Bureaucratic Staff Infection

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Compassion Versus Guilt. pp. 178 - 181

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Staff Infection

Of all the fatuous things said by college commencement speakers each year, none is more poisonous than the idea that there is something higher and nobler about a career in so-called "public service."

People in many occupations serve the public: grocers, doctors, bus-drivers, telephone repairmen. Indirectly, so do farmers, factory workers, and in fact everyone who produces a good or a service that others use. But when the deep thinkers speak of going into "public service," with that special unction in their voice, they mean becoming a 'bureaucrat or politician.

The vision that is unfurled to the departing graduates is one of self-sacrifice for the common good. This is contrasted with going into the grubby world of business to make money for yourself.

Why it is nobler to seek power over others rather than be a producing part of the economy is never really explained. But it doesn't have to be. After four years of listening to "social scientists" tell them how bad this country is, many students may feel that rescue is urgently needed.

Some of the graduates may want to go out and apply the theories they learned from their professors. (God help us all.) But, more than specific theories, students have been presented with a vision in which "thinking people" have to assume responsibility for the rest of us poor slobs.

Not as many students are buying this as in the 1960s. But the professors are still selling it and the media are still echoing it.

It is a very self-flattering vision, in which the Olympians up on the hill look out for the peasants down in the valley. Some even consider it democratic and patriotic.

The young men and women who follow this vision into the bowels of the bureaucracy, who join the staffs of politicians or become clerks to judges, seldom realize how profoundly ignorant they are of the society they want to help rule.

True, they may have learned some things in school that the man in the street does not know. But the mechanic, the builder, or the policeman also understands many things that the student and his professors are blissfully ignorant of.

A great civilization requires a staggering range of knowledge, skills, and insights that no individual can possibly master, outside a narrow circle of his own specialty. Inte1lectuals are the last people to realize their own vast sea of ignorance surrounding the small island of their knowledge. That is why they are so dangerous.

No small part of the political mess that graduates are urged to help clean up was caused by previous generations of graduates going boldly out to save a world they knew pathetically little about. Their insulated lives on college campuses were often followed by insulated lives on the government payroll or in non-profit organizations.

Neither of these kinds of organizations has to meet the test of performance. Both deal in words that need only sound plausible to the right people.

The staffs of Congressmen, judges, and both government and non-profit bureaucrats are filled with these bright young people, inexperienced in the real world that exists beyond their narrow, inbred circle.

The growing load of responsibilities put on legislators, judges, and heads of government agencies make them ever more dependent on staffs whose own knowledge is second-hand, theoretical, or ideological. When a judge has to decide an anti-trust case against a corporation, how likely is his staff to contain someone who has actually run a corporation and knows what it is like from the inside? The judge is far more likely to have to turn to a young law clerk, whose head was pumped full of theories of corporations in college or law school.

The dependence of Congressmen on their staffs is notorious. With all the politicking and public relations that Congressmen have to do, there is no way that they can find time to really look into all the things they have to vote on. Staffs do that—and people who have vast amounts of real world experience are unlikely to be on those staffs.

It is the blind advising the blind. And sometimes it is the biased advising those with the same bias.

Urging college graduates to go into so-called "public service" is urging them to continue the insularity and presumptuousness that college breeds. For society, it means aggravating a condition that might well be called staff infection.

It is especially inexcusable for the idolizing of "public service" to be promoted by a college or university. Higher education is supposed to teach people to see beyond surface glitter and plausible words. It is supposed to see beyond the fads of today to the broad sweep of history. Much of history is the story of how political leaders have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race.

—May 31, 1985

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30 May 2024