Professional Documents
Culture Documents
contrary." They are also hostile, explosive, lack impulse control, and, sometimes,
reckless.
Inevitably, passive-aggressives are envious of the fortunate, the successful, the
famous, their superiors, those in favor, and the happy. They vent this venomous
jealousy openly and defiantly whenever given the opportunity. But, deep at heart,
passive-aggressives are craven. When reprimanded, they immediately revert to
begging forgiveness, kowtowing, maudlin protestations, turning on their charm,
and promising to behave and perform better in the future.
Read Notes from the therapy of a Negativistic (Passive-Aggressive) Patient
considers the erection of yet another office tower and the disbursement of yet
another annual bonus to its members. As Parkinson noted, the collective
perpetuates its existence, regardless of whether it has any role left and how well it
functions.
As the constituencies of these collectives - most forcefully, its clients - protest and
exert pressure in an attempt to restore them to their erstwhile state, the collectives
develop a paranoid state of mind, a siege mentality, replete with persecutory
delusions and aggressive behavior. This anxiety is an introjection of guilt. Deep
inside, these organizations know that they have strayed from the right path. They
anticipate attacks and rebukes and are rendered defensive and suspicious by the
inevitable, impending onslaught.
Still, deep down bureaucracies epitomize the predominant culture of failure: failure
as a product, the intended outcome and end-result of complex, deliberate, and
arduous manufacturing processes. Like the majority of people, bureaucrats are
emotionally invested in failure, not in success: they thrive on failure, calamity, and
emergency. The worse the disaster and inaptitude, the more resources are allocated
to voracious and ever-expanding bureaucracies (think the US government post the
9/11 terrorist attacks). Paradoxically, their measure of success is in how many
failures they have had to endure or have fostered.
These massive organs tend to attract and nurture functionaries and clients whose
mentality and personality are suited to embedded fatalism. In a globalized,
competitive world the majority are doomed to failure and recurrent deprivation.
Those rendered losers by the vagaries and exigencies of modernity find refuge in
Leviathan: imposing, metastatically sprawling nanny organizations and
corporations who shield them from the agonizing truth of their own inadequacy
and from the shearing winds of entrepreneurship and cutthroat struggle.
A tiny minority of mavericks swim against this inexorable tide: they innovate,
reframe, invent, and lead. Theirs is an existence of constant strife as the multitudes
and their weaponized bureaucracies seek to put them down, to extinguish the
barely flickering flame, and to appropriate the scant resources consumed by these
forward leaps. In time, ironically, truly successful entrepreneurs themselves
become invested in failure and form their own vast establishment empires:
defensive and dedicated rather than open and universal networks. Progress
materializes despite and in contradistinction to the herd-like human spirit not
because of it.