vantage point. Closed networks lack vantage points.)
  2. The smaller the network, the less room it will have for diversity. (So, a diversity solution that is self-contained is no diversity solution at all.)
  3. The smaller the network, the less it can tolerate differences of opinions.
  4. Every network has stupification points. You must constantly be hunting for and eliminating them or they will destroy you.

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About Airline Fees, the Washington Nationals, and Dan Snyder

Posted on May 5, 2010 | 1 comment

Economics has never been my strong point. In fact, anything mathematical  leaves me without clues. I was once asked to do a job at the CIA that essentially amounted to editing the work of economists, and it was the one job I felt most insecure in doing. (Although I soon learned that most economists, like most–but not all–deep or single-threaded experts, need help in putting things in perspective and in understanding the noneconomic consequences of their findings.)

But it has struck me this week that there is an unhealthy trend manifesting itself in American companies that does not bode well for the vibrancy of the US economy. It is the explosion in using fees to bolster profitability, rather than doing things to make money the old-fashioned way, by earning it through increased productivity, efficiencies, and innovations.

This hit me quite personally yesterday when I went online to buy tickets for a Nationals game this weekend.  As I started to check out, I realized I was being charged almost $15 in fees for the transaction, including a ridiculous, I believe it was $1.75 fee, to print the tickets using my own equipment at home. What is this I thought?! I’m being charged almost 15% in fees for online transactions that, by the way, have miniscule marginal costs. I immediately cancelled the transaction, and, as I was subwaying downtown anyway for a meeting, just wandered by the stadium and got my tickets there at face value.

But if you’re paying attention, you know that it’s not just baseball teams that are garnering additional revenues through the imaginative use of fees. Credit card companies were really champion performers here at least until recent legislation passed aimed at tempering them. Airlines, of course, are on a fee rampage. They made $8 billion dollars in revenues last year from fees. I couldn’t easily find an overall revenue number to compare that to, but for at least one airline the income from fees accounted for 20% of their total revenues. (By the way, we really need to get on the media for so often not providing context for the numbers they use. That is just sloppy journalism and analysis. We are often told that X activity is going to cost [insert here some really scary number], but are rarely told what percentage that number represents of  total revenues or expenses. This is not an insignificant issue, because it is this very lack of context that obfuscates the real meaning of most developments. But I digress…)

And if you want to read about a really hideous example of using fees diabolically, read this story about the beloved owner of the Washington Redskins, Dan Snyder. It just sickens you.

And it also points out the real problem with American companies getting on the fees bandwagon. You’ll notice in the article that the company Dan Snyder was running, Six Flags, went bankrupt anyway despite its excessive use of fees. Companies seem to be using fees in lieu of other and much healthier ways of increasing revenues, such as through greater efficiency or innovation. As managers and leaders, we need to rise to the challenge of doing our missions better and not sink to employing clever machinations to compensate for substandard results.

You may not think as a manager of a small group, for example, that you collect fees rather than fix and innovate. But you may very well collect fees, they are just not monetary. Every time you impose some new control step in your process to guard against a recurring error committed by some, for example, you are collecting a fee and avoiding dealing with root causes of undesirable performance.  Managing by rule-making is essentially managing through non-monetary fees. And just as reliance on fees threatens to stifle innovation in American companies, managing through rules does the same for any small group effort.

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Another Commercial Break

Posted on May 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

A piece I’ve been working on concerning the future the government needs to start preparing for was just published on the Center for American Progress website. You can check it out here if you’re interested.

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Posted in Change, Future Thinking, Government Performance, Leadership, Nature of Federal Workers, Organizational Dynamics, Social Networks, Work Design

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A Commercial Break

Posted on May 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

I’m going to be speaking at the Gov 2.0 Expo in D.C. at the end of May. My talk is the afternoon of 26 May. If any of you are interested in attending and haven’t registered yet, I’ve been given a code that purportedly provides you all a 40% discount on registration. Here it is:  gxp10sbx      In addition, early registration closes 5 May, this Wednesday. The message I received from the coordinator of the speakers doesn’t make clear whether the code applies on top of the early registration discount, but I guess no harm in trying.

