Control Mentality and the Managerial Bureaucracy

“No one that ever lived ever thought so crooked as we.” – Samuel Beckett, Endgame

Over the past few decades, which is accelerating year by year, our lives have all but been taken away from us by technological “developments.” We have failed to notice this, as we are indoctrinated by the idea that technological progress is inherently beneficial and is closely connected to political democratization and economic freedom. This is not so, and the last two terms are increasingly becoming problematic anyway. In turn, we must start trying to understand what is happening with us before it is too late – though, most probably, it is already too late.

The theme has evident affinities with Eric Voegelin’s “modern Gnosticism” thesis, which is one of his most influential and important ideas. Therefore, it very much belongs to VoegelinView – though, at the same time, it is also a source of controversy, practically since it was first formulated, over 70 years ago.

The topic is practically endless, and in this short article, which follows a series of articles published in VoegelinView about two years ago, I can only touch upon one, particularly vital point: the practice of official online applications.

The practice, and its purportedly self-evident justification, is well-known to everyone. Instead of standing in line in front of offices for hours, not to mention making lengthy and costly trips to centers, how much simpler it is to sit in front of the computer and do everything in the cozy atmosphere of our homes. It is trivially better; technology, as always, helps to improve our quality of life, right? No, wrong; even absolutely wrong. Let’s see why.

In order to gain a proper perspective, as we always need to gain such perspective when something is not working in our taken for granted world, especially when this is not even realized, let me return back to the forgotten reality of everyday life under communism – rightly forgotten, at the existential level, as such reality was drab, boring, to be canceled from living memory; but forgetting at the intellectual level is problematic, as ignorance and oblivion only helps our entrapment in the same kind of practices – mutatis mutandis.

I still have a good recollection of what it meant to contact an office in Hungary, in the 1960s and 1970s – memories of a child and a young adult. Such memories are precious data, as they are truly given, in the etymological sense of the term; without such concrete contact with living experiences, “empirical evidence” and “archival research” only produces lifeless, boring, and routine outcomes, helping one to make a career in contemporary universities, ultimately to be forgotten immediately. At any rate, one approaches any official place, not just the police or the state bureaucracies, but a personnel office in any institution, or even in a firm, with considerable trepidation. Much like the person sitting behind the window that was not there to help us– only to check us, to control us, or whatever we were doing. This was driven by the ideology that we “people” out there were all renegade, if not outright fascists, and were giving them trouble with our applications by not letting them simply converse in the office. They used every opportunity to harass us, forcing us to rewrite any sheet due to a single typo. (Such documents were often several pages long, requiring half an hour– if not much more work– to fill them out.)

Compared to that, a new world has opened for me when I went to the “West.” Whether in Europe or North America, employees in banks, university offices, in state bureaucracies, and Home Offices were evidently only there to help – being not just polite, but benevolent, good-willing. They did not even understand why I was profusely apologizing when making a typo. Applications were handled by people who understood the process, knew what was supposed to be the proper outcome, and who were not officially suspicious about the reasons why I was there. Thus, everything went smoothly, and one left the office with a sense of contentment. This is not an idealization of the past – it was plain everyday reality. It was normal and natural.

Now we can turn to see what is going on, right now, due to technological developments, and why this is desperately wrong. Applications, whether for a passport, a visa, a banking card, a health certificate, and so on, are no longer submitted personally to another human being, but using various internet “portals.” This, supposedly, makes things easier, and this is indeed the case if one deals with a routine procedure, repeated frequently. However, there are many such applications, which are only done a very few times. Thus, one does not gain a familiarity with them – and at any rate, every such application has a “first time,” when one is faced with the process for the first time; and now, instead of being helped, one is facing the void – the horror of the void. And usually the most significant, even fateful, such applications are the cases that are done infrequently, and where mistakes can be the costliest.

Before going further, let me note that the very word “application” altered its meaning over the past decades. Previously, it was used in the sense I’m applying in this paper, meaning “a formal request to be considered for a position or to be allowed to do or have something, submitted to an authority, institution, or organization.” However, through mobile phone technology, the term is now applied for “computer program that is designed for a particular purpose.” Note that there is now a confusion between two different meanings of “application,” and one wonders whether this is intentional.

So, instead of going to a possibly distant office, we now submit the “file” (no longer a physical sheet, but this is not the real issue) from home – but what is the “price” we must pay for all this? It is very simple, though exactly cannot be put into monetary terms: it is that we forgo the assistance of a concrete, competent human person. This supposedly can be “substituted” – note the word, it will be central for this article – by a detailed explanation of the purposes and modalities, or perhaps a video which explains details. So, and again, all is well, such advice is free, so it has no “price,” case is closed, yes? Obviously, no; and for many reasons.

