the think-machine gods, whose cult has one dogma, we cannot make a mistake

Everybody is informed of everything. George glances through them all and then tosses the lot into the waste-bucket, with one exception: an oblong card slotted and slitted and ciphered by an IBM machine, expressing some poor bastard of a student's academic identity. Indeed, this card is his identity. Suppose, instead of signing it as requested and returning it to the Personnel Office, George were to tear it up? Instantly, that student would cease to exist, as far as San Tomas State was concerned. He would become academically invisible, and only reappear with the very greatest difficulty, after performing the most elaborate propitiation ceremonies; countless offerings of forms filled out in triplicate and notarised affidavits to the gods of the IBM.

George signs the card, holding it steady with two fingertips. He dislikes even to touch these things, for they are the runes of an idiotic but nevertheless potent and evil magic; the magic of the think-machine gods, whose cult has one dogma, we cannot make a mistake. The magic consists in this, that whenever they do make a mistake, which is quite often, it is perpetuated and thereby becomes a non-mistake. . . . . Carrying the card by its extreme corner, George brings it over to one of the secretaries, who will see that it gets back to Personnel. The secretary has a nail-file on her desk. George picks it up, saying, 'Let's see if that old robot'll know the difference' and pretends to be about to punch another slit in the card. The girl laughs, but only after a split-second look of sheer terror; and the laugh itself is forced. George has uttered blasphemy.

Christoper Isherwood, "A Single Man", p30-31, Vintage Books, London, 1964 (2010).


The above was written in the early 1960's in America (the original book was published in 1964), yet, unfortunately, the sentiment behind the piece is as applicable today as it ever was at that time. It appears to be a social verity - large organisations become impervious to people - an individual not longer counts, and is treated not even with disdain - they are treated as abstract commodities, which if they do not conform to the idiotic strictures placed on them by organisational design and control (hegemony), are then severely punished and sacrificed in their attempts to either: rejoin the organisation, or exert their right to live as an individual outside the bounds of organisational rigidity.

It is people conveniently forgetting that they are people, because they are now a factotum of this mysterious "god" and thus above and separate from being individually and responsibly human. They have no responsibility any more - they can claim the "These are the procedures (rules / processes / instructions / etc)" Nuremberg defence. And the lure of conformance (to authority, and/or power) is far too strong for most to resist (the Stanford Prison Experiment - Zimbardo, after "Obedience" - Milgram, 1963 - see http://www.integratedsociopsychology.net/milgram_experiment.html).

So we now find that organisations continue to act as "think-machine gods", who can not make mistakes, and if anything resembling a mistake is notified to them, they simply need to "apologise" and deny that anything further can be done ("it is out of my power", "I have now authority", "We don't recompense for any of those reasons", "What more do you want me to do?", "I have apologised, what more can be done?"). There no longer is a mistake, there is nothing to be further addressed (the "apology" has been issued) and the organisation can continue without change - gods don't change, gods sacrifice people.