My talk takes the principles of social networks and applies it to the work of high reliability/high risk organizations–you know, the ones who usually say their work is too difficult or too important to entrust to collaborative work practices. Like the one I used to work for. Of course, the argument is completely the reverse. Such silliness.

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Twelve Stupid Things People Say about the Internet

Posted on May 2, 2010 | 1 comment

I remember when I was a kid people  would always say that to find life elsewhere in the universe, we had to look for carbon, because life was carbon-based. And I remember thinking, probably as a 10-year old, well who says that all life has to be carbon-based? Can’t we imagine a different kind of life? And people would say, no, that’s wrong, except now it isn’t so wrong to think that way. And I thought the same thing about the chances of finding life in the deep, deep ocean. I bet we will find weird life down there, I thought to myself, because these arguments that life can’t survive the lack of light and the intense pressure, they’re based on our very limited experiential base. After all, in terms of how life works, our N = 1. It can’t be right to be so sure.

So when I read critiques of the new culture we may be creating using all this internet stuff and mobile devices and Twitter and all the other things certain people like to make fun of, my ear is always listening for these unproven and unjustified assumptions. For example, almost all these critics assume that the good is self-evident and that the internet is displacing a wonderful tradition of knowledge, wisdom. and contemplation, offering very little of substance in return.  Hmmm…I’m just not so sure about that, and I offer the following list of shaky assumptions that we should question fiercely and for which we should demand either evidential or logical proof

  1. Heavy internet users have short attention spans and lack mental discipline. This is just plain silly, if you ask me. When I get deep into researching a topic on the internet, I have a very long attention span. And if I am traveling across many different topics, how is that proof of anything other than a curious disposition?
  2. Digital life is shallow. Says who? By what standard? Compared to what? Going to the movies? Watching old I Love Lucy reruns? Reading a thick economic treatise? And in any case, digital life itself is neutral. It’s the person who is shallow or not, if indeed we want to use this rather elitist formulation.  Even in the old analog culture, I never bought the line that going to the symphony is somehow culturally more significant than catching Bonnie Raitt at Wolf Trap. (I have to say I’ve even been to a Donnie Osmond concert in my lifetime….or was it the Osmond Brothers…the synapses misfire.)
  3. Slow is better than fast. You often hear the digital culture beaten up for its quick answers or its provision of instant gratification. But independent of all other values, such as accuracy, fairness, completeness, etc, there is nothing inherently bad about fast. In fact, fast will always, all other things being equal, be more efficient.
  4. Always “on” is bad. Prove it. As our societies and economies have become more complex, there are significant costs to periods of non-sentience. We may want to go back to an era of slower pace and tempo, but we can’t wish our way there. My experience as a manager is that organizations work best when they sustain momentum; there’s a favorite saying among managers: if you want something to get done, assign it to the busiest person on your team. And I actually believe that for many crackberry addicts, being constantly aware of the status of projects or other activities is actually less stressful than not knowing what is going on.
  5. Work based on reflection is better than immediate reactions. This is actually the ultimate argument of individuals who criticize the internet culture for being too fast or too persistent. And I think you have to admit that reflection has many advantages. Let’s unpack them. Reflection usually contributes to completeness and, in most cases, to accuracy. But reflection is at best neutral in terms of creativity; many argue for example that the best way to be creative is to generate as many ideas as possible without stopping to be judgmental. And there are certainly opportunity costs associated with reflection. As a CIA manager, I was always aware that one never had a monopoly on good ideas.  The longer you wait to propose a new way of looking at a problem, the greater the chance that some other entity will beat you to it. (Whether knowledge work should be competitive in the first place–now that’s another question.)
  6. Formal work is better than casual work. By formal, people usually mean work that has gone through some recognized quality control or expert process. Writing in a hurry is just not as elegant and good, goes the argument, as a carefully constructed essay. The arguments used in discussing reflection apply here as well. There are certain situations where formal work is obviously appropriate, but they are not as numerous as the critics would have you believe. And informality has many advantages in addition to immediacy. For example authenticity, directness, and, often, honesty.
  7. Correct spelling and grammar is essential for communication and is an indication of careful expression. Now I have sympathy for this position because I would tell people whose work I was editing that the worst thing that could happen was for me to gain the impression that I as the editor was paying more attention to their piece than they ever did. Finding obvious typos was one of the events that would create that impression. But that said, I also reviewed many pieces that were impeccable in terms of spelling and grammar but deplorable when it came to logic or original thinking. So sometimes correct spelling and grammar indicates nothing more than that.  The argument that spelling and grammar are essential for communication cannot be disputed. But special communication methods, such as the telegram for example, have always developed spelling and grammatical shortcuts that quickly became well understood. Twitter is just following in that tradition.
  8. It is more serious to do things by yourself than to do them in collaboration with others. Oh, for heaven’s sake!! This can only be accepted as gospel by individuals enamored of the great person theory of knowledge work.
  9. The internet is destroying literature. You’ve heard this. Nobody reads serious fiction any longer. Although I do believe classic forms of literature are threatened, I don’t buy the theory that it is the internet’s fault. Actually, it is probably more the fault of movies, television, DVDs, and video games. And in my view the real issue is that, compared to other, newer media for storytelling, the advantages of the novel just aren’t that apparent any longer.
  10. People who are playing Farmville on Facebook would otherwise be writing the great American novel or reading Proust. Please…(the game I like to play is Typing Maniac.)
  11. Most people don’t have anything interesting to say. This point is made peevishly in reaction to the fact that anyone now can blog or tweet. Again, I’ll concede that good writers of 500-word essays are not that common; but my experience, and I bet the experience of many others, is that lots of people actually do have something worthwhile to offer in the short form.  Twitter and Facebook –and let’s not forget YouTube–are great democratizers of the public space and, if anything, are giving many the confidence to share their views with others. I’m darned if I can figure out why that is bad for a democracy. Now in your average dictatorship…
  12. Our current culture, which has taken millenia to develop, is better than any culture we could develop over the next ten years. At face value, that sounds pretty reasonable, but given the explosion of information, connectivity and transparency, I’m not so sure we should  concede even this point. Knowledge is doubling in many fields at a faster rate than the education cycle for those disciplines. I don’t know about you but I’m putting my money on the future.

