Corruption and incompetence in public life
Whether you like it or not, your health is subject to the ministrations of Nestle and GSK via official government advice. It seems to me that their mutual corporate interest is for Nestle to wreck your health and for GSK to provide pharmaceutical “solutions”. Not only those corporations of course, see the lists below.
We need to very clear here. The reason we draw attention to such gross failings is not to sneer or to denigrate the people involved. We are interested in people being able to think properly and openly about the issues that affect their lives. We are interested in cultivating enough awareness of the richness of the actual situation, richness that is destroyed by ownership of knowledge such as that exerted by the SACN below. People who just want to stay top dog in an exploitative scheme have to close down everyone else’s awareness, lest their gravy train come to an abrupt and messy halt.
The UK, on the available evidence, is both corrupt and incompetent in its public administration. The evidence of that corruption and incompetence is hidden in plain view, as we have discussed. But it is hidden, and it is hidden by illustrious figures at some of our major universities: Oxford, Reading, Nottingham, Edinburgh. We will name some names below that get paid large amounts of public money to do work that a motivated schoolchild could find the gaping holes and contradictions in. Such work, presented in voluminous reports, gets quoted by the likes of the BBC as though it had some authority — the intended effect of course. It doesn’t work if you just go round saying Nestle would like to ruin your health, but that would be the honest position.
This table is compiled by Hannah Sutter[1] and shows the composition and declared interests of the SACN, the government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition:
The potential for corruption is clear, with massive conflicts of interest, [2] which according to Hannah Sutter, a lawyer who has researched this deeply, does indeed find its way into “scientific” “advice”, which in another legal system would amount to mass murder. Seriously. Lots of maimed and dead people as a direct result.
Hannah Sutter in a headline says that these national experts have a “lack of expertise verging on the negligent”.
Zoe Harcombe, who knows more about this than just about anyone, says: “there is no evidence for any of the recommendations”. She highlights that the recommendations include limiting sugar to 5% of calories and keeping carbohydrates at around 50% of calories. In dietary, digestive terms, carbohydrates and sugar are indistinguishable. Make sense of that if you can, and then try to imagine meetings of the committee, over 7 years!
You tell me how the government can pay serious public money to the great and the good, for them to fail to produce any evidence for their recommendations! Overseen by the Food Standards Agency who are supposed to keep us safe. Some time ago I spoke to a senior civil servant, then in charge of the Food Standards Agency, who explained to me with a grin that he had achieved his life’s ambition: to be in charge of a major government department without having a minister to report to.
I mention the names of the key academic institutions because they have a stake in keeping the system honest. However, I can see no sign that they either know or care what their senior staff are up to. As we discussed before, the establishment does not see its own faults or the risks to its reputation.[3]
For completeness, here is Zoe Harcombe’s list of the interests of Dr Ann Prentice, the committee chair (Zoe’s emphases):
Action Medical Research; Aarhus University Hospital; Aquapharm; Arch Timber Protection; Boden Institute for Obesity; British Dietetic Assoc; BUPA Treasury; Cambridge University Hospitals; Christie NHS Foundation Trust; Coca Cola; Cranfield University; Danish Brewers’ Association; Diabetes UK; Electro Sci. Industries; European Molecular Biology Laboratory; HS Pharma; Institute of Brewing and Distilling; Ikon Informatics; Iron Therapeutics Switzerland AG; Kellogg Company; King’s College Hospital LLR-G5 Limited; National Safety Assoc; National Centre for Social Research; Nestle; Playerthree; Shield Holding AG; Thermo Fisher Scientific; Weight Watchers Int; World Cancer Research Fund; The Rank Prize Funds; Thrombosis Research Institute; UCL Consultants; Universitat Rovira; Weight Watchers; York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust; pSiMedica.
Consulting to government
Perhaps this is an isolated or atypical example of corruption and incompetence. And yet… here is Benjamin Taylor, managing partner of RedQuadrant and also chief exec of the Public Service Transformation Academy:
Once again: the *truly shameful* thing is that as of now, *no part of UK government* has *any mechanism* to evaluate and record the quality, impact, or value for money of consultants — and *even when they know they’re useless* they *can’t* take this into account in future bids.
Not only is the problem systematic, but the rules enforce the continuance of corruption and incompetence. How can that possibly be?
Let’s go sideways from here a moment. In the current Chicago Review of Books is an excellent piece “Can Fiction Rewild our Minds?”.[4] In rewilding we get the complexity of an ecosystem and its constant learning, rather than the artificial order of a designed and planned environment, which is ultimately sterile. Here is a quote from the piece by Jeff VandeMeer and Kate Schapira:
I keep thinking of a line from Authority about “a circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.” The idea is that we need to become better at receiving the world around us rather than imposing ourselves and our views on the world. To truly see the world and make decisions about the complex that aren’t inane simplifications.
The trouble is of course that we think what we are seeing IS the world. For us in our everyday thinking a square IS a badly made circle. We need to see the corruption and incompetence (not the presented authority and correctness) AND see the possibility of redemption. In any ecosystem worthy of the name there are multiple paths to getting any particular outcome.[5] Our world has this natural complexity, but we want for our own purposes to work with simple cause and effect.
We must always keep in mind the opposite of what we believe in, the opposite of our highest ideals, our most serious and holiest convictions for all of these have another side. We should always be able to think in terms of paradoxes & opposites, what both is and is not.[6]
— von Franz
If we go with von Franz then corruption and incompetence is a narrative that has an opposite. That opposite I take to be that some people, well enough aware of the state of the system they are in, manage to make it work for citizens and the people who need services. I know many of these people and their passionate engagement with trying to do good work in a bad place.