To start with, and most evidently, such explanations tend to be legalistic, the more important the application is, and therefore ever more unintelligible. Applicants are forced to choose among predefined options, but it is by no means clear, in many if not most cases, what exactly is the “right” option, even after consulting the online suggestions. And here we enter an infinite number of problems, starting from the potential loss of connection to the difficulty of moving in between the application draft and the various website clarifications, the possibility of saving a draft or starting everything again, to the ticking of the clock and the threatening loss of connection, due to the “very reasonable” limitation of how much time one can stay connected, and so on – we all know about this, experienced this, but either consider this a triviality that does not require intellectual attention, or believe that “eventually” technological progress will solve all this. But all this is wrong; the issue won’t be solved, won’t go away, and we are actually and all but irretrievably giving up our rights and possibilities to a meaningful life.

This is because we can only resolve our issues, as concrete, living human beings, by interacting with other concrete living human beings, who trust each other and are benevolent towards each other – there is no other way. This connection cannot be substituted – technological solutions are nonsensical; they only pile up problems upon problems, leading to the presumption that this will be solved by further technological progress, but this will rather only create further problems. This will go on and on, as long as we do not realize that we are on the wrong track.

Thus, a quick practical-policy advice can immediately be formulated: it should be illegal for central state authorities to transfer applications to online processes. Applications for passports, citizenships, visas, work permits, health certificates, and the like are too delicate to be done without direct personal human help. Eventual errors, that are bound to happen, easily create enormous problems for anyone. Evidently, all around the world, interior ministries and similar organizations are already overwhelmed by mending applications that somehow went desperately wrong.

In this short article, I can add only two further points about this dead-end street: one about the underlying dynamics and logics of the entire process, and the second about the impact on those who previously were there to help us inside the state or a private organization, and now their task changed to control and supervise us.

Substitution

Instead of throwing up our arms, or going down on our knees, saying that all this is nothing but “technological progress,” we need to reflect on what exactly is going on. If, instead of talking to a human being, we are facing and addressing a machine that replaced a person. Seemingly, this is exactly what “technological progress” means: activities, functions, and jobs that are too burdensome for us to do are performed instead by machines. Substitution, in this sense, is almost identical to “rationality.” However, it is exactly here that the problem can be captured, and it becomes visible through etymological analysis. This also, at the same time, illuminates a general point that was discussed among others by Lewis Mumford and Michel Foucault, which concerned the primacy of applying technological reasoning to things, or to humans.

Substitution originally, in Latin and medieval French, meant a very specific legal act, by which in the absence of a “natural” heir, a successor was nominated. Thus, the word had three key aspects. First, it only applied for legal persons, or human beings. The manner in which some “thing different from a human being could become a legal person that has an important history on its own, not to be entered now.” Second, for a substitution to take place, the person to be substituted had to die. Thus, substitution implies prior death, destruction, or the generation of a void. This can be well seen through its closest synonym, “replacement:” the term means that there is an empty space, or a space vacated by the death or disappearance of the person, a void, that can, or must be filled. This point is fundamental, as it implies the necessary violence implied in any act of substitution. To be clear about it, it is not the appointment, or the making, of a substitute that is violent; violence is implied in the disappearance of the person who thus must be substituted: a violence that is the equivalent of death. Still in other words, only somebody who gave up his place, because died or disappeared, can be substituted; thus, substituting someone who remains alive is the equivalent of killing that person. The third point is that substitution only takes place if the normal line of succession is broken. Under normal conditions, a person who dies or disappears has his legitimate heirs. Thus, substitution is not only always and inherently violent, but, at the same time, it is a highly out-of-ordinary event (in Weberian language); or, in anthropological language, it assumes liminality.

Giving one trivial example, anybody familiar with the recent history of European football can understand the point about the violence, the intolerable character of being substituted. To start with, substitution was not a practice allowed in the rules of soccer. Though under exceptional circumstances, using special discretion, in a few cases, usually due to the injury of a player, substitution was occasionally allowed. The wider use of substitution happened due to violence: in some games of the 1966 FIFA World Cup, some players were targeted by violent and irregular tackles, making them limp in the rest of the game, without the possibility of substituting them. This was the reason why in the 1970 World Cup the practice of substitution was introduced. American Football, of course, allowed much before almost unlimited substitution – but American Football is a very particular game, being both extremely technological and very violent, and it is hardly played as a popular sport outside the US.

Now, in the first years, even decades, when substitution was introduced, it was used very sparsely, only in cases of injury, or when a player was underperforming, as a strong negative feeling was associated with it. Nobody wanted to be substituted in a game, whether in the World Cup or in a game of amateurs in a City League; it was felt as shameful if someone was substituted. Up until very recent times, one could follow in the news the discussion surrounding the negative reactions of certain top players to their coach’s decision of substituting them. This has all but disappeared out of sight by now, as for a series of reasons pressure on the players increased, and substitution became a routine phenomenon; but this is not due to “progress,” rather to the increasing failure to perceive how problematic, for all sorts of reason, the act of substituting is. The increasing “naturalness” of substitution, not surprisingly, went ahead hand in hand with the increased mechanization of soccer.

This is because, simply, and as it is evident through the etymology, no living human being can be rightfully substituted. Substitution is a violent altering of the order of things, just as in fact death is. Every single human being in the world has its own time and place; the place where they were born, where they grew up, and where they are living; a place among their family and relatives, among their friends, among their neighbors, in the place where they perform certain activities – works, sings, performs, plays; does all of this in the full possession of their capacities, and nobody can do any of these things exactly as they are doing. The idea of substituting anyone is simply absurd.

