Meme 218: Dread: The Prime Emotion of the Bureaucrat
Sent 11.5.11 by F.F.

Fear, not to speak of terror, can shut down reflective thinking. But so
can dread. I speak here of a low level, inchoate, but all pervasive dread.

The word fear goes back to the Old English fær, to 453 and to Beowulf (ca.
1068), meaning "a sudden and terrible event ; peril." It came to also mean
"the emotion of pain or uneasiness caused by the sense of impending danger,
or by the prospect of some possible evil," and dates to c. 1175. The
Oxford English Dictionary continues: Fear is "now the general term for all
degrees of the emotion ; in early use applied to its more violent extremes,
now denoted by alarm, terror, fright, dread." Indeed, fear is among the
Big Five emotions: joy, surprise, fear, disgust, and anger, whence alarm,
terror, fright, and dread are subtypes of fear. (Guess which one of the
Big Five is uniquely human.)

The word dread is more recent and goes back to Middle English drede, ca.
1200, and means "extreme fear ; deep awe or reverence ; apprehension." The
O.E.D. notes that in the fourteenth century the expression is "sometimes
pleonastically dread and fear."

I am speaking not of dread as a kind of extreme fear but as a low level,
inchoate, all-pervasive feeling, one that is unarticulated. It does not
cause a shut down of thinking so total as to invoke either flight or
fight, but it does mean that new ideas will not come to be carefully
considered.

This feeling, I maintain, has become the chief emotion of the bureaucrat.
As nearly always, someone with ideas that will shake up established ways
of doing things will get a less than objective hearing. Coupled with
low-level dread, it means that ideas that could potentially benefit those
who continue to operate in established ways are not given a hearing
either. Change itself, even beneficial change, is dreaded (unless it just
means more money).

The cause of low-level dread is the vague feeling that one's position
could be wiped out if the public gets the idea that what one does has no
value and that all that is produced is HOT AIR, the subject of a previous
meme. It matters whether one all but admits this to oneself, but the sense
that the public might is enough. One can argue vehemently that what one
does is valuable, but ultimately the public and its politicians hold the
power to wipe out one's job in an instant. It is not infrequent that the
very vehemence of one's defense is a good sign that one suspect that
established ways are perverse or futile, in this case consisting mostly of
producing HOT AIR.

Thus the dread. And dread, not pride in doing good, has become the chief
emotion of the bureaucrat. In the long run, bureaucracies serve themselves
ill by shutting out ideas, even those that serve their interests. This
dread may very well bring out what they fear the most.