By Kirk Packer

We live within a culture and a nation that places a high value on freedom.  Many cultures outside of our nation look at our freedom with a certain amount of envy.  Many of them long to live in such a place that allows the freedoms of choice that we enjoy.

Kirk Packer, pastor First Christian Church in Sesser

However, if we are to perpetuate this freedom beyond our current generation, there are few worthy characteristics of freedom that must be understood.  First of all, our personal freedom is always limited.  What I mean by this is that as relational beings, we must always be willing to sacrifice desires for the sake of relationship with others.  We are created to live and thrive within relationships.  Relationships though, always require the suspension of our desires in order to meet the desires of another.  If we are unwilling to suspend our desires, we will find ourselves without relationship.  This is not a place any of us desires to be.  And so, we sacrifice for the sake of relationship.  Does this make us less free?  No, for we had the choice of which desires we would meet.

Another worthy characteristic of freedom is that you cannot have it without also being willing to submit.  This unfortunately is a word that many in our culture show nothing but disdain for.  However, you should know that it is absolutely essential for freedom to thrive.  So then where is our freedom?  Our freedom is in the blessing that we can choose to a certain extent who we submit too.  For instance, when I choose an employer, I am choosing who I will submit too.  When I choose a spouse, I am choosing who I will submit too.  When I vote for any kind of an official, I am choosing who I will submit too.  And finally, when I engage in worship, I am choosing who I will submit too.

The Packer Family

If we do not grasp the importance of these two characteristics of freedom, we end up giving our freedom away, rather than perpetuating it for the next generation.  This occurs when the basis of my relationships and who I submit to is all about what I get in the immediate.  Rather than looking at the real heart of people I am in relationship with, I simply look at what I think I can get from them.  Rather than looking at the heart of the people I choose to submit too, I simply look at what they are promising me.  Both of these fallacies eventually lead to the loss of real freedom.

So let us perpetuate freedom by understanding its limits.  For if we do not live within the limits of a blessing such as freedom, we end up losing that freedom.

(Kirk Packer is the pastor of First Christian Church in Sesser, located at 212 W. Callie St. (Phone – 618-625-5092 and email – sesserchristian@gmail.com.)

Bureaucracies create and sustain a moral perspective.
“If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.”

— Hyman Rickover–
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By Walter V. Wendler

Effective bureaucracies — vision directed guidelines and processes — are flywheels reducing vibration in an organization by tempering irregularity and providing consistency and rhythm. They are exceedingly rare.  Typically, and unfortunately, bureaucracies do little of value to focus on first purpose.  Inevitably they become twisted first purpose and live outside the watch, like a wicked watchmaker.  Any human organization that aspires to purpose and excellence via regularity of process alone cannot do so.  It is lost.

Max Weber, a German sociologist whose ideas flourished in the 1930’s and 40’s, identified key principles of good government: 1) formal structure, 2) management by rules, 3)  fixed division of labor, 4) equity based treatment of employees and customers, 5) success determined by technical qualifications, 6) all knotted together by a propensity to enlarge.  Number six, added by C. Northcott Parkinson as a criticism, became known as “Parkinson’s Law.”

Douglas J. Amy, a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, argues that bureaucracy is government and therefore it’s good in a stunningly simplistic story called “Government Is Good.”   He tries to break myths such as bureaucracies are wasteful, government should be a business, bureaucracies cause government growth, and bureaucracies provide poor service. Visit the Department of Motor Vehicles in New York or California to see how far out in left field Amy is.  Although intricately woven, Amy’s and Weber’s “bureaucracies-are-good” or create “good” are still nonsense, whether caring for the sick, educating the young, or selling nuts and bolts.

Robert Jackall’s “Moral Mazes: Bureaucracy and Managerial Work”, in the Harvard Business Review, 1983, suggests that managers create a morality in an organization by day-to-day actions — habit.  My friend used to have a sign in his office, “Make order and cleanliness a habit.”  Process becomes all and it’s hard to argue against fair processes.  But vital opportunity is leadership-driven through predictable behavior. If “Weber’s Web” takes over rules govern, not people. And this road to nowhere is paved with good intentions. This visionless path spawned by rationality and procedural perfection, guided by management processes rather than ideas and passion, is full of potholes.

The real work of any organization of two or more people, public or private, should be excellence through the attainment of a vision guided mission.  However, bureaucracies are sanitized from any guiding perspective working under the assumption that because different moralities exist in pluralistic organizations, it is preferred that the organization have no perspective at all, moral or otherwise.

Teamwork and thoughtful mission directed processes shouldn’t be confused with bureaucracy.  Teamwork is essential, bureaucracy is crippling.   But fair processes are vital:  Don’t choke this idea for its seemingly autocratic tendencies.  Kevin Williamson in National Review Online argued last week that damning autocracy exists in bureaucracies upheld by rules established by committees.  Worse yet, nobody, not even leadership, appears responsible…just good managers following democratically determined processes and rules.  That should be Mr. Weber’s first law, make everyone responsible for nothing.  Such organizations claim to embrace “Management Morality” as a means to equity and fairness.

Managerial plebiscites are disingenuous and rudderless.  Indeed, the best ideas frequently well-up from the ground, not dribbling down from on-high.  Bureaucracies bent on a rule-driven aversion to risk create listlessness.  Organizational morality hates intelligence apart from process.  The morality of the bureaucracy is not wedded to the functional goal of excellence but procedural machination elevated to a perverse art-form of jots and tittles.

Initiative is replaced by the caprice of mindless obedience. Willful compliance based on a commitment to cause beyond process is invaluable, but mindless conformity to anything is worthless and suffocating.  This, for many organizations, is the operational morality paralyzing human initiative, commitment to high purpose, and progress that provides for liberty and achievement.
Our universities are too frequently bedeviled by the seemingly benevolent belief that procedural rationality creates quality.  Sorry, it won’t.  Bureaucracy birthed moral perspective should be checked at the front door:  It devastates everything a university, or any human organization, should strive for.