Quality Managing the Country, including education, philanthropy, prisons, and poverty relief, posted by Mark Bousquet, author of How the University Works. What cannot be evaded is the recognition that Total Quality Control (TQM) works to the benefit of the managerial and share-holder class. We are all working in Wealth Bondage, and the only question is how it can be done better, faster, cheaper, the one best way, with more reliable metrics, lower labor costs, and more share-holder value, and tighter controls. Not that I am objecting. My pension is all in Wealth Bondage stock. If it goes down, I am totally screwed. Having sweated my ass off all these years to make Wealth Bondage prosper, I hope those who follow will be exploited to no less effect. Yes, it will all collapse, like the housing bubble, the dot.com bubble, the telecom bubble, and the ecosystems, but let it hold together, one bubble after another, through my life expectancy, dear God.
Catherine Austin Fitts diagnoses my foolish fears pantomimed above as "the red button problem." If we had only to hit a red button and end our exploitation by corporate America, end our materialism, end the drug trades, end the gaming industry, the porn industry, the mindless Hollywood crap, end the flow of illegal money into the financial system, end the collusion of those at the top managing things behind a veil of secrecy to their mutual advantage, we would not hit that red button for fear that it would mess up our own limited stock holdings, or our job. If the system collapses, we have no farm to work, no place to go, except maybe the Dumpster. As Margaret Thatcher said of Wealth Bondage, "There is no alternative." Therefore, rather than questioning the ways things work, we simply engage in symbolic exercises around social ventures, double bottom lines, green branding, screened investments, social capital markets and other efforts to disguise from ourselves our own complicity with what is literally killing us.
Catherine suggests, and I agree, that we will not cure the denial and the complicity until we have alternative places to invest our money, time, energy, love and attention outside the unholy systems of Wealth Bondage, also known as the Free Market, or Social Capital Market, or whatever you wish to call it. This is neither a conservative nor a progressive agenda. It is something in which we all have a stake. Catherine has impeccable libertarian, Wall Street, and Federal Government credentials. Yet she now works the grassroots via talk radio and blogs. On the progressive front, the open money community, like Mark Bosquet's work, and Jon Husband's at Wirearchy, or Tom Matrullo's at Improprieties, are among the many indications that total quality management has a few discontents yet to be mopped up. (Jon, by the way, used to work as a consultant for Hay Group, a premier provider of managed human solutions. Talk about an apostate. Tom is no better, a Yale-trained Comp Lit professor, turned journalist, whose mind works Tasso, Ariosto, Dante, Edmund Spenser, and Joyce against the grain of contemporary media.)
Along with Catherine Austin Fitts, William Schambra at Hudson's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society, is another example of a conservative who chafes under the yoke of TQM. He associates it with governmental bureaucracy espoused by liberals; I with Wealth Bondage beloved by conservatives; but we both are unresponsive to TQM in philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. Civil Society for us both is like a code phrase for the hope that there is a limit to TQM, and the total management of the human spirit. Bill and I both count among our favorite books James Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve The Human Condition Have Failed. What Scott shows, essentially, is that TQM, or Management by Objectives and Results, via quantification and standardization, is the modernist project in all walks of life, and in all modern societies, not just democratic, but in Russia, under Stalin and today, in China, under Mao and today, and in business no less than in government, in agriculture, education, and the arts, no less than in military affairs. Modern life is managed life, which is why Freedom gets repeated so often in that menacing way of propagandists inverting the truth. Freedom becomes in our time the exquisitely mass customized experience, metered and meted to the plebes in return for docile acceptance of their lives in Weber's iron cage, whether at work, consuming, or socially investing. (By the iron cage, I also mean the enslavement to our own vices, upon which Wealth Bondage preys.)
Against managed speech, against speech-writers, and ghost-writers, and marketers, and spokespersons, and pundits, and think tank thinking, against brand speak, against the imperatives of managerial authority, perhaps we have the open (and generally ill-informed) conversations of the internet, and perhaps we have the great traditions, spiritual, literary, and philosophical. Maybe that is why I am so in love with the work of Amy Kass, another conservative, and conservator, of the living tradition of the liberal arts, and exponent of the humane tradition of benefaction, or good deeds. For her too giving is not a transaction, nor a market, to be managed, but something we do in conversation and community with others, starting as with the arts by listening to the deeper spirit or muse or the graces that move through history, and helps us flourish, not as managed and monetized beings, but as a free people. That is why these arts are called liberal. H. Peter Karoff is such another, a poet and giving consultant, for whom giving, poetry, social entrepreneurship, and teaching are the expression of one impulse, the blind urge to imagine, sustain, or create the world we want. When a Tracy Gary speaks of inspired philanthropy, she does not just mean well managed. She means inspired and even disruptive of established expectations and controls.
Well, let's keep our voices down when we discuss this, ok? Even on weekends, we must manage our persona. No telling what will come back to haunt you. Best to keep it positive if you want to find work. You talk against Wealth Bondage and out you go: The Dumpster forever more.
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