The Bee-watcher Watchers

(A bee that is watched will work harder you see)

I read my son books before bed each night, so in an effort to maintain my own sanity I’ve developed an appreciation for the deeper insights which children’s books can illustrate with an elegance that other genres rarely match.

In his darkly humorous book Have I Ever Told You How Lucky You Are?, Dr. Seuss gifts his readers with an absurd and illuminating picture of the prevailing managerial logic of the bureaucratic institutions which exercise power today.

The comically absurd dystopian community of Hawtch-Hawtch holds up a mirror to our own society which has transformed into a panopticon of management and self-regulation — a society of bee-watcher watchers.

Bee-Watcher Watchering Watch

“Oh, the jobs people work at!

Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch, there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher – his job is to watch, is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee.

(A bee that is watched will work harder you see.)

So he watched and he watched, but in spite of his watch, that bee didn't work any harder. Not mawtch.

So then somebody said "Our old bee-watching man just isn't bee watching as hard as he can, he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!"

Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher. He didn't watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher!

And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher who's watching that bee. You're not a Hawtch-Watcher, you're lucky you see!”

Lazy Honey-Bees

The villagers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch have developed an elaborate structure for the scientific management of honey-production, but in so doing have ensnared themselves in an absurd situation of infinite regress where they spend their days watching each other watching each other.

Where did things take a wrong turn? How did it turn out this way?

You’ll notice that the setup for this bureaucratic nightmare involves a certain theory about honey-bees and their work. The Hawtch-Hawtchers believe that their bee is lazy, and thus they’ve developed a theory about how to optimize honey production — “a bee that is watched will work harder, you see.”

Our analysis must begin then with the bureaucratic fantasy about the production process. A few beliefs we should notice about this imaginative theory of work include (1) production is done by others, (2) these others are not like us, and (3) these others are naturally lazy or unproductive.

You see, inherent in the scientific principles of management which guide bureaucratic forms of social control is a fantasy about the worker! While it cannot be acknowledged explicitly, management does not actually perform the act of production — the bee makes honey, not the bee-watcher.

Nonetheless, the humans of Hawtch-Hawtch have determined that their bee is unproductive. Their bee is holding out on them, and they could get more work out of this bee if only they could figure out a method for extracting that labor.

In response to this belief that their bee could produce more honey than it is, and that the driving factor in this lower production is the bee’s internal disposition of laziness, the management committee has developed a hypothesis that the solution for increasing production then is to watch the worker, the honey-bee, to ensure that they do not indulge their natural propensity for laziness.

A bee that is watched will work harder, you see!

… more! more!

Now that the Hawtch-Hawtch scientific management committee has a hypothesis about how to increase honey production (“watch the lazy bee”), they devise a test by assigning a watcher to watch the lazy bee. If their theory is correct, then this should make the honey bee more productive.

But, the bee-watcher doesn’t turn out to help production (at least, not mawtch).

So, back to the drawing board, right?

WRONG!

I imagine some young buck pipes up, saying, “Our old bee-watching man just isn’t watching as hard as he can! he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!”

In the Hawtch-Hawtchers’ response to this discovery, we begin to discern the contours of the bureaucratic logic which Ivan Illich lays out in his Deschooling Society. Illich argues in that book that the operational logic followed by the institution demands a continual intensification of the institution’s current methods. More people! More funds! More control! More data!

Bureaucratic logic structurally excludes the possibility that it may be the problem. Instead of being able to question its existence or its most foundational theories, the bureaucratic response to less than desired outcomes inevitably takes the shape of a demand for an increased scope of control, more information to make smarter decisions, and a continual modification of current methods.

Illich points out how as we’ve spent increasingly more money on public education we’ve actually seen outcomes get worse for students. The cost per student has ballooned dramatically (and he wrote this in the 1970’s), but students are not even reading or doing math at grade level anymore. Today we see things like thirty Illinois schools where not a single child reads at grade level, despite a cost per student ranging from $25k-$40k a year.

The response by administrators, law-makers, and teachers’ unions to this reality is to push for increasing funds to schools, producing ever greater numbers of M.Ed’s and EdD’s doing research on education, and expanding the scope and capacity of schools to intervene in the lives of children and their families.

At what point do we realize that it may be the system itself which is the problem? This question is excluded from the outset. The system cannot revise its own original hypothesis because too much is at stake, the ramifications of re-founding or abolishing the bureaucracy entirely would be too painful for the people who draw a paycheck and a sense of identity from the system.

The problem is that an institution gets established, and now there exists an entire class of people who now depend on this institution’s ongoing existence and expansion for their family’s livelihood and their personal social status. Thus, the system ends up reproducing itself through a technique of intensification and avoidance which allows it to foreclose existential questions.

Watching workers being watched

So, the Hawtch-Hawtchers find themselves in the position of the modern managerial class — watched workers watching workers. Because the system cannot examine, revise, and respond to the failure of its own foundational thesis about humans and production, it must reproduce itself through continual modification and expansion of its services, using its own failure as grounds for demanding more power and more resources so it can “do it for real this time!”

An unspoken problem with the Hawtch-Hawtcher’s theory is that it’s not clear that the bee-watcher can be excluded from the suspicion of laziness! Is not the bee-watcher also a worker? Is the bee-watcher holding out on us too? This disavowed premise (that the watcher is also a worker) is a structural feature of the managerial class, but this repressed can only return as a continual proliferation of more managers to manage the managers.

I see this proliferation of watchers watching watchers impelling towards a total elimination of human beings from bureaucratic structures themselves. The bureaucratic logic of the lazy worker in need of watching eventually terminates in a world where AI bots will coordinate their work with perfect efficiency and total optimization independently of human interference.

We’re already seeing this in the way that artificial intelligence has been far more threatening to “knowledge work” than it has to manual labor! AI now makes art, writes emails, executes contracts, (and watches!), but technology still struggles to dig ditches and change bedpans. The managers are finding that their work is being automated away faster than the lazy workers they are supposed to watch.

How much longer will the bee-watchers be able to stand watch at their posts?

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Hello, fellow Hawtch-Hawtcher — how goes the bee-watcher watching today?

I hope that this piece has brought you some insight about the operation of power through contemporary biopolitical institutions, as well as sprinkled a bit of Dr. Seuss’ characteristic whimsy into your life when you need it most.

(the elites don’t want you to know this, but it’s free to read Dr. Seuss books, you can literally just take his books home, I have 458 Dr. Seuss books)

Anyways, for more analysis like this, please subscribe to Samsara Media! I’d love to have you along for the ride.