Short Takes #18: In Their Own Hands
George Orwell | Colin Newlyn | Naeema Zarif | Rachel Happe
Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of “managers.” These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. … The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centers in Europe, Asia and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.
| George Orwell, Second Thoughts on James Burnham (1946)
…
It’s fitting to pull up this prediction of Orwell today, as the super-state of the US (under the suzerainty of Trump) bombs Iran, one of the ‘uncaptured portions of the earth’. I’ll leave the geopolitical analysis to others, but will point out that we are living in a world controlled by the ‘managerial society’ presaged by Orwell, with the billionaire aristocracy at the top and all the rest of us as ‘semi-slaves’ at the bottom.
I saw that James Talarico, the democrat running for US senate has been arguing that left versus right is a false dichotomy. What matters is up versus down.
Colin Newlyn on ‘Uncomfortably Numb’
Colin Newlyn is a deeply observant chronicler of the human condition of white-collar work. In Uncomfortably Numb he illustrates how organizations impact the semi-slaves at the bottom of the pyramid:
We enter the workforce with high expectations, optimism and energy. We are keen to learn, to help, to achieve. Then the knock-backs start. We get told off for speaking out of turn. We get told our questions are stupid, that our ideas are naive. We show some initiative and then get into trouble for not having got permission first. We find coworkers are running us down to our bosses, we see people less able than us get promoted, seemingly for sucking up. We see that what gets rewarded is performance theatre, not actually getting the work done.
Day by day, our enthusiasm gets blunted, our hopes get dashed and our optimism evaporates. It’s heartbreaking. So we start to numb ourselves as self-protection.
We lower our expectations and our goals. We trust our coworkers less and expect less of them. We curb our impulse to speak out, we stop asking questions and we definitely stop making suggestions. We hold back from taking the initiative because that only leads to taking the blame for something. We can’t play the performance game and we’re not interested in the politics, so we keep out heads down, play safe and merge into the background.
We detach ourselves from the work because that way we can’t feel any pain when it disappoints us once again. We figure that if we don’t really expect anything, then we can’t be disappointed. And we decide that’s a plus because we really can’t bear being let down all the time.
Gallup has detailed disengagement of the workforce in State of the Global Workforce 2025 report, which is just what Newlyn’s observations would suggest:
Instability from Rigidity
In Imagining Institutions as Living Systems, Naeema Zarif dissects the structural defects of our institutions, leading to a world where ‘everything is broken’ [emphasis mine]:
Contemporary governance is beset by high-profile failures, from halting crisis responses to eroding public trust, that reveal a deeper institutional malaise. Neither better technology nor managerial tweaks alone can fix what ails our governments. Recent years have seen pandemics mishandled, climate plans falter, and bureaucracies paralyzed in the face of rapid change. Global surveys show that confidence in public institutions is near historic lows (fewer than half of citizens worldwide express trust in their national government). These issues are often framed as technical or leadership failures. But beneath them lies an ontological problem: our very conception of institutions. Many of today’s institutions were designed as if they were machines, static, hierarchical, optimized for control, and thus structurally incapable of governing the complex, adaptive realities of modern society. When a system built for predictability confronts the unpredictable, the result is fragility. Indeed, institutions premised on singular truths and rigid plans tend to break under the plural, emergent pressures of real-world politics. The argument is that governance failures stem not primarily from a lack of expertise or data, but from a misaligned institutional worldview. By treating institutions as living, evolving ecosystems rather than static clockwork machines, governance can center on plurality, feedback, and collective action, building resilience without veering into authoritarian control.
Or not.
I learned of this post by Rachel Happe, who remarked on it in a Substack note:
This is aligned with the conclusions I have come to about organizational structure and governance, with more explanation of how complex systems work.
The key point, is that we over-engineer solutions and when we go, they create rigidity and fragility rather than offering room for adaptability and diversity. As humans, that feels stifling and restrictive. It creates a cage that is limiting instead of a trellis that supports growth.
Control is for amateurs 😏