Michael Lissack problem solving and its obsession with order and obedience. Dealing only with labels (never individuals) and claiming that “this decision was free from political pressure” are like the steel framework of the bureaucracy. And like any material framework in a building, it is capable of withstanding only so much stress. Unlike a building which is used and then adjusts to the individuals within it, our government bureaucracies assert the magic of their labels and then defy individuals to challenge them. The bureaucracy claims “objectivity” when it means wrongful simplification and inertia. When claims of objectivity are internalized, we start to imagine our- selves as objects acting within a system designed to maintain order and ensure obedience. We then almost certainly begin to experience stress. Of course there are “too many things to do.” Of course there is “too little time.” Of course we start spending less time outside of the system, taking fewer vacations and worrying about things back at the system when we do, or working too much because we fear that without us things will get out of hand, pile up, overload, fall through the cracks, go haywire. And of course anxiety builds as we come to think that as mere object in a system we our- selves can almost certainly be replaced. It is interesting to note how many of the usual remedies given for stress involve turning one’s attention away from the alleged stress-inducing event (take a vacation, meditate, go to the gym, close your eyes and concentrate on relaxing, etc.), all of which are examples of how objectivity uses its ab- stracting talents to avoid direct emotional involvement. In turn, order and obedience create an atmosphere of false stability that allows objectivity’s lack of passion to go unchallenged. But when things go out of whack, as they inevitably do, this quid pro quo becomes an engine of stress. Redundance is a needed property of all languages. It is a safeguard that permits us to understand a sentence even if we miss some of the words. The degree of redundancy varies with the language. The safeguard of a language to prevent total failure in communication, even when partial failure occurs, is perfectly analogous to the amount of redundancy the architect puts into a structure to avoid total failure in case of local failures and varies with the -type of -structure. Structural redundancy essentially allows the loads to be
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