The Narcissistic Rage of the Bureaucracy
Everyone today seems to be an amateur psychologist, quick to diagnose psychopathic, manipulative narcissism in anyone they don’t like or with whom they disagree. There is no shortage of videos on YouTube or articles instructing laypeople on how to identify and deal with the narcissist.
We are told that signs include self-importance, pre-occupation with status, entitlement, a need to seek out people with high status, exploitative behavior, arrogance, a lack of empathy, a need for admiration from others, and envy.
This can also describe organizations.
Entities that prioritize their significance over those they would serve. Groups that derive power from their perceived position in the pecking order. Institutions that feel entitled by their constitution or their existence to do what they will. Forms that collaborate principally with groups of equivalent or higher status. Organizations with a haughty, supercilious indifference to the impact of their actions on other groups and on individuals. Entities that cannot tolerate criticism or even interrogation. Groups that feel put upon by the success of others.
This does not apply to every organization. But it does apply to some. The common denominator for those who fit this mold is bureaucracy. The organizational design for bureaucracy is meant to impose a callous insensitivity to its clients through the application of rules, leveraging the status of arrogant expertise, in an emergent quest for resources.
For the bureaucracy, status is paramount. Deep in the core of the organization’s DNA is an ancient urge to defend its current status at high cost because it was hard won.
This is why we have whistleblower laws: to protect the people who report wrongdoing.
“Unfortunately, reporting often comes at a high price: whistleblowers risk their career, their livelihood and sometimes their personal safety to expose wrongdoing that threatens the public interest. They may be fired, sued, blacklisted, arrested, threatened or, in extreme cases, assaulted or killed. And in some societies, whistleblowing carries connotations of betrayal rather than being seen as a benefit to the public.”
Organizations will go to desperate lengths to crush any suggestion of wrongdoing, any criticism, or any provable allegations.
Narcissistic rage is described here:
“An episode of narcissistic rage derives from a threat to a person's sense of self and is characterized by intense anger. In a relationship, for example, this could manifest in physical or verbal abuse, manipulation, or passive-aggressive behavior.
“Narcissistic rage is different from other forms of anger in that narcissistic rage is disproportionate to the perceived slight; it’s as though the person has a hair-trigger response. It’s completely out of proportion to what provoked it and often takes the other person by surprise.”
Criticize or question the deemed infallibility of the bureaucracy and prepare to feel its wrath, just as individuals do when the narcissist flies off the handle, something best described by the great American naval officer, Hyman Rickover:
“Admiral Rickover, the founder of America’s nuclear navy, observed that if you have to choose between sinning against God or the bureaucracy, choose God. Neither will ever forget, but God may forgive you.”
A great example of this is the UK Post Office scandal.
The UK Post Office employs sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses to run small branches. It is a franchise system. In 1999, the Post Office purchased and implemented a software system from the Japanese developer Fujitsu. The software was called Horizon. The Post Office imposed this system as a type of enterprise resource planning infrastructure. Sub-postmasters used it to manage their operations, including the branch finances.
The problem arose when sub-postmasters started reporting bugs, errors in the software code that created the appearance of monetary shortfalls. It looked like theft.
“From 1999 to 2015, around 4,000 branch managers were accused of mishandling company finances. During this time, 900 were prosecuted and 700 convicted on criminal charges such as fraud and theft, 236 were jailed, and many more were left in financial and personal ruin as reputations, marriages, and lives were destroyed.”
But, as it turned out, it wasn’t.
“In 2009, Computer Weekly published an investigative report into the computer issues based on the testimony of seven postmasters. According to its report, the Post Office instructed the staff in its call center “to tell callers they were the only ones experiencing problems” and “lied to journalists, politicians and anybody else who questioned the robustness of the Horizon system.” Those who publicly criticized the IT system were threatened with legal action or bought off in nondisclosure agreements.
“That is, until a group of 555 postmasters under the campaign Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) found strength in numbers. In 2019, JFSA won a High Court case, Bates v Post Office. The judge, Justice Fraser, expressed “very grave concerns,” finding that “bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon system caused discrepancies in postmasters’ branch accounts,” and concluding: “The Post Office’s approach to evidence, even despite their considerable resources which are being liberally deployed at considerable cost, amounts to attack and disparagement of the claimants individually and collectively.”
“As the Times of London reports, as early as 2000, “many workers continually reported bugs in the system with unexplained shortfalls in their accounts, but these were ignored. Private prosecutions continued until 2015.” The Criminal Cases Review Commission called the scandal the “most widespread miscarriage of justice the CCRC has ever seen and represents the biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history.””
This was well-known but the issue did nothing more than simmer on the backburner of public consciousness until a British TV drama humanized the story. Now, it is a full-blown scandal.
“The show has sparked blanket media coverage of the long running scandal, leading Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to rush through legislation to quash the convictions of more than 700 people. Millions signed a petition for former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells to hand back her CBE.”
The terror of the errant bureaucracy is its impersonality, the sense that no individual is accountable for its errors and the dreadful recognition that the disincentive to bad behavior does not exist in a practical sense, despite the outward charade of its governing mechanism.
So, of course, nobody from the Post Office or Fujitsu has suffered.
“But who is responsible? In 2020, the U.K. government ordered a statutory public inquiry. The Met Police opened an investigation and is currently considering possible charges of fraud and perverting the course of justice for Post Office prosecutors. Yet so far, no one among Post Office or Fujitsu leadership has been convicted of any wrongdoing, nor will anyone be held to account. If it hasn’t happened already, it is unlikely to happen at all.
“It would be easy to say that the guilty party was simply a centralized computer system — one that was, at the time of its implementation, the largest nonmilitary IT program in Europe. But is this to become something for bureaucrats to hide behind? Whether the Post Office’s prosecutors knew the software was faulty or were too dim to join the dots, they had a responsibility to the truth. There are no shortcuts. The government must stand scrutiny and answer for its own misdeeds. Until it does, the scandal continues.”
We’ve spoken previously about measuring the level of bureaucracy in an organization. Perhaps we can add another dimension to analyzing the extent of a bureaucratic influence by looking at the way it handles scandals and our perception of its sensitivity to any degradation of its status.
Perhaps every organization is at least a little bureaucratic, existing on a spectrum.
If the organization is prone to covering up allegations of wrongdoing, if it has a history of vindictive treatment of those who point out wrongdoing, if there is large-scale litigation related to the eventual exposure of bad acting, or if there is significant turnover in organization leadership driven by revelations of conduct unbecoming, then maybe it’s a bureaucracy with a capital B.