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Being Puerto Rican–A Network Analysis

Posted on April 30, 2010 | 1 comment

I was born in Puerto Rico and I try to go back every year for at least a week. This is one of those weeks. If you haven’t been there, it is a diverse and beautiful island with some of the best examples of karst topography in the United States and hundreds of miles of diverse coastline, from pure white beaches to dramatic bluffs. Most people who just visit San Juan never get to experience this diversity and may get little appreciation for the Puerto Rican people and culture.

Speaking about Puerto Rican people and culture reminds me of how I  learned that “being Puerto Rican” had (has?) a certain malodor, at least in some major cities of the East Coast. I came to live as an adult in DC as a transfer college student. Previously I had been in Texas for 8 years, which is why I consider myself a Puerto Rican by birth and a Texan by nationality. And I had no real concept of what being Puerto Rican meant on the East Coast. (To this day when I meet someone new, the chances are 50-50 that, when they find out I’m Puerto Rican, they will just assume I grew up in NYC. Conversely, I take great and flinching pains to rescue them from that idea, which reveals my prejudice as well.) Anyway when I got to Catholic University, I started working in the dining hall and I just innocently told my coworkers I was Puerto Rican. And this fellow student from Connecticut advises me: “If I were you I wouldn’t tell too many people that cuz where I come from Puerto Ricans are lazy and dirty.” (To this day I have had a prejudice against any Connecticut, including always rooting against their excellent basketball teams. But it can’t be helped.)

Once you get away from San Juan it becomes clear how different the island is from the States. If Puerto Rico ever became a state, it would be, by a 50% factor, the poorest state in the union. The economy as currently structured does not generate enough jobs for the young men and women who live there. So everywhere you go you see large clumps of young people, mostly men, mostly doing nothing. Another indicator of the absence of youth engagement are the large pied-piper party trucks and vans that bounce along the roads, topped by about 6-foot speakers, blaring out rhythms enticing all to join them at the best place to party that night and this weekend. My mom observing all this said, “We Puerto Ricans are lazy.” I said, “I don’t think so. But there is certainly a messed up rewards structure here.” When there is nothing to work for, we humans, being reasoning animals, often choose not to work. Sensible.

