Bit of a mess really. Image: BBC

The world is being overrun by the technocrats – bankers, management consultants, analysts. Company boards and the political landscape are being stacked with professional systems massagers and paper shufflers  – like a giant Dickensian circumlocution office (I call it the GDCO) of reports and do nothing confabulations, suffused with hidden agendas. Responsibility is shunned at every level.

The entitlement class is the new class – individuals are from every demographic – rich, poor, age, gender, religion. Entitlement reigns and is expected well before any responsibility. And it seems somewhat obvious that this entitlement culture (which is married to the great debt super-cycle) will be the unravelling of the Western financial system.

To be strong one must step aside from this culture of entitlement and become an observer. Find it amusing rather than judge it. With entitlement running hot the GDCO is supported and the GDCO is not a place you should visit – else you will get lost in catacombs void of any hope of spiritual fulfilment (last sentence said with a deep voice and spooky music).

From Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit – Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not to do it, in motion. Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions that extinguished him. It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything. Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memorialists, people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent grievances, people who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people, jobbed people, people who couldn’t get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn’t get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under the foolscap paper of the Circumlocution Office.

Numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office. Unfortunates with wrongs, or with projects for the general welfare (and they had better have had wrongs at first, than have taken that bitter English recipe for certainly getting them), who in slow lapse of time and agony had passed safely through other public departments; who, according to rule, had been bullied in this, over-reached by that, and evaded by the other; got referred at last to the Circumlocution Office, and never reappeared in the light of day. Boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered, entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away. In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it…….