Oct 21, 2023·edited Oct 21, 2023Liked by Clayton Craddock
Call me cynical if you must, but while I find the general sentiment of this admirable in an idealistic sense, when held up against my own experiences and observations it strikes me as hopelessly naive.
The reason I say this is that in my own attempts over many years to engage with anyone at any level of the 'public sector', it has never taken long before I come up against that familiar smokescreen of bland indifference, generally in the form of well-rehearsed runarounds where one is consistently informed that whatever issue is at hand is in someone else's purview, and that the office or agency or official one is trying to deal with is powerless to deal with it other than by whatever policy or procedure they are bound by, but have you tried calling X, Y or Z edifice to share your concerns? Whereupon the either very polite and attentive or else supercilious and condescending staffer who takes calls at the offices of X, Y or Z informs you that you'd be better off discussing your trivial and inconsequential matters with the office you'd already been given the runaround by, etc, etc.
Over the years I've come to accept that few if any individuals who deposit checks into their own bank accounts and call it 'income' from public-sector sources regard anyone outside that closed and elitist world as anything but a threat and an enemy. I take it as a given that those who draw their livelihoods from any form of government 'service' do so not out of any sense of obligation or duty to any community of any size, but rather because government benefits and pensions are simply a more reliable means of padding their own lifestyles and servicing their own personal interests than earning an honest living (by working for it) will ever be.
Anyone who comes into their field of vision calling for 'change' is perceived and treated as a potential disruptor of a quite reliable system whereby funds go out of various public-sector accounts and into their own pockets, legally and otherwise, and must therefore be kept from acquiring any further knowledge of where the money actually came from, what was supposed to be done with it, and especially whose pockets it ended up in, instead.
Government is basically a vast money-laundering racket and probably has been throughout all of human history. There is something (apparently) about the mindset of civil service which both allows and requires the individual on public payroll to part company with their own sense of personal accountability for whatever actions they undertake in the discharging of their various functions, and this over time turns the civil servant into a person who does not regard themselves as being in the same world as those who are outside the system. They have much to gain by playing ball with a setup which rewards them for their ineffectiveness, and everything to lose by trying to make it work any better by way of actually serving the community or (God forbid) complying scrupulously with the law.
If I had read the above essay as part of an eighth-grade civics course (though few schools were offering civics courses by the time I reached the eighth grade, which was half a century ago), perhaps it might have inspired me with a sense of enthusiasm, for the potentialities of citizen engagement with the structures of power.
But I'm not in the eighth grade any more. A long list of encounters and experiences with the public sector, at every level on which I've had the misfortune of encountering its hostility and experiencing its coldly indifferent machinations, has taught me it is best to regard anyone on public payroll as a potential enemy, because as soon as I open my mouth to assert my birthrights as a citizen, they will already be regarding me as precisely that and little else, unless I can show them that somehow doing business with me will put still more money in their own pockets.
All I've been able to come up with in all that time has been to have as little to do with any portion or version of 'government' as I can manage. Any attempt to assert any degree of influence I have ever made has left me wishing I'd never dirtied my hands with such racketeers, who never have nor ever will give a rat's ass about serving anyone but themselves, in a system that expects and requires them to.
I always end up realizing what sort of people would ever go into making a living in this manner in the first place, right about the time that I am remembering that all they see in me is a threat to their gravy train.
“ All I've been able to come up with in all that time has been to have as little to do with any portion or version of 'government' as I can manage. Any attempt to assert any degree of influence I have ever made has left me wishing I'd never dirtied my hands with such racketeers, who never have nor ever will give a rat's ass about serving anyone but themselves, in a system that expects and requires them to.”
I agree with you.
The primary argument here is that local government often has a more immediate impact on your day-to-day life than the high-profile disputes in Washington, D.C.
Personally, I prefer minimal government involvement in my life. I take pride in reducing my tax liability year after year, believing that the less I contribute to the government, the better off I am.
Call me cynical if you must, but while I find the general sentiment of this admirable in an idealistic sense, when held up against my own experiences and observations it strikes me as hopelessly naive.
The reason I say this is that in my own attempts over many years to engage with anyone at any level of the 'public sector', it has never taken long before I come up against that familiar smokescreen of bland indifference, generally in the form of well-rehearsed runarounds where one is consistently informed that whatever issue is at hand is in someone else's purview, and that the office or agency or official one is trying to deal with is powerless to deal with it other than by whatever policy or procedure they are bound by, but have you tried calling X, Y or Z edifice to share your concerns? Whereupon the either very polite and attentive or else supercilious and condescending staffer who takes calls at the offices of X, Y or Z informs you that you'd be better off discussing your trivial and inconsequential matters with the office you'd already been given the runaround by, etc, etc.
Over the years I've come to accept that few if any individuals who deposit checks into their own bank accounts and call it 'income' from public-sector sources regard anyone outside that closed and elitist world as anything but a threat and an enemy. I take it as a given that those who draw their livelihoods from any form of government 'service' do so not out of any sense of obligation or duty to any community of any size, but rather because government benefits and pensions are simply a more reliable means of padding their own lifestyles and servicing their own personal interests than earning an honest living (by working for it) will ever be.
Anyone who comes into their field of vision calling for 'change' is perceived and treated as a potential disruptor of a quite reliable system whereby funds go out of various public-sector accounts and into their own pockets, legally and otherwise, and must therefore be kept from acquiring any further knowledge of where the money actually came from, what was supposed to be done with it, and especially whose pockets it ended up in, instead.
Government is basically a vast money-laundering racket and probably has been throughout all of human history. There is something (apparently) about the mindset of civil service which both allows and requires the individual on public payroll to part company with their own sense of personal accountability for whatever actions they undertake in the discharging of their various functions, and this over time turns the civil servant into a person who does not regard themselves as being in the same world as those who are outside the system. They have much to gain by playing ball with a setup which rewards them for their ineffectiveness, and everything to lose by trying to make it work any better by way of actually serving the community or (God forbid) complying scrupulously with the law.
If I had read the above essay as part of an eighth-grade civics course (though few schools were offering civics courses by the time I reached the eighth grade, which was half a century ago), perhaps it might have inspired me with a sense of enthusiasm, for the potentialities of citizen engagement with the structures of power.
But I'm not in the eighth grade any more. A long list of encounters and experiences with the public sector, at every level on which I've had the misfortune of encountering its hostility and experiencing its coldly indifferent machinations, has taught me it is best to regard anyone on public payroll as a potential enemy, because as soon as I open my mouth to assert my birthrights as a citizen, they will already be regarding me as precisely that and little else, unless I can show them that somehow doing business with me will put still more money in their own pockets.
All I've been able to come up with in all that time has been to have as little to do with any portion or version of 'government' as I can manage. Any attempt to assert any degree of influence I have ever made has left me wishing I'd never dirtied my hands with such racketeers, who never have nor ever will give a rat's ass about serving anyone but themselves, in a system that expects and requires them to.
I always end up realizing what sort of people would ever go into making a living in this manner in the first place, right about the time that I am remembering that all they see in me is a threat to their gravy train.
“ All I've been able to come up with in all that time has been to have as little to do with any portion or version of 'government' as I can manage. Any attempt to assert any degree of influence I have ever made has left me wishing I'd never dirtied my hands with such racketeers, who never have nor ever will give a rat's ass about serving anyone but themselves, in a system that expects and requires them to.”
I agree with you.
The primary argument here is that local government often has a more immediate impact on your day-to-day life than the high-profile disputes in Washington, D.C.
Personally, I prefer minimal government involvement in my life. I take pride in reducing my tax liability year after year, believing that the less I contribute to the government, the better off I am.