The Invisible Bureaucracy Behind Our Inability to Solve the World’s Problems

                                                         by Andy Plotkin

   One of the most perplexing conditions of modern society is that through direct experience and the mass media people are subjected to a constant barrage of seemingly endless social problems.  To name just a few, we are continuously hearing, seeing, and reading about thousands of people dying from opioids and other drugs, millions struggling with alcohol, and billions suffering in global poverty.  Furthermore, we are relentlessly reminded about yet other social problems, such as crime, illiteracy, obesity, dementia, police shooting unarmed people, prospects of nuclear and biological terror, pandemics, human trafficking and slavery, climate change, mass killings, wars, divorce, and a prevailing climate of unhappiness at home and at work.  As if that weren’t enough to assault everyone’s nerves, we are constantly reminded of sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and ethnocentrism throughout our many institutions.

Little wonder that many of us tune out and adopt an apathetic attitude, since it seems that there cannot possibly be effective solutions for these many problems.  We bury our heads in the sand by distracting ourselves with our many diversions, including television, social media, email, sports, and entertainment.  In addition, many drown out the din of their anxiety with drug abuse, alcohol, food, and other addictions.

Moreover, many people believe it is all right to turn away from the torrent of social problems on our senses, since surely our glitterati—our elected political leaders, academic elite, learned educators, top scientists, various experts, newsmakers, wealthy industrialists, and famous entertainment and sports stars—are more than capable of solving these problems. After years of placing our faith in our glitterati, such faith has gone unrewarded and we are faced with these simple truths: Our elites are not capable of solving these problems, and that all people in a democratic society—the highly accomplished and ordinary citizen alike—must learn to evolve to the point where we can begin to solve these baffling, overwhelming problems.

Despite their shortcomings, our glitterati are not idiots; they are just ignorant of the invisible roots of our social problems.  They, like the rest of us, are victims of a social system that pushes them to be narrow in their thinking.  For example, some experts claim that the cause of mass school shootings lie in the inadequate protection of our schools.  Still others point to the ease in which mentally unstable people can obtain guns.  And yet others point to the effects of violence in the media and in digital gaming on impressionable young minds.  By themselves, these ideas are not stupid or wrong: they are just too narrow to solve humongous, widespread, and complex social, cultural, psychological, economic, and political problems that pervade our modern and modernizing societies.

In short, many ideas, such as the three just mentioned regarding school shootings, are considered in isolation from one another, and therefore they cannot be integrated to solve complex social problems.  For example, the violence portrayed in the media, the easy access to guns, and the lack of protection in schools are not considered together as different parts of the mass shooting problem. Why, in another example, are the social movements organized to eradicate mass killings, sexual abuse, ageism, homophobia, and racism not working together?  Why don’t the activists in these separate movements see that each of their narrow problems are related to the broader condition of how our society is organized?

After understanding this organizational condition of our bureaucratic society, we can begin to know why individuals and groups are rendered incapable of solving our pressing social problems.

Throughout the ages, going back at least 2,500 years, sages have been calling for people to first become aware and then to examine forces in their own lives that cause them to think, feel, and act the way they do.  To not do so makes all of us susceptible to acting upon our individual and collective illusions.  Plato’s Analogy of the Cave, for example, suggests how we are all like prisoners who are forced (or enticed) to look at shadowy images on cave walls caused by people in control of their society.  After a while, the prisoners believe that the illusions on the walls are real.

It seems clear, for instance, that all individuals, barring physical and mental disabilities, have the same capacities to develop into exceptional human beings.  Nevertheless, people the world over act on the erroneous illusion that a variety of factors, such as skin color, gender, age, IQ, religion, and social class, make some people inferior (e.g., poor, unintelligent, and criminal) and others superior (e.g., wealthy, intelligent, and law-abiding). Acting on this illusion prevents us from developing the vast, untapped capacities of earth’s more than seven billion human inhabitants—a huge waste, if not also an egregious moral affront to humanity.

This illusion is in fact an illusion because it is invisible, shared by people around the globe.  We mistakenly believe that our world leaders and other glitterati are somehow superior to the rest of us because they are ranked higher in a stratification system (also largely invisible).  However, if they are so superior to us, why are they incapable of solving our worldwide problems?

This illusion captivates our thinking and encourages us to view all problems as if they were diseases that need to be eradicated.  The fact, however, is that the reverse is true: These problems are not diseases, but are only the symptoms of invisible diseases crying out for interdisciplinary cures.

Social scientists, along with many in the humanities, have tried in vain through the centuries to show how the litany of social problems mentioned above are not the diseases, but are only the symptoms—the illusion of diseases—of our modern society.

While many invisible social conditions exist that contribute to our confusion between the diseases and their symptoms, the one most pervasive is the way in which our society is bureaucratically organized.  There are three conditions of bureaucracy.  First, workers and managers in bureaucracies are specialized by technical skills and disciplines such that, for example, bookkeepers, paralegals, freight handlers, and sales specialists are unable to communicate in any great depth with each other.  Secondly, executives, managers, and workers in bureaucracies are arranged in a hierarchy in which communication, especially upward through the ranks, is limited.  Third, all people must conform to rigid written rules and regulations.  It might also be added that all three of these conditions allow the top managers to control all employees to comply with their wishes and goals; therefore, the managers can prevent their organizations from making significant changes, which allows them to maintain their positions of authority.

All these characteristics of bureaucracy—specialization, hierarchy, and rule-bound conformity—limit communication and creative thinking among people who work and live within schools, offices, factories, government agencies, hospitals, the military, the mass media, and other bureaucratic institutions, and which isolate people and their ideas from one another.  This isolation within bureaucracies is confirmed by the fact that at least half of American workers feel lonely at their jobs.

This isolating condition limits our abilities to solve both personal and collective problems, and prevents people from achieving their goals.  As an example, we know that school shooters are isolated loners, so much so that even their parents, spouses, and close friends are often unaware of their large gun collections and meticulous plans for committing their heinous crimes.  Oftentimes, these loners were themselves isolated among their peers, and rejected and bullied (both visible symptoms of invisible hierarchical conditions) by their classmates.

Here, then, is an example of how the invisible bureaucratic structure of society both contributes to a social problem and then makes it difficult to solve the problem.   This unnoticed isolating bureaucratic structure lies behind the gun culture, videogame culture, and the felt need to arm trained teachers.  All these unintegrated aspects of our bureaucratic culture are caused by bureaucratic isolation; concomitantly, the inability to bring together these seemingly disparate and isolated parts of our culture to solve our problems are also caused by our bureaucratic way of life.

Similarly, various social movements attack isolated problems of sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and inequality.  Yet, each of these problems are only symptoms of the invisible hierarchical structure that separates the sexes, races, generations, and social classes from one another.  If the leaders and other members of all these social movements were to realize that their respective problem is but a symptom of the overall bureaucratic structure of society, then these movements could work together, and we all could learn to attack the invisible bureaucratic disease behind all these symptomatic problems.  Until then, our social problems will remain unsolvable.

Andy Plotkin, Ph.D., resides in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, is the president of the Interdisciplinary Education Group, teaches sociology at various public and private colleges and universities, and tutors private clients in writing.  He can be contacted at aplotkin@bellsouth.net.