… such stuff as madmen Tongue, and brain not; either both, or nothing, Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such As sense cannot untie. Cymbeline, Act 1, scene v .
All doctors have noticed that when one of their colleagues, goes over to the other side – Management, I mean – he soon begins to speak a kind of language that is neither colloquial nor technical nor philosophical nor literary nor precise nor poetic nor even quite human, howsoever clearheaded and lucid he may have been beforehand. The transformation usually takes about two weeks, but is then complete. A man becomes a talking robot.
A puzzle attaches to this. Do such a man’s utterances correspond to what is going through his mind, or does he have to translate his thoughts into this simulacrum of language? Or has some kind of virus entered his brain that has disarranged its language centres, rather as a stroke does, though in a rather more subtle way? (Has anyone performed post-mortem examinations on the brains of such people as a separate class?) And if his words correspond to his thoughts, how can he, as a man of education and feeling, bear the tedium of it?
Medical managers are not, of course, the unique victims of this malady. It is pretty widespread in the public service and for all I know (and suspect) in the commercial sector as well, at least in companies large enough to function as bureaucracies. Indeed, it is quite probable that the ultimate source of the malady was those companies, and perhaps the business schools that trained their managers, as primates in the forests of Central Africa were the source of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Infection often escapes its original nidus to infect the surrounding population of the susceptible, in this case (managers in and of the public service) made susceptible by Mrs Thatcher’s ill-fated notion that the public service could be some kind of replica of private business.
