One can easily imagine its attraction for men in search of
soft jobs, for pedants, for meddlers. One can see red tape, mountains
of papers, questionnaires ad nauseam, seven copies of every document,
endorsements, delays, lost papers, the use of form 136 instead of form
2gb, the return of the document because pencil was used instead of
ink, or black ink instead of red ink. The work could be done very
badly. There are no fool-proof institutions.
But if one could assume that there was circulation through the whole
system between government departments, factories, offices, and the
universities; a circulation of men, a circulation of data and of
criticism, the risks of dry rot would not be so great. Nor would it be
true to say that these intelligence bureaus will complicate life. They
will tend, on the contrary, to simplify, by revealing a complexity now
so great as to be humanly unmanageable. The present fundamentally
invisible system of government is so intricate that most people have
given up trying to follow it, and because they do not try, they are
tempted to think it comparatively simple. It is, on the contrary,
elusive, concealed, opaque. The employment of an intelligence system
would mean a reduction of personnel per unit of result, because by
making available to all the experience of each, it would reduce the
amount of trial and error; and because by making the social process
visible, it would assist the personnel to self-criticism.
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