A few days ago, I received a call from the hospital that I had been waiting for for over a year. When I picked up, I felt like I had won the 6/49 jackpot. Unfortunately, after a brief discussion, my interlocutor told me that there was no longer any trace of my doctor’s request.
For the rest of the story, she recommended that I go back to see my family doctor so that he can send them a new request. No need to tell you I wasn’t happy. But I kept my calm, because there is no shortage of people in Quebec to witness bureaucratic ordeals.
This disappointing experience made me want to write a column on the bureaucracy that stifles our institutions. However, before getting to the heart of my subject, the biologist in me must tell you about a fundamental difference between plants and animals. Yes, the link between bureaucracy and plant biology may seem strange, but if you accept my proposal, I think I have a small chance of convincing you. I’m trying.
Plants, which are unable to move, are more vulnerable in times of adversity. For good reason, while the animals decamp to other skies, they are forced to face the local reality, however harsh it may be. For the human species, this fixed life could therefore only be a form of curse. However, plants, reminds biologist Stefano Mancuso, have evolutionary achievements that would make animals jealous.
For example, unlike us, plants do not have individualized vital organs. They don’t have lungs, hearts or brains. Their respiration takes place at the level of all the leaves and the circulation of their sap does not go through a heart pump. Even their sexual organs are temporary and renewable. In short, the anatomical and physiological organization of a plant contrasts with that of the human body, which is very hierarchical.
In this pyramid, the brain embodies the equivalent of the big boss. This functional compartmentalization makes us more vulnerable. Indeed, if you want to kill a human, in addition to the head, you just need to aim for the heart or the lungs, the location of which in the rib cage is clearly highlighted by bipedalism.
Conversely, many plants can lose more than 90% of their body and come back to life. The mere fact that some lizards can lose a leg or a tail and regenerate it impresses us. However, this partial resurrection is very insignificant compared to what plants are capable of doing.
This fundamental difference between plants and animals would have influenced human life beyond our physiology. In his book entitled Us and the plants, Mr. Mancuso says that this pyramidal structure of the human body has also influenced the organization of our societies at all levels. In other words, in our administrations, our armies, our businesses and many other institutions, we unconsciously reproduce this hierarchical organization which seems more efficient to us.
However, the pyramid bureaucracy is often a hotbed of slowness and inefficiency. For good reason, it is the weakest links in the chain that determine overall performance.
Behind this multi-speed efficiency, there is also the famous “Peter principle”. This idea formulated by Canadian educator Laurence Johnston Peter in 1969 says that members of a hierarchical structure tend to become more and more incompetent over time. Even in a true meritocracy, because of the chair game of promotions, this march toward systemic incompetence is inevitable.
In question, placing a turtle on a wall does not make it a natural climber. If hierarchical meritocracy does not escape the “Peter principle”, says Stefano Mancuso, now imagine what happens when favoritism, friendships and pistons come into play and influence promotions? The degree of incompetence of such a system quickly saturates and blockages multiply at all levels.
To these aggravating factors, we can add the cult of seniority and the share of bootlickers whose motto is: “If you can’t get promotion by climbing the ladder, try by kissing the boss. »
Also, when a boss feels like an impostor, it often happens that he hires, as a subordinate, a stooge rather than a competent mind who could every day painfully remind him that he shines with a borrowed light. Finally, to these already numerous traps, we must add the unstoppable magnification, because like the universe, bureaucracy is always expanding.
Comparable to a black hole, it can also absorb astronomical budgets without leading to a concomitant improvement in services to the population.
Think here of the Phoenix pay system, the chaos in immigration management, the saga ArriveCAN, to that of passports and airports, etc. Despite the enormous sums sunk into numerous programs managed by an armada of civil servants and the gigantic accumulated debt, the incompetence of the Trudeau government in delivering effective services to the population continually defies the chronicle.
In Quebec too, similar bureaucratic mechanisms have transformed the health system into a bottomless financial pit of very dubious effectiveness. Without tackling this octopus, even if we put 80% of our public funds into this ministry, inefficiency would remain endemic.
Let us say ironically that if in an efficient organization, one manager is needed to supervise nine workers, the bureaucracy tends towards a model where nine managers watch over one worker. Now, to paraphrase Coluche, a good part of this hierarchy is similar to shelves: the higher it is, the less useful it is.
In 2018, in a very provocative book entitled Bullshit Jobs, the anthropologist David Graeber took a very harsh look at these jobs that he considers useless and even harmful in our societies, including the dustiest shelves from above. In order not to offend sensitivities, I will not give here the list of areas mentioned in the book. Allow me, however, to summarize his definition of what bullshit jobs. These are, he says, paid jobs that are so useless and superfluous that even the employees who occupy them cannot justify their importance.
However, these employees go to work every day and even manage to convince themselves that they are wrong to doubt the relevance of their position. In a survey carried out by the firm YouGov in 2015, 37% of British workers questioned recognized that their job made no contribution to the rest of society.
Our institutions are crumbling under this omnipresent bureaucracy and no revolution will be able to improve their efficiency without tackling the problem at the source.
Let us still wish Christian Dubé good luck so that Santé Québec, its future hierarchical megastructure, escapes everything I have just said. It won’t be easy. I recently heard Gilles Duceppe, paraphrasing the vision of Jean-Baptiste Lamarque, say that in biology, it is the need that creates the organ and, in bureaucracy, it is the organ that creates the need.
All this to say that we would perhaps benefit from drawing inspiration from the decompartmentalized system of plants which is much more resilient than our hierarchical and bureaucratic model. I am making this proposal, but as I am also not certain of the relevance of what I do in life, I have no idea how to lead this revolution.
I must even admit that the writing of this text was a little motivated by my mysteriously missed hospital appointment, because even if I am for downsizing, I am far from being a libertarian.