Language is another battleground. Whether it is the corporate buzzwords, the political talking-points, the postmodernist’s indoctrination within the education system, the marketing spin, or the “inclusive” language policies, it is important to recognise that words and phrases are tools (or weapons) being used to reshape your society.

Generally, I think we need to keep our primary focus on the physical and material changes inflicted upon societies and not be too distracted by the rhetoric and word games. However, the use of language is important in shaping view points, hiding trade-offs, shifting culture, communicating concepts, and making people aware of reality. We need to start using phrases which more accurately describe reality and which help with growing resistance to the various agendas which use deception.

Replacement Language will be an ongoing series of shorter articles introducing and highlighting wording to use while resisting the agendas.

Replacement phrase: “Dysfunctional by design”

What phrases are we replacing?

The phrase ‘dysfunctional by design’ is intended to replace phrases such as “unintended consequences” and “cock-up rather than conspiracy”.

Phrases and framing such as “cock-up rather than conspiracy” have been used in the UK parliament since the 1980s with a “significant and steady reduction in the number of conspiracy claims advanced in parliament” reported to have occurred since the widespread use of that framing.1

Phrases such as “unintended consequences” and “cock-up rather than conspiracy” have been used for decades to shield managers, institutions, and decision-makers from accountability for their choices and the consequences of those choices.

What does the phrase mean?

We are using ‘dysfunctional by design’ to remind people that when something happens in contemporary civilisation it is usually the direct result of a design and management process. Damage and dysfunction inflicted on society might be accident, negligence, or intentional. It might be some murky combination of all three. We may never know what occurred in the minds of those responsible behind or what was discussed behind closed doors.

However, groups of highly-paid experts, managers, and professionals likely had many meetings to plan and fund the actions which lead to whatever is the current situation. This likely holds for most situations outside of natural disasters. Even natural disasters, the way a civilisation fails to effectively predict, prepare for, resist, respond to, and recover from a natural disaster could be accurately described as ‘dysfunctional by design’. As governments, corporations, and NGOs assume greater control over peoples lives, society, and the environment, less that happens can accurately be described as natural.

We do not need to discover or prove the true intentions of the designers and managers. We do not need to definitively attribute the situation to malice or incompetence (or some combination of malice and incompetence). We do not need to construct a conspiracy theory, or identify all the conspirators, or identify their true motives. We instead need to often remind people that the given situation with negative impact is likely the result of institutional planning and institutional action.

We live in societies where institutions have a credibility crisis driven by a lack of accountability within those institutions. It is important to repeatedly remind those within the institutions, and the wider public, about responsibly and accountability.

How would we use this phrase?

Here are a few examples of how the phrase ‘dysfunctional by design’ could be used in response to various statements to add a much-needed dose of reality to conversations.

Example 1

Statement:

“With statistics, it’s usually cock-up rather than conspiracy”

Sir David Norgrove, Chair of the UK Staticis Authority, speaking on the issues around ‘with COVID or of COVID’ in reporting numbers of “Covid hospitalisations” numbers at the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs committee.2

Proposed response:

Is it not more a case of dysfunction-by-design? Choices were made about how to fund and organise the collection, processing, and reporting of these statistics. Were checks made to ensure that the statistics were collected and reported in a way that was ‘fit-for-purpose’. The purpose is to give us an accurate view of how many hospitalisations are actually due to COVID-19, right?

Why is the statistic gathering and publishing so dysfunctional?

Example 2

Statement:

“It won’t surprise you to learn that these lanes, like many technocratic schemes, come with unintended consequences. When it snows — and it does, from time to time, always catching the city completely by surprise — the plows can’t remove the snow from the streets because the plows can’t fit in the bike lanes. So the plows dump all the snow into the bike lanes themselves. This causes a problem for the two or three people who actually ride bicycles in the bike lanes. It also causes problems for motorists because the city, employing its micromanagerial genius, often uses the portion of the bike lanes near intersections as left-turn lanes for cars. Safety first.” Michael R. Strain on the topic of Bike lanes in Washington.3

Proposed response:

This is dysfunctional-by-design. It is not that functional in terms of keeping cyclists safe or encouraging more cyclists. It is a dysfunctional design for many different road users. There were multiple people involved in designing these cycle lanes, so the dysfunction is unlikely to be an accident. If these problems are just the result of errors, then the institutions responsible should have procedures for finding and fixing errors before such changes are installed in a city. These are not “unintended consequences”. At the very least these are trade-offs and adverse consequences which were foreseeable, and the individuals and institutions responsible likely decided that those trade-offs and adverse consequences were acceptable (or possibly even desirable within there worldview).