Well done. People sense this is going on but don't understand the nature of it, which you spell out here. The lack of understanding means the 'opposition' spins its wheels out of frustration and attacks effects while the core problems are imbedded in systems that automatically dissipate the risk of being held responsible and frustrate opportunities for resistance, change, and the enforcement of the laws and standards they violate. It's brilliant, really, the way their bureaucracy and other less observable structures all the way down to spin use natural risk aversion to protect the people at the top. They rail against this natural bureaucratic function when it works for the public good not because they're against it but because they want it for themselves in the cause of injustice. We see that now as everyone is asking what happened to Republicans being for federalism, certain specific freedoms, and a small government that leaves citizens alone. They're doing just the opposite. I keep a list of approachable articles/videos I think help get some of these points across. These came to mind ...
I don't know your education, or anything about you, but the use of 'harm' made me think of this article which I return to occasionally because the Greek understanding of hubris and the nature of fate, compulsion and possession keeps coming to mind for me. Good job on using 'harm' in this context, I think. It's insightful and well chosen ...
This analysis and framing is such a useful way to view institutional behaviour and its resultant behaviours. There is a long standing 'conspiracy versus cock-up' debate about why situations occur but this dualism misses out the more banal explanation of institutional power dynamics and protectionist tendencies.
I can see quite easily that various arms of the state and allied corporate interests would simultaneously but independently act in similar ways that absorb or deflect potentially damaging disclosures once the harm has been publicised and then consider sacrificial elements on the periphery that leave the body in tact.
Here in the UK in the 1990's and early 2000's there were several cases of child deaths that became national scandals and following each one there was an enquiry with a set of recommendations made (each of which more less paraphrased the last) and social workers struck off or otherwise disciplined. Despite the repeated recommendations and promises of implementation these deaths kept happening. What was not addressed of course was the way in which social care was organised with a deprofessionalisation of staff who had to run everything past managers, spend hours of the day inputting data to protect the organisation and carry vast caseloads with personal responsibility for every one of them. Through a lack of resources and an over-cautious management the job became little more than documenting the decline of care in a family and the gut wrenching certainty that the case worker would be the sacrificial lamb should something go wrong.
There developed a sort of Stockholm Syndrome amongst workers who rather than raise the alarm learned that protecting the organisation was the first priority which often took the form of writing off families and framing many of the presenting families as unworkable which took on its own form of internal logic as the same ones presented over and over.
Your piece stays with the abstract concept of this framing re Epstein. Are you able to publish something a bit more concrete?
The point of the piece was not to concretize anything, but to offer a framework for understanding how these protective stacks can be identified using inference.
I've been working on this essay for several months, and actually developing a concrete example using the Epstein dump, would require more time and resources than I currently have available.
I'm quietly hoping that journalists, and lawyers, and data analysts, and activists will find the concept useful, and use it to develop a concrete example, but my reach is limited too, so I will probably have to slowly chip away at it.
Great piece, A! I love the pattern recognition in the beginning and the connection analysis in the middle. I’d love to see a followup with specific actions we can take, along with a system chart that makes this analysis easier to see.
Deserves to be read widely. Well articulated!
Well done. People sense this is going on but don't understand the nature of it, which you spell out here. The lack of understanding means the 'opposition' spins its wheels out of frustration and attacks effects while the core problems are imbedded in systems that automatically dissipate the risk of being held responsible and frustrate opportunities for resistance, change, and the enforcement of the laws and standards they violate. It's brilliant, really, the way their bureaucracy and other less observable structures all the way down to spin use natural risk aversion to protect the people at the top. They rail against this natural bureaucratic function when it works for the public good not because they're against it but because they want it for themselves in the cause of injustice. We see that now as everyone is asking what happened to Republicans being for federalism, certain specific freedoms, and a small government that leaves citizens alone. They're doing just the opposite. I keep a list of approachable articles/videos I think help get some of these points across. These came to mind ...
https://billmoyers.com/content/moyers-on-america-capitol-crimes/
https://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/the-wrecking-crew/?single=1
I don't know your education, or anything about you, but the use of 'harm' made me think of this article which I return to occasionally because the Greek understanding of hubris and the nature of fate, compulsion and possession keeps coming to mind for me. Good job on using 'harm' in this context, I think. It's insightful and well chosen ...
https://www.academia.edu/1585243/Ate_in_the_Homeric_Poems
This analysis and framing is such a useful way to view institutional behaviour and its resultant behaviours. There is a long standing 'conspiracy versus cock-up' debate about why situations occur but this dualism misses out the more banal explanation of institutional power dynamics and protectionist tendencies.
I can see quite easily that various arms of the state and allied corporate interests would simultaneously but independently act in similar ways that absorb or deflect potentially damaging disclosures once the harm has been publicised and then consider sacrificial elements on the periphery that leave the body in tact.
Here in the UK in the 1990's and early 2000's there were several cases of child deaths that became national scandals and following each one there was an enquiry with a set of recommendations made (each of which more less paraphrased the last) and social workers struck off or otherwise disciplined. Despite the repeated recommendations and promises of implementation these deaths kept happening. What was not addressed of course was the way in which social care was organised with a deprofessionalisation of staff who had to run everything past managers, spend hours of the day inputting data to protect the organisation and carry vast caseloads with personal responsibility for every one of them. Through a lack of resources and an over-cautious management the job became little more than documenting the decline of care in a family and the gut wrenching certainty that the case worker would be the sacrificial lamb should something go wrong.
There developed a sort of Stockholm Syndrome amongst workers who rather than raise the alarm learned that protecting the organisation was the first priority which often took the form of writing off families and framing many of the presenting families as unworkable which took on its own form of internal logic as the same ones presented over and over.
Your piece stays with the abstract concept of this framing re Epstein. Are you able to publish something a bit more concrete?
The point of the piece was not to concretize anything, but to offer a framework for understanding how these protective stacks can be identified using inference.
I've been working on this essay for several months, and actually developing a concrete example using the Epstein dump, would require more time and resources than I currently have available.
I'm quietly hoping that journalists, and lawyers, and data analysts, and activists will find the concept useful, and use it to develop a concrete example, but my reach is limited too, so I will probably have to slowly chip away at it.
Great piece, A! I love the pattern recognition in the beginning and the connection analysis in the middle. I’d love to see a followup with specific actions we can take, along with a system chart that makes this analysis easier to see.
Have you read this? I think you’d like it: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-american-history/article/infrastructural-turn-in-historical-scholarship/D027C5132D4492C3CA72B44B383821C5
I hadn’t, but now that I have, the overlap with what I’ve written is genuinely mind-blowing… I wish I’d found this sooner. Thanks Claire
Thought you’d like it! I owed you one from that paper you shared with me on the bow tie network😊