Things, of course, do change in life. For example: people die, and then, under certain conditions, they must be “substituted.” Also, some people may do things, or behave in a way that their continuous presence becomes impossible, and there are all kinds of ways such problems can be solved through law, customs, warnings, etc. But none of this implies the kind of supposedly smooth, easy, and anesthetic act that we associate with the term “substitution” – as a kind of “rational choice.” And this is because “substitution” is not a “rational” choice: it is inherently violent and intrusive. We as social thinkers, philosophers, essayists, and simple human beings must understand how we came to arrive at this current state in which we simply take for granted, in all sorts of ways, “substitution” as a normal and rational act, as this is not one. No human being can be substituted, without grievous harm, with another; and especially no human being can be substituted with something else.

So, submitting an application to a machine is simply wrong. A machine cannot help us, no matter how “intelligent” it looks – which, by the way, is a complete misnomer. Intelligence implies recognition, judgment, experience, emotions, and the like, which only a human being who had a whole series of life experiences can have; this cannot be imitated and should not be imitated. Who does not understand this is at the level of Gollum, and they cannot be saved.

Now, let’s turn to the second point, which concerns in the concrete case those who were “substituted” by a machine: the officers of the state, of a bank, or another organization, who evidently were replaced by a machine. How and why did they agree to this? Here, apart from general brainwashing concerning the inherently beneficial nature of technological progress, there is another, even more sinister point, which is a kind of a pact with the devil: instead of their previous, helping or assisting work, they were given more power.

The Mentality of Control

State functionaries, in a democratic country, are supposed to have one central legitimate concern, and this is to help citizens. The situation is similar in any large private organization: employees are there to help their customers – even if their overall aim is to make money, which by the way is never a legitimate aim of a state or public functionary. However, with online applications, and similar processes, the situation is radically altered.

Employees are not there to help their clients, who are rather sitting alone, facing a machine; but they have not become unemployed: their work has been redefined from helping to controlling. The significance of this shift, all but unnoticed, is epochal. It is creating a brand new mentality among administrators, as a category: particularly lethal in state departments, and in universities. Previously, to repeat, administrators were there to help – their clients, or their professors. Now, their job, and their ensuing mentality, was radically altered: they are now there to control whatever we are doing.

Let me give a very simple example, based on personal examples – such examples, and similar anecdotes, tell much more than expressing the same point in the garbled language of social or political theory. In 2012, when I was in Brussels at a Panel meeting of the European Research Council, in the intermission of meetings, a very nice lady went around the table, distributing forms to be signed, helping in filling them out, collecting receipts for reimbursements, and the like. All was very pleasant and informal. The next time, in 2014 – the dates certainly have their own importance, in the overall spread of such practices, the history of which somebody should write – though we do not even have a proper history of the way “empirical research” was spread in the social sciences, something that much preoccupied Voegelin just after 1945 – we were supposed to submit reimbursement applications online. We were given a handbook, but this, as anybody can imagine, especially given that it was prepared in Brussels, was impenetrable. I was trying to guess the right answers to the more complicated questions, but evidently failed, as my application was rejected, and the same lady wrote back to me an email about this, that was formally polite but written in a style that I somehow was not happy with. I wrote back a message, in the same kind of language which we used two years ago, which was neither too informal, nor hostile, but tried to convey that the error I made was alluded to the fact that we knew each other from two years ago. Her reply by no means returned the style, rather gave an almost threatening indication that she could have been much less kind and could have taken my error as an attempt to claim benefits I was not entitled to. The issue, as far as I remember, was trivial, related to rather strange ERC practices, which would categorically rule out paying for any taxis, and which also do not reimburse travels inside Brussels – both being quite nonsensical, typical of “universalistic” Brussels rules.

Thus, what I conjecture here, and what should be verified with research, to be done once such documents would be available, which certainly will not happen within a few decades, is that internal memos explicitly must have suggested to offer administrators the “devil’s pact” of trading their jobs as assistants of the public to the much more powerful position of its controllers. But whether such a pact existed, the real effect is certainly the same: public servants and administrators became effective controllers, wielding power, instead of offering help. This radically altered the very nature of liberal democracies, pushing them into a direction that rendered them – and this is the absurd corollary of this paper – more and more similar to the former, collapsed communist regimes.

Thus, in the past decades, Western liberal democracies performed a trip alongside a Mobius Strip: the more aggressive and technological, dehumanized, neo-liberal managerialism became, the more it became similar, in practices and especially in mentalities, to the collapsed communist regimes. The Covid measures represented a crucial test case in this regard, and we still do not know what their exact outcome was.  But at any rate, we all must realize that we require a paradigm change in thinking: a new paradigm that would make it possible to think our Brave New World, the unreal, absurd reality of a neo-liberal neo-communist managerial bureaucracy, which is increasingly moving towards a fully commercialized, virtual police state.

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