In terms of manmade structures, most of the island is just a mess. For example, there appeared to have been no zoning laws for much of recent history, leading to just the ugliest stretches of suburban blight I’ve ever seen. And, and this is my opinion, the Fast Food industry appears to have been allowed to run roughshod over the local food culture (which truth be told wasn’t too healthy either, but at least there was less of it usually served).  What I find really appalling are the huge billboards all over the state, tempting you to “take a break” by eating about 2000 calories of carbohydrates and fat. Diabetes is, of course, an epidemic.

So as I drove around the state, visiting relatives (and I thought it would be impossible to drive 400 miles in one day in PR but I am here to attest it can be done) I realized the entire state is a very good example of a very poorly designed network. The risk/rewards structure facilitates nonproductive behavior. Lack of design thinking at the very beginning leads to consequences one could have foretold. (Is there a design checklist out there? There must be. That actually reminds me of another lesson, #20, as a CIA manager. The importance of checklists. Most serious professionals I’ve known are offended by the concept of checklists–we’re above that, they say. As a seriously flawed human being, however, who claims to very little expertise, I love checklists. But I digress….)

The road “system” is the most obvious if not the best example of bad networks. Intersections between major highways are particularly clumsy, leading to creative workarounds by drivers. I wish I had a picture to show you, but of course I’m always driving at the time. But the lesson is clear: people will adjust themselves to even the most badly designed network. But making the most of bad situations allows for survival, but not prosperity.

My relatives in Puerto Rico are real characters. A real highlight is Juana, my mother’s cousin, I think, although determining exact family connections is a challenge given the alarming rate at which people recouple, at least in my family, and produce half-brothers and half-sisters. Anyway here’s Juana telling us one her many wonderful stories. I particularly liked the one where she went to visit the grave of her beloved husband (I was going to write deceased husband, but thought better of it given that’s why he’s in the grave in the first place). Anyway, she’s at the gravesite when a sudden burst of wind manifests, blows her down–that wind was substantial!!–and deposits her exactly alongside the burial site of her departed Gabriel, precisely where she will lie when she eventually joins him.

And here are some of her beautiful orchids.

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Just a Few Last Thoughts about the Internet

Posted on April 25, 2010 | Leave a comment

Sitting here on a Sunday evening…the usual internet surfing on the laptop. Have about ten tabs open on my browser (using Chrome these days having just about given up on I.E.).

Absentmindedly click on the tabs sequentially, like flicking through the cable channels.

  • There’s my Facebook page.
  • Signed out on LinkedIn.
  • MNBC reports an Emirates flite dropped suddenly over India, 20 hurt.
  • Wikileaks still leading with the Collateral Murder story
  • Lead Tweet features the professional rabbit breeder I inexplicably follow, also inexplicably named the_turtle
  • Looking up information on Kay Ryan, the US Poet Laureate: Waiting is sustainable, a place of its own harvests
  • The bloggers are starting a comment frenzy over Stephen Hawking’s advice that we should not contact alien life. (and am struck that considering what we should do when we meet aliens is now talked about reasonably, without sarcasm or embarrassment. There’s a theory that somehow–intuitively, access to the multiverse, whatever–we develop a sense as a species for what is about to happen and without conscious thought begin to reflect it in our conversations, so that trending topics in forums such as Twitter actually can be used to predict the future.)
  • And the Houston Astros are recovering from their horrendous start

It took about 15 seconds to cover those topics. And just for a moment, the slightest tug of transcendence penetrated my consciousness, only to bounce away, like it was frightened by my material nature. The experience of soaring across topics in seconds is without precedence in human history. It’s become so commonplace that we usually lose sight of how shattering it is of our previous experiences and models of human behavior. What I know and am aware of at any given moment dwarfs, I think, what the White House Situation room in its entirety knew in 1960, 1970, 1980.

One of my favorite sayings is:

Quantity has a Quality all of its own.

The quantity of information and connections is changing the quality of the person, the society, and the species. Really, we have no idea of where this will end.

