The real point or purpose of politics is to show change locally, but it just isn’t happening.
One of the disheartening features of modern life is the tendency to go “all in” for modern fads and phases that really pass us by with a few lessons learnt but no real life experience.
This is the experience of so many who set out to work with high hopes but feel dashed against rocks of hopelessness because there is so much distraction over political causes and little to show for it.
The higher echelons of MI5 used to believe everything was settled on their part and that operational difficulties were “lower down” the “pecking order” so to speak. This isn’t a snobbish or “high society” attitude but it’s a lazy prevailing attitude that exists in those who never really grabbed onto anything in life.
They privately blame it on themselves but their profession is to look for a culprit elsewhere.
It may be in the language or it may be in the suit that others wear.
There’s sometimes an importance that can come from a look someone has but this only involves false feelings of intimidation and inferiority. It warps a person’s thinking and makes them act in irrational ways.
In some sense these two points are aligned. There’s a way of seeing politics as everyone else’s fault but feeling ashamed about it ourselves too. There’s also what I said before – a way of seeing life as blameable but ultimately the culpability falls on us.
In other words, we die too.
The failures at the heart of MI5 also have to do with this but it’s so much more.
There is a sense that protest attitudes already prevailed through the ranks of some departments. It’s not an impromptu protest that brought it up but the protest ‘lore’ of the past that did it.
There are some protests we can launch ourselves because we think it’s right.
One of these is the cause of feminism which some in the intelligence services decided to make into an issue.
It’s clear that in some quarters of government there are significant numbers of females to males and in others the opposite is true. It just seems to be a quirk rather than a fact of life.
The ‘protest’ started out as a polite discussion but soon turned to acrimony since some were led to believe their statements wouldn’t be taken out of context but taken as being observations of “facts” as it were.
It wasn’t that male operatives or female analysts felt one way or the other. It’s just their line of work is questioning and not solving issues that relate to human complaints.
They raised dilemmas based on examples and put forward statistics that weren’t challenges but were mere Wikipedia-style statements that were designed to drive the debate and not a conclusion.
The less senior members of a few departments took issue with a lack of certainty over this issue they raised in the first place. This led to a worsening of attitudes and eventually entailed a downturn in morale.
It isn’t unresolvable but people are sometimes hard to deal with anyway.
It took analysis of what motivated their accusations and what tone or attitudes were involved to unpick the argument. It was resolved as a valid point raised but recognised as something that would take much longer to fully establish than to just “see” as a matter of fact in the first place.
