American administration is not just a job, nor even just a profession any longer. It has become a whole style of life, a country club, even a somewhat pseudo aristocracy. The traditional stratification of American society, between line and staff or blue and white collars, has evolved to a new form of hierarchical stratification via governmental administration. An administrator doesn't simply quit because of a lousy work ethic or bad judgment on the part of those who appointed her or him or the mistakes they make on their own and blame on others. No, they are promoted out of harm's way, given a salary increase, "relocated" to a distant field with a second, a third, neigh, nth number of chances to start fresh. No, the American government has too much invested in the status and privilege of an administrator to let them go as if they were so many salaried or part-time employees. After all, it would look bad for the company as a whole, as they stand for the whole system, the established order, the authority that articulates down from on high. They are the living embodiment of the justification for higher taxes, big budgets and inflation.

In such an administrative context, Government profiling of the American people has come of age as a principle mechanism of social control and manipulation. No doubt the digital information revolution has conspired to make such profiling even more subtle and sublime in its results than it already had been. It is carried on like a deep science, though it is not done in an open manner in the way that normal science is supposed to be conducted. It seems the shallower the bureaucratic water-hole it is practiced in, the "deeper" the science of profiling becomes. Who the deep scientists are who have concocted these profiling systems, and to whom they are held accountable, seems to me to be largely a well-guarded secret. Of course, academic psychologists themselves have come to use standard inventories, that do not go past certain built in cultural, linguistic and cognitive biases, as the chief instrument of their legitimization as true social sciences, and it seems, government funding agencies and interests have been largely the source of their funding and prestige. I doubt a lot of debate is going on any longer in academic psychology forums concerning behaviorism, organicism, psycho-analysis or Father Freud, just as anthropologists appear to have abandoned their own father, Franz Boas, in favor of new theories of ethnic memes and mom's blue genes.

Of course, reworking the Universities after the debacle of Vietnam and the campus protest movements of the late sixties and early seventies has been the first step to the reform of the American system. Universities are more strapped by government sponsorship and administrative controls than ever before, and to raise any form of political protest these days is not only to be construed as "political incorrect" but as a basis for dismissal and removal from a campus. Needless to comment, thought on campuses has fallen suit, and if one is looking for free speech and independent thinking in various academic programs, one is almost bound and certain to come away from one's academic experiences disillusioned if not completely "brain washed." I think the contemporary American campus reflects many of the realities of contemporary American society. They have become a breeding ground for a certain kind of uninquiring intellectual conformism, and for a kind of paradigmatic disciplinary approach to knowledge organization and articulation across a wide range of scholarly fields. Graduate students are being trained and rewarded not for the clarity or independence of their ideas, but for adopting the dogmas espoused by one or other of the faculty who are jockeying and competing with one another, often in a vicious and cut-throat way, for limited resources, students and, of course, the prestige of being treated like you really know what you are talking about. If a critical attitude among students is cultivated, more often than not this attitude is one that is more hypo-critical and aggressively criticizing, rather than merely being skeptical or critical in some philological sense of the term.

I would define profiling in its basic sense as a nomothetic system of social and personality classification based upon an individual's response and performance to tasks on a kind of inventory or other interview protocol design, or based upon an individual's traits, characteristics and other patterns of behavior. Profiling a serial killer at a murder scene is one thing, profiling a person seeking job is quite another.

The function of profiling the general population in a closed socio-economic system is primarily to reinforce the status quo of a class stratification in such a system, and thereby to structurally preserve the inequalities and asymmetries of such a system. In order to help keep people in their places, and to legitimize a policy of doing so, one must first define what those places are. Profiling serves this purpose when it comes to its broad-scale deployment across large sections of the national population. It can thus be described as a gate-keeping mechanism that serves to limit access to resources redistributed through the system by means of systematic categorization and exclusion. It provides a way of blocking "front door" and "front of the line" social mobility, while still permitting side-door or back-door selection to take place.

Profiling seems, by its deployment, to be in fact much more than a new form of science, but a form of high art, albeit somewhat propagandized into service of government based interests and interest groups. In large measure, what is kept in secret and hidden from view from the eyes of the American public, does not need really to be held in any kind of ethical account--the ethics of profiling are presumed away with the "science" of administrative anonymity, bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility, and a lock-step, "hail the SYSTEM" sycophancy.

One really does not need any longer to buy into the idea of Global or Federal Conspiracy Theory to accept or find plausible the idea that the degree of control and, in a sense, "intrusion" into the everyday affairs of Americans has increased considerably, especially in the last couple of decades, and that this has resulted, among other things, in the possibility of a new form of "unfreedom" that comes from the ability for other people to manipulate your identity and control your range of choices without you even knowing about it happening. The conspiracy part is really not one guy phoning another guy in a distant city. It is a collusion of shared cultural values, of ideological commitments, of a form of limited responsibility that comes through wielding power. The side-benefits are great, the prestige built-in and there is almost no downside to speak of except perhaps a series of lunch-dates with social undesirables and rather boring in-service meetings in hotel conference rooms.

Cybernetically, we can say the government bureaucracy, in spite of increasing deregulation, is getting better at what control functions it has done. It is getting better in a sense that it is able to monitor and respond efficiently to a wider range of issues that occur, even down to a very local and even personal level of articulation. Depending upon our perspective, I guess, this can be either a very good and wonderful thing, or it can be potentially a very dangerous and bad thing. I'm inclined to suspect that most people employed by the government or serving in some administrative position, would be inclined to adopt the former point of view. Everyone else would be wise to be a bit more skeptical about our Brave New Bureaucracy, and would probably do better to lean the other way.

The concept of political equality really plays no part any longer in government based decision making or selections, if they ever really did play a part. Double standards, disguised by ideological rhetoric about "Diversity" and "Multi-Cultural Multiplicities," have become the norm, by which people can be conveniently categorized, labeled, channeled, and, in a sense, their fates sealed permanently in a file that everyone in the world seems to have access to except the person whose name is on the file. For one thing, Party Politics seems to have become all the rage, and the notion of a professionally disinterested bureaucracy, secure in their posts regardless of weather changes in the Presidency or Congress, is perhaps a quaint anachronism from a by-gone, "Gone with the Wind" era. 

The concept of