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The Tale of Two Friendships

Posted on April 21, 2010 | 2 comments

Drinks today with a friend of mine, someone I would call a work friend as in we’ve rarely done anything together outside of the context of work.  But this friend follows me on Twitter (milouness) and on Facebook and as we talked I realize she knows just about everything there is to know about me, or at least anything that I’ve been reflecting upon on Twitter or Facebook, which is probably 90% + of  what is meaningful to me.

My friend is a baby boomer like I, but quite different from most of my other baby boomer friends, who naturally form the bulk of my friendships given that they’re just as old and decrepit as I am. And as I drove back from our chat, I got to thinking about the odd state of my friendships, where most of my friends in real life, the longstanding ones, have no real-time connection to me because they’re not on Twitter, they’re not on Facebook, or if they are, they are there in the most perfunctory of ways. A handful are active on social networks, but for the most part they are absent and, unlike my work friend, have no real-time insight into me, and, of course, I don’t have that insight into them. It’s really odd because when I meet with these friends, maybe once a week, but for some very dear friends who are somewhere else in the country, much less often, I spend a lot of time updating them on what I’ve been up to, which is of course available for anyone to know, really. But my more casual friends, some of whom I’ve never even met in the physical world, are actually, if they care to be, part of my everyday life, and I part of theirs.

So, I wonder, which really are the most important networks in my life? It’s disturbing to contemplate that these lifelong friends actually may end up inhabiting some other, less intimate category, but it’s hard to avoid that conclusion. Social networks not only have the power to connect you to entirely new categories of allies and collaborators, they also indirectly can erode other ties that are  based on a powerful but, in the end, limited and, in some ways, arbitrary factor–physical proximity.

If this dynamic can develop in the context of lifelong friendships, imagine what it could mean to organizations that fail to develop social platforms among their employees? Sure, you may work alongside someone every day but, if you’re not allowed to access Twitter at work, as an example, you may not have the intimate insight into their thinking that develops trust. In fact, you may end up developing more trusting relations with “strangers” you meet who share your same interests. Some of them may even work for your competitors.

What to make of this funny dynamic? Can I make others, particularly those who don’t join social networks because they believe, sincerely, that they lead to shallow relationships, see what is really occurring? I wonder, because, you see, if you don’t participate, it doesn’t make sense to you. It’s a puzzlement.

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Does the Government Have any Pull?

Posted on April 20, 2010 | Leave a comment

About halfway through their new book The Power of Pull, John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison write about how individuals can use emerging social networking capabilities to harness personally the power of pull–pull being their term for the capability of institutions and individuals to contribute to society by becoming centers of attraction, rather than continuing with the old model of pushing their value propositions regardless of how tired these may have become. But the authors admit there is a problem, that being ” the certain reactionary peevishness with which some people dismiss social media and digital culture.” And I thought when I read that, gosh that describes many federal government employees I encountered over the last few years of my service. I routinely confronted downright hostility to platforms such as Facebook and Twitter often, I thought, based on ignorance and on this odd conviction that experts do best by working by themselves, not by sharing with others. Now, I admit this reaction may have been particular to my Agency, but my sense is that it is rather characteristic of individuals above a certain, ahem, age.

I just finished reading the book, which is both an easy and provocative read and provides a detailed and I suspect largely accurate prescription for the adjustments we need to make to become power surfers of the pull economy. (Their argument is actually much more complex so here’s a link to Hagel’s blog post introducing the book.) In any case as I read the book I came across many concepts that I think will be challenging for the federal government–not impossible mind you, but hard.

One of their more ambitious points is that “rather than individuals serving the needs of institutions, our institutions will be recrafted to serve the needs of individual.” Wow, I thought, rather breathtaking and a good example of something that will be quite a stretch for federal agencies. Many, for example, are formed around needs that are at least today considered essential, such as the military, the Coast Guard, tax collection, and intelligence. It will be quite an intellectual journey to get to where we will be comfortable having these necessary functions carried out in a manner that depends less on rules and more on personal initiative.

