Bureaucracy and life
Dear readers, we are starting a series of articles about the impact of bureaucracy and the free market on our lives, their continuous cooperation and fight, and how to creatively conquer bureaucracy in your personal life, workplace, and even country. We hope that you will find our writings beneficial without getting too bored.
Article 1. An open secret …
The biggest secret of the entire history of civilization is that for the last 10 000 years, we have been living in a slavery society where the bureaucratic elite (in administration, finances, ideology, science, information, entertainment, education, healthcare, etc.) is a collective master (owner and manipulator) over the lower classes – rest of us.
If this reality looks horrific to you, don’t despair. We want to help you better understand the source where most of the daily problems come from. Therefore, this awareness will help improve your life and, possibly, your country’s life. We will give you the tools to manage this mess!
How the world bureaucracy was born
Around 20 000 – 25 000 years ago, the last glaciation reached its maximum. Tribes and groups of people, separated by areas of pathless ice, had been actively developing their intellect in the fight for survival in quite hostile conditions with limited available resources. Their language, ability to predict, plan and implement group actions, altruism, and mutual support improved. In addition, such skills as finding new, creative ideas for life improvement, from technologies to art, appeared and strengthened. People were learning how to use fire, some elements of agriculture, and how to produce more advanced instruments and weapons.
Approximately 12 000 years ago Ice Age ended. Forests and planes were quickly growing and filling with an abundance of edible herbs and animals. People escaped their “ice prisons” and began broad expansion in all directions. Rapidly grew the number of people, tribes of hunter-gatherers rose, split, migrated, and conquered more and more space… Food gathering was taking only 3 – 5 hours a day, and it was rather a pleasure than work. The rest of the time could be spent on self-entertainment… Births were outnumbering deaths, and the human population was growing. Life was amazing!
Unfortunately, nothing good lasts forever. In 1 000 – 2 000 years, people faced a completely new situation – the human population grew so much that natural food resources for tribes of hunter-gatherers became scarce. That started brutal wars, with genocides at times. Tribes were fighting for “living space.”
At first, management in tribes was relatively informal, performed by people whose authority was demonstrated by physical power, wisdom, cunning, etc. Although there were no formal election procedures, there was still something slightly resembling democracy. Besides chiefs, there were “wise people” absorbing information and experience, teaching children, and attempting to predict essential events – shamans. Tragically, it was not enough for tribes to survive in conditions of excessive birthrate.
Tribes that didn’t have talented leaders understood that a single victory over neighbors couldn’t ensure the tribe’s survival but rather depended on having an army (even with just 20 warriors) and effective control of the activity of every person in a tribe were doomed. These leaders (most probably together with smart shamans) turned their troops into the instrument of “social management,” in other words – tribal bureaucracy.
Everyone in a tribe is given the precise task – this family is to supply five pigs a year for feeding the military unit, this one – 10 sacks of grain or dried mushrooms, etc. Among other duties, there were ones to form and guard food supplies, dig mud shelters, build fortresses, collect stones for throwing, and make bows, clubs, and knives of wood, bone, or stone… It was continuous sweat labor with minimum entertainment, free time, and cruel punishments for disobedience.
The price of tribal safe life was the loss of individual freedom. For a moment in history, the tribe was saved, but naturally, with the victory over the enemies, the war state did not disappear – it became permanent. Free people turned into enslaved people and became the property of their bureaucracy. The most significant turning point in history happened, historically unavoidable and ethically disgusting revolution – transition from free development of people to total control of elite over them, managing only in its (elite) interests.
From authors:
Few words about the Soviet Union and us
Let us introduce ourselves:
We, Boris Zlotin and Alla Zusman, are not very young. Still, we perfectly remember our childhood declamations when together with other kids of the former USSR, we were thanking our country and Stalin personally for being the happiest children in the world.
We all knew that, although not all of us and not always were well fed. We also knew that sometimes we could make a little mischief, but we always had to obey our superiors because they were brilliant. Then suddenly, Stalin stopped being a genius, became a bad person, and the time to obey Khrushchev came. After that, he also “went bad,” and burry Brezhnev appeared to be “the Great Leader.” Despite this, we remained the happiest and the freest because, according to the bureaucracy, our freedom was a “conscious necessity.” Russian general population and its intelligentsia got used to living in socialistic slavery, secretly entertaining one another with political jokes, avoiding contact with stinky representatives of the most aggressive ideology, deceiving bosses, and some simply stealing staff when possible, from government-owned entities: “You are the master, not the guest, grab every nail – be the best!”
We put the Soviet Union behind
We (Zlotin and Zusman) got fortunate when we accidentally met with the new science – Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ or TIPS – eng.) and its founder Henry (Genrich) S. Altshuller, who became our teacher and a true friend. We had a job we loved – solving real, inventive problems, implementing our solutions, teaching creativity to children and adults, writing books and articles… We were earning quite good money, traveling a lot, living in our own “happy world,” paying little attention to the marasmus of our elderly leaders, insane deficits, production and transport collapse, constantly mounting accidents and errors, idiotic gambles like the war in Afghanistan or vineyard burning, etc.
Science has many geeks
At the beginning of the 1980s, we continued working upon the developments of Henry Altshuller and found out how to extend the TRIZ approach to building scientific ideas, hypotheses, and theories. After the first successful results, mainly related to revealing the root causes of failures and other undesired events in various productions, we decided to deepen our studies. For that, we chose a few “guinea pigs.”
It appeared that Boris’ father was a mechanical engineer and a very productive inventor; Boris’ mother was a historian. The house was full of technical literature and history books. Boris’s not too literate granny taught him to read when he was five years old but not “correctly” (not slow by syllables) but fast, memorizing whole words and phrases. That is why 5–6-year-old Boris read 100 – 200 hundred pages daily, from his favorite technical encyclopedia with marvelous pictures to volumes of Tarle, Soloviyov, Kliuchevskiy, and other historians.
One of the first tests of our scientific method was constructing a methodology of forming scientific models based on historical material, which we called “Historical Mechanic” or “HistMech.” We want to share our findings on bureaucratic development and demonstrate in these articles a portion of our studies which we have been conducting for more than 35 years.
End of part 1 – to be continued
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