A comment by John Fitzgerald on yesterday's post clarified something for me. he said:
I was leafing through the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salford's 2019 almanac at my Mum's house today. There was a page devoted to one of those organisational-structure flow-chart diagrams, showing who's who and who does what in the Diocese. To me, the sight of the Church aping the world of business and HR in this way, was an eruption of pure Ahrimanuc evil and an admission and indeed a celebration of Ahriman's taking power in the Diocese. The medium is the message, form is content, etc. Honestly, an old-school pentagram would have been less alarming!
I replied:
A very good example. Yet, how few people can recognise that as a mark of actually-existing evil?
At most, some might acknowledge this as sign of a risk of corruption. But the truth is that it is a mark of corruption, it is evil being-implemented.
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This is important - very important. When we see managerialism, bureaucratic thinking, then we are seeing evil: the main form of evil. Not just something that encourages evil, but actually-happening evil.
It is a lethal blind spot of our era that we fail to notice and identify the major form of evil in our era. This can be termed Ahrimanic (or specifically Satanic) evil; and is the bureaucratic evil of materialism/ reductionism/ positivism/ scientism.
The cold, dehumanising, despair-inducing Ahrimanic evil is far more common and dangerous than the 'old style' 'Luciferic' type of demonic evil - of impulsive lust, torture, killing. More common and dangerous because is simply is not admitted to be evil!
And the Ahrimanic is not admitted to be evil exactly because it is everywhere, obvious, triumphant; in all organisations and institutions including our most cherished Christian churches!
The worst that most people will say of managerialism is that it is a 'waste of time'. But it certainly is not that - because for the demonic powers time expended on managerialism is powerfully corrupting; keeping the mind away from Good, and enforcing and rehearsed the denial of God and the world of spirit and joy.
The point is that when we see an organisation emphasising its hierarchical and functionally differentiated managerial structure, using Public Relations, dishonesty and manipulation in public announcements, pandering/ virtue-signalling in advertising material by emphasising Leftist weazel-concepts such as equality, diversity, anti-poverty, climate change...
When we hear or read the tropes of managerial language and behaviour; observe committees, voting, procedure etc - that whole crushingly-familiar world of The System; we are seeing actual evil being implemented - just as surely and solidly as if we were seeing demons with horns, pointy-tails and tridents boiling a human being in sulphur.
The big problem is that there are such powerful and plausible excuses for this type of evil.
It is all too easy to say - But we have to do this, nowadays - and if we didn't we could not function. And it is all too easy to accept this excuse, which is true - at least at the level of rational materialism, and simply to forget about the whole thing because it is inevitable, and a necessary compromise.
We have had many generations of this compromise; of the forces of Good using the instrument of evil on the basis that either there-is-no-alternative, or that they are doing-so in a way that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
Yet we look around and see that the opposite has happened. The instruments of evil have thoroughly corrupted all institutions and nearly-all Western people - who nowadays accept the inevitability and potential benefits of managerialism.
It seems that our society will go to its destruction, and we will go to our deaths, defending the absolute necessity of that which incrementally and systematically corrupts and dooms us.
4 comments:
I stumbled over this sentence "The instruments of evil have thoroughly corrupted all institutions" and thought "what? aren't institutions the very things that are defined by organizational flow charts and such? isn't such managerialism an implicit feature of any instituation?"
Then I realizied my error. Church, crown, congreation are instituations. They need neither an organistional flow chart nor a commitee.
This gets even more clear when I think about family. I'd say it is the most basic and most important instituation in any society.
Bureaucracy is perhaps at its worst most evil in education. All education systems I worked in were horrible in this regard, but the most oppressive form I ever experienced was in a Church of England school in the UK.
Simple requests for educational supplies like paper or white board markers required the filling out of several forms that included a cursory explanation of my lessons plans and how the supplies would be utilized within the structure of these plans. These forms then went through three or four 'line managers' who all raised questions about the content of my plans. I had to provide justification for my lesson content and methods before I was finally given the supplies.
The whole process was so demotivating and infuriating, I eventually chose to purchase the supplies I needed out of my own pocket rather than endure such a soul-destroying procedure. The experience, together with earlier ones of the same variety, finally motivated me to quit school teaching altogether.
Karl. We need to distinguish the family (and marriage) from institutions.When based on love, itbis not an institution (search this blog for 'gemeinschaft ').
@William - I gave no examples, because I meant 'all' - and I want people to join the dots for themselves - not to get diverted by singling out specifics. Respectability, wealth, assimilation, worldly power and effectiveness - these all entail bureaucratic corruption.
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