What can no longer be ignored

I'm struggling with the election results, but I'm not sure whether the issues I'm struggling with would be any different if the other guy had won. I could have ignored the issues if things had turned out differently, but as it is, I've spent the last hour trying to bring some sort of order to the chaos of my thoughts and feelings. My struggle isn't really with the concrete results of the election. As much as I dislike the current administration, there would be no dramatic difference with somebody else at the helm. Every national politician is primarily interested with expanding their power and influence. That means making the government more powerful and influential.

Confronting the implications of a more powerful and influential government is my real struggle. Government is bureaucracy. The rise of the bureaucracy marks the decline of the individual. Systems have little interest in or need for people driven to do things their own way. Disrupting the accepted way of doing things is actually suppressed in powerful bureaucracies. Success is determined by how well you can conform with and fit into the system. Success is a function of surrender rather than an expression of individual will.

Most of my professional aspirations are derived from a desire to work outside of a rigid hierarchy of expected behaviors. I strive to achieve things that require me to draw from my personal resources. I try to avoid those things that require me to rely on established processes and procedures. I want to become a leader so I can get people to leave behind their reliance on established routines to find their own way. I'm sitting here wondering if I'm crazy for thinking about going against the system. Who am I to think that I'm stronger than the system?

The election results make it hard to ignore the trend towards control by a central authority over more and more aspects of our life. I've been trying to ignore that trend. Rather than confront what the election of 2008 implied about the direction of our society, I worked hard to rationalize it away. I viewed it as an outlier rather than recognizing it as a valuable insight into the evolution of our culture. I wanted to ignore it and keep going on my merry way. After tonight, I recognize that the trend towards more control will only keep growing. 

There are other signs of the trend towards the reliance on rules to establish order in complicated situations. The pharmaceutical industry has been turning away from R&D for years. My initial response to an article that describes this rejection of research scientists by the pharmaceutical industry was to rationalize it away. I was poised to write a post or two on how that article illustrated the need for the research side of the business to exert itself. Our value is not being recognized. Once the business sees how much they need research, the precipitous trend away from R&D will reverse itself. Is that just wishful thinking? Fundamentally, research is complicated, expensive, and incredibly inefficient. It doesn't lend itself to simple metrics or efficiency measures. It's hard to bureaucratize. If the messiness of R&D is what is really keeping it from the core of the business, my effort to get the business side to recognize our value is doomed before it has really even begun. 

I can see a scenario that as I rely more and more on my personal abilities, as I become more and more of an expert, I weaken my ability to influence and shape my organization. In pushing away the bureaucratic, I will be isolating myself from the levers of power that are needed to get things done. My accomplishments outside of the system will result in rejection by the system. This line of reasoning leads to the conclusion that the course of action with the greatest probability of success is to embrace the system, yield my personal ambitions, and master the bureaucratic procedures that will allow me to increase my power. That course of action negates everything that I've been striving for during my entire career. 

So you can see why I'm struggling. Success in my field, scientific research, requires the skills and thinking style that run counter to an organization's desire for order and control. Success in my industry requires embracing the routine. In order to succeed as a scientist, I have to reject what is currently considered good business.