How the autistic thinking style of governments ensures continual crisis

Every badly governed country is highly visible and self-publicising. (It seems that the more corrupt and inhumane a society is, the more in thrall to the cult of personality it becomes.[31]) Good government is invisible.[32] When everything is running smoothly we don't need to know how it is done or who is doing it, just as we don't think about our cars when they are working properly — we take them for granted and get on with our lives.

But in the UK things are not running smoothly. Far from it. Government is highly visible and so are the personalities working in it — which is a bad sign. And that is largely because our government (which itself has been corralled by the European Union) operates from a centralist philosophy that believes it should take to itself ever more power and control over our lives.[33] The big problem with this, from the psychological perspective, is that, by forcing the population to conform to its centralist ideology, and binding people to it with invasive rules and regulations, government is impinging directly on a fundamental human need: that of feeling one has autonomy, volition and a degree of personal control over events and circumstances.[34] (The only people getting that need met are those making the rules to control the rest of us!) This obsession with centralising power and 'control freakery' arises in many other institutions, thereby ensuring that they clumsily harm whatever they influence. It can always be seen when management is out of touch with the reality of a situation and divorced from doing productive work.

There are psychological reasons that explain why these things happen. Political leaders do not usually set out deliberately to do damage. Most start off fundamentally decent. Yet they seem to lack psychological self-insight and so rarely develop an objective knowledge of what is really needed in given situations. Hence their reliance on ideology, which is a poor substitute for knowledge and so often has explosive consequences.

When assessing the psychology of the processes by which those who run institutions attempt to fulfil their obligations to us, we see that the characteristic type of thought they use is 'straight-line thinking'. (This is a term coined by someone with Asperger's syndrome — high functioning autism — to describe his inability to monitor and prioritise numerous streams of information and react flexibly to them in the normal way.[35])

In politics it is such straight-line thinking that unleashes the deluge of initiatives, decrees, 'official guidelines' and political correctness that make the lives of the working population so difficult.[36] In management it is straight-line thinking that fuels the continuing weed-like growth of paperwork, reports and demands for information that are only obscurely related to the work the organisation was set up to do. A system like this tends "to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation."[37] We see this in the insistence by straight-line thinkers on the meeting of targets. Typically, administrators gather information about how well targets are met, or apportion blame when they are not, and debate how to change the targets. (This behaviour now passes for management and decision making in the public sector and in other large organisations.)

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