5:3 How management philosophy can dissolve dissent.

A second strategy is to build up the management philosophy itself. This teaches that all organizations are the same. Their ‘mission’ is more or less uniform, to produce ‘profit’, which is measured by accountants. This accounting looks at ‘input’ and ‘output’ and sees what the ‘bottom line’ is. Everything is measurable, everything is on the same level. You cannot count what you cannot count.

Using this philosophy, take any lumpy bit of the social structure, whether it be an ancient university or a new sports club, and investigate it. How ‘transparent’ is it? How accountable to its own stake-holders and to the rest of us? How profitable is it? How uniform and egalitarian is it? If it fails to live up to the expectations of the business school model, it must be changed. It must be audited, accounted, transparency and outside inspection forced on it. There must be paper trails, mission statements, performance related rewards, accountable procedures. Otherwise it must be dissolved.

This approach works like magic. Like detergent on fat-encrusted dishes it will dissolve most of the old, encrusted, forms and turn them into sparkling replicas of your favoured businesses. They will soon lose their unworldly, impractical and basically corrupt, not to mention potentially subversive, aspects which originally gave them life. They will lose their own breath and then you, as the State, can breathe new life into them and they will become your creatures.

All this will deal with those awkward remnants of an outdated age of associations and de-centralization. But your task would not be complete if you did not take it down one stage further and penetrate each individual, as well as each organization. How best to do this? There is an easy solution, which was adopted successfully by the Gestapo and the KGB, which is to assemble files on everyone in as much detail as possible, and to keep them at hand.