> “It’s characterizing the reality of a situation with any description that is necessary to make that situation more palatable to some group that matters. It me

> “It’s characterizing the reality of a situation with any description that is necessary to make that situation more palatable to some group that matters. It means that you have to come up with a culturally accepted verbalization to explain why you are not doing what you are doing… [Or] you say that we had to do what we did because it was inevitable; or because the guys at the [regulatory] agencies were dumb; [you] say we won when we really lost; [you] say we saved money when we squandered it; [you] say something’s safe when it’s potentially or actually dangerous… Everyone knows that it’s bullshit, but it’s accepted. This is the game.” Wow. This article wonderfully describes dysfunction in a (modern, chicken-shit IMO) corporation, operating much like a pyramid scheme. Accepting responsibility is discouraged. Rational plans to profitability are avoided in favor of "looking good" for at least as many years at the company as one needs in order to be hired by the next company, and upon leaving the lack of planning results in a disaster. And on modern bureaucracy vs America's classical Protestant Ethic, now often ignored: > The bureaucratic ethic contrasts sharply with the original Protestant Ethic. The Protestant Ethic was the ideology of a self-confident and independent propertied social class. It was an ideology that extolled the virtues of accumulating wealth in a society organized around property and that accepted the stewardship responsibilities entailed by property. It was an ideology where a person’s word was his bond and where the integrity of the handshake was seen as crucial to the maintenance of good business relationships. Perhaps most important, it was connected to a predictable economy of salvation—that is, hard work will lead to success, which is a sign of one’s election by God—a notion also containing its own theodicy to explain the misery of those who do not make it in this world. > Bureaucracy, however, breaks apart substance from appearances, action from responsibility, and language from meaning. Most important, it breaks apart the older connection between the meaning of work and salvation. In the bureaucratic world, one’s success, one’s sign of election, no longer depends on one’s own efforts and on an inscrutable God but on the capriciousness of one’s superiors and the market; and one achieves economic salvation to the extent that one pleases and submits to one’s employer and meets the exigencies of an impersonal market. And the punch-line: > Men and women in bureaucracies turn to each other for moral cues for behavior and come to fashion specific situational moralities for specific significant people in their worlds. > As it happens, the guidance they receive from each other is profoundly ambiguous because what matters in the bureaucratic world is not what a person is but how closely his many personae mesh with the organizational ideal [....]