COB-32: exploiting bureaucracy

butterfly stealing a drink from a watermelon

Ants are second only to humans in bureaucratic excellence. Study of ants thus potentially provides important insights into bureaucratic behavior. Recently scientists observed ant meetings with purported high-level ant management:

Clustering around the speaker, worker ants stay motionless in a hunched-over posture with antennae out and jaws slightly open. Like an honor guard around a human queen, worker ants will maintain that pose for hours.

Such behavior indicates well-trained bureaucrats. Unfortunately, the purported high-level management was an imposter, a complete fraud, in reality not a queen ant but actually a caterpillar. Through the misfortune of biological change, a species of butterflies has evolved the ability to exploit ants. The caterpillar stage of the butterfly makes noises (“Staff meeting! Staff meeting!”) that induce the ants to carry the caterpillar into the ant nest and treat it like a queen.  Appalling exploitation results from the ants’ dedicated bureaucratic service:

[the] interloper caterpillar gains most of its body mass while luxuriating in ant care, and then turns into a Maculinea rebeli butterfly.

This is similar to the revolving door phenomenon in high-level managerial positions in some human bureaucracies. To avoid exploitation, ant and human bureaucracies should avoid bringing in outsiders and should be suspicious of managers who appear to differ from previous managers.

StickSlip at Orbis criticizes Elizabeth Alexander’s inauguration poem for containing “unremarkable clichès” and “prosaic platitudes”.  Clichès and platitudes are prominent features of bureaucratic writing. They also make for commercially successful poetry.  We foresee a bright future for Ms. Alexander in the greeting card industry.

Victor Barrenceha at ArtLurker documents the problems of an artist who lacks sufficient respect for bureaucracy. A Miami code inspector issued code infractions to artist Clifton Childree for: “Weird mannequins with their heads chopped off in the garage, … movie theatre with collapsed ceiling in the backyard, as well as piles of rotted wood, scattered furniture, and other debris.” Bureaucracy is a higher art than art. Artists who want to be exhibited in a major art institution must learn to appreciate bureaucracy.

Andy at TinkerX offers a rousing defense of middle management. We agree completely on all points. Without middle management, the whole bureaucratic structure would collapse in upon itself.

Jim Sinclair at Jim Sinclair’s mineset offers a brief explanation of economic stimulus payments. It’s clearly far too brief for a bureaucratic to have actually written it.

Bureaucratic work requires intense concentration. While most bureaucrats are superhuman, some are merely human. This can lead to problems with young, sexy interns. Fortunately, European Commission officials have recognizes this problem and are organizing a study group to examine it. The Telegraph, continuing a tradition of sensational newspaper reporting, has crassly sensationalized this legitimate concern for bureaucratic concentration. Consider this quote from an anonymous source:

“I think men working here in boring jobs would love to believe that sexy women spies were after their bodies and their secrets. I personally think it is unlikely,” said Petra, a 24-year old stagiare from a Baltic country.

Bureaucrats do not have boring jobs. In addition, sexy women spies are after their bodies. And if Petra (I believe the root of Petra is “rock”) had more bureaucratic skill, she would produce a 25-page report on the subject rather than merely declare what she personally thinks.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival’s regulations. Past editions of the Carnival of Bureaucrats can be found on the Carnival’s category page.

encountering your past self


Samuel Beckett’s play, Krapp’s Last Tape, now being performed at the Keegan Theatre, resonates poignantly in our age of cheap, easy, and ubiquitous digital recording. Imagine thirty years from now looking back at your Facebook News Feed, or at your e-mail archive. Imagine looking through the old digital photos piled up on your hard drive or watching a personal video that you recorded a long time ago. Even if you don’t have such records, your family and friends do, and they will share them with you. Memory of your past self has been growing rapidly outside your and others’ minds.

Bits of Krapp’s memory of his life reside in spools of reel-to-reel tape.  As a sixty-nine-year-old, Krapp listens to a taped diary entry he recorded thirty years earlier.  His recorded voice, in turn, talks about past events, including a recording that Krapp made about a decade earlier.  Krapp reacts viscerally to scenes his recorded voice describes, he condemns his old self’s thoughts and attitudes, and he continually manipulates his recorded voice by stopping, rewinding, and skipping sections of the tape.  As a counterpoint to this fragmented, varying spool of himself through time, Krapp relishes saying, and experiencing himself saying, the word “spool”.  The sensuousness of a banana that he retrieves from drawer in the desk drives him into a frenzy of physical appetites.  Sense of presence of oneself across a long span of time jars all levels of neural processing.  How could I have thought what I thought?  I am physically here, not there, this I, I am.

The Keegan Theatre’s production conveys beautifully both the all-encompassing flow of time and the altered attentional response to distanced viewing.  As the audience enters and finds seats, Krapp sits, facing the audience across a  desk that has its working side toward the audience.  The play has no definitive start.  The audience has the protagonist’s desk position for a review of Krapp’s old self. But, distancing and objectifying these circumstances, Krapp is silent, stationary,  and framed on the stage like a portrait placed on a black background.  I found myself scrutinizing and interpreting Krapp’s facial expressions, which varied slowly over time.  Thus I entered into solo actor Brian Hemmingsen’s expressive, sympathetic, and continually engaging performance of Krapp’s Last Tape.  Everyone who can should see this Krapp.

*  *  *  *  *

Krapp’s Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett, directed by David Bryan Jackson, starring Brian Hemmingsen, presented by Keegan Theatre new island project at the Theatre on the Run, February 19 through March 14, 2009.

balances in stress responses

In her interesting book, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions, Esther Sternberg describes how the brain’s hormonal stress response balances susceptibility to inflammatory and infectious diseases.   Stress stimulates hormones that repress immune cell functions that cause inflammation. Hence a rat strain that reacts more to stress is less susceptible to a common type of inflammatory disease than a rat strain that reacts less to stress. A small-scale evalution of human subjects by means of a controlled stress test found that persons with a higher stress response are less likely to suffer from a particular type of autoimmune disease. On the other hand, chronic stress is associated with greater susceptibility to infectious disease.  A good balance of stress-related hormones is needed to keep the immune system active (not too much stress hormones), but not over-active (not too little stress hormones).

Humans’ behavioral response to their genetic/developed stress response creates an additional problem of balance across biology and experience. Persons consciously or unconsciously aware that they react strongly to stress (become highly distressed) have a strong biological incentive to avoid stressful situations.  Thus persons with a relatively high stress-response may respond by adopting a low-stress lifestyle. Correlation between degree of stress-response and inflammatory disease in health surveys might not be negative because of this life-historical behavioral response.  An important challenge for persons with a high stress-response is to find a satisfying lifestyle with a moderate amount of stress.  That seems to be the kind of lifestyle that provides the best biological circumstances for avoiding both inflammatory and infectious diseases.