John Smith says “that is too grown-up for me”. And Benjamin tweets “Yikes. Not sure I’m ready for that responsibility ;-)”. Meaning that taking responsibility for the narrative through which we make meaning of a situation is a scary place to be. Note that maturity and the ability to grow into adult attitudes is largely missing in our culture, especially in business cultures that consider themselves hard-nosed and macho. We live in a society of children: try Robert Bly’s The Sibling Society if you don’t already know it.
You may know a children’s book by Salman Rushdie: Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In the story the flow of narrative threads in the sea of stories becomes polluted so that nothing works out right. This is the meta level of taking responsibility for narrative: corruption works even to corrupt the logic of narrative, to introduce cynicism into the very stuff of our imaginations. In the story of Haroun, the orator of endless stories dries up. Our imagination can become barren when our minds need to be rewilded, when the ecosystem of our minds has become over-managed and over-simplified. We need to be de-schooled!
Mixed narratives and models
A colleague worked on a contracting process with Welsh Water. In the days when people whittled down their supply chains to a few key suppliers and persuaded them to improve by x% year on year.
So five key contractors had been in place for five years. In the terms of that model they had improved their cost effectiveness by 10% a year, so essentially a 40% improvement. Being part of an increasingly integrated set-up, efficiencies and waste could still be found. Now however, the situation was up for review because it has to be open to competition. Meaning that someone who logically has to be at least 40% less efficient than the existing incumbents might displace one of the existing contractor.
In the event, in the course of reapplying for their existing contracts, one of the main contractors gave a poor presentation and was ousted in favour of someone new. It seemed to me then that this was to completely fudge the narrative. Either competition is useful, or continual improvement is useful, but they are difficult to combine and still be coherent.[7]
The likelihood is that all the narratives and models applied to this situation leave out more than they include. There is a complex set of interconnected factors that has been over-simplified to provide a legible course of action. As we know from many blogs in this series, legibility is both necessary and a bit of a curse.
The typical tech scenario is of a client who wants something yesterday and a tech team who are tempted to promise the impossible. In the supplier mindset here, it is necessary to say “no” to a client who may then become not a client. This situation is not actually binary, yes/no, will do/won’t do. None of the envisaged actions and outcomes are what they purport to be.
If we invert the logic of the Welsh Water story, we recognise that the nonsense Alice in Wonderland logic is in the legibility stories not in the practical situation. Instead of formal and legible narratives that are taken to be reality, what clients and suppliers need in the tech scenario is a “rewilding” of their minds: a recognition that there is a necessary complexity and fecundity to the situation that everyone needs to be able to work with. No-one needs wilful obfuscation and obscurity, but narratives that simplify the situation so far that they lose key aspects of the reality (“I want this by Tuesday”) are useless too.
None of this is new. In Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn is a meditation on Rembrandt’s great painting The Anatomy Lesson of 1632. Sebald notes that the audience are looking not at the cadaver, but at the anatomical diagram, the highly simplified map that provides a comprehensible narrative. That is what we still do daily. The notion that you can do some specified thing by next week is ALWAYS an over-simplified fantasy. It depends on the map not on the territory. It leads inexorably to more distortion of how people see the reality they must work with eventually. Remember Bateson, father and daughter: small arcs of larger circles.
Ownership of knowledge establishes a monoculture. You only have to glance at a monoculture to know that nothing useful is happening there, that the possibilities are encumbered. A grossly limited view of productivity and efficiency has led to someone thinking that a field of wheat has positive value to humankind. We can tell from the aesthetics that this can’t be true. You can just look at a monoculture and tell that it’s not going anywhere good. Monocultures of human clones, all thinking alike, are immediately depressing.
The notion that you can do something by next week is a totally impoverished piece of thought and imagination. When an ecosystem is impoverished, becoming non-viable and heading towards a sterile monoculture, it needs rewilding. How we might rekindle diverse awareness and thinking is precisely where these blogs are headed. Your job, when it seems to be stuck in a binary choice, is to recover a mutual sense of the actual richness. The client in his imperative doesn’t achieve what he thinks he is achieving, nor do you in your refusal. None of the real paths go through that binary.
[1] http://healthinsightuk.org/2013/11/28/sacn-or-sack-em-the-committee-thats-confused-about-carbs/
[2] As she notes in that article, declaring a conflict of interest doesn’t negate the conflict. Might even make it worse: research in the US shows that surgeons who confess a bias toward surgery are more successful in promoting surgical ‘solutions’ than those surgeons who present themselves as unbiased.
[3] You may recall from Nassim Taleb that the risks managed by the Las Vegas casino community failed to spot or mitigate the top risks to their operations. Notable examples include the ill-fated Roy Horn of Seigfried & Roy, and a disgruntled worker who planted explosives in the foundations of a new casino. It’s in our nature to be blind to the things that would disrupt the current narrative.
[4] https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/07/03/jeff-vandermeer-kate-schapira-fiction-rewild-our-minds/
[5] This multiplicity of possible paths is in part the source of IT people’s frustration with the business constantly ‘changing their minds’. It may just be the espoused path that is changing, not the intended outcome.
[6] Also: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” — Niels Bohr
[7] Which reminds me of Lakoff & Johnson on mixed metaphors; when the purposes don’t mix, neither do the metaphors.