Hagel, Brown, and Davison convincingly argue that as we move to the pull economy we will discard the “detailed demand forecasts, operational plans, and operational process manuals [that] carefully script the actions and specify the resources required to meet anticipated demand.”  I agree. The complexity of today’s age just mocks tight planning concepts–the impact the Icelandic volcano is having on our just-in-time economy is an apt illustration. But unfortunately for the federal government, we may have no choice but to remain prisoners to arbitrary budgets and program goals primarily because of the flaws in our law and budget-making processes. I suspect Congress will remain quite determined to keep federal agencies on a short leash.

One of the best sections in the book is the discussion of the need for institutions to arrange for creation spaces and for their employees to be exposed regularly to the potential for serendipity. Why? Because  only the explorers in your organization can hope to spot the advantages and opportunities that will, like fireflies, constantly flash before them. (By the way the need for employees to have an explorer’s mentality is another reason to ban the use of the metaphor “short leash”.) I would think these are ideas that federal agencies could start implementing right away. But to do so we have to realize that innovation requires failure to succeed.

Hagel, Brown, and Davison also provide a warning for federal agencies given the looming shortage of skilled workers. They write that “any institution that cannot provide a powerful platform for talent development will find its most talented people fleeing their cubicles and corner offices for other ‘homes'”. Well, we all know that government workers NEVER voluntarily give up corner offices, but otherwise federal managers need to take seriously their responsibility to create an environment where talent can best develop. In a pull economy, only those organizations that can attract the best talent will prosper.

There’s a lot more insight I could point to, but they all support the conclusion that the pull economy will eventually lead to significant changes in how the mission of government is carried out. For me the change needs to begin with how we define the roles of government workers. Right now too many of them are in fact pulling at short leashes, assigned to narrow jobs that allow for little innovation. Despite public prejudices that the opposite is true, I suspect the key to better government performance is not to have government employees do less, but to encourage them to do more.

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On Another Subject: What is the Difference Between Government and Community?

Posted on April 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

One of the things I like best about my public identity is that advertisers and spammers are in disagreement as to my gender, my age, whether or not I know how to speak English, and, most interesting, my political affiliation. I get bombarded with emails from every possible political angle. Today I received one from a very conservative group who is worried that schools will soon start forcing boys to wear dresses and that an army of 80k troops is lurking to put down civil unrest. Normally I would pay little attention to such an email, in the same way I wouldn’t pay attention to one from the opposite end of the spectrum. But the tag line on the email grabbed my attention:

The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.

Well, I agree with that I thought. Everything I know about history and human nature tells me that governments which purport to take care of a long list of needs for individuals somehow mess up the essential motivational structure of the human being.  And accounts from many totalitarian states agree that the dignity of the human and her independence suffer horrifically under these regimes. Among the eeriest things I ever watch are the documentaries about the so-called life of ordinary citizens in North Korea.

But I do have one caveat about the phrase. And I present it in the form of a question: What is the difference between government and community? Because if you replaced the word government in that phrase with the word community it stops making sense.

The bigger the community, the smaller the citizen.

That doesn’t sound right. Being a member of a thriving community enriches the life of an individual. That’s why urban areas worldwide are the essential centers of innovation and economic activity. That’s why individuals find mega-churches enriching, both socially and spiritually. And that’s why, in all but the rarest of cases, hermits seem like very diminished persons indeed.

My memory of civics class tells me government is, at its best, an expression of the community. This tendency to see government as some type of monstrous entity independent of the individuals it serves is very disturbing. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t like very much the survey of political attitudes on Nolanchart.com that’s been bouncing around Facebook the last couple of weeks. Government is presented as some kind of monolithic THING that acts independently of the wishes of any citizens. The agenda of the government is somehow seen as completely independent of the agenda of the citizens. This is an unhealthy view. In a democracy, the agenda of any elected government will of course not be to the liking of some citizens (perhaps even 50% minus 1) but regardless of which side we’re on, we cannot view the expression of another reasonable view as illegitimate.

One last point rant. This depiction of government as an independent, weight-throwing monolith also carries with it the view of bureaucrats as evil, aspiring tyrants. Here’s my problem with that. For the life of me, I don’t understand how we bureaucrats can be both lazy and stupid AND evil and dominating, but I’ll leave that to cleverer people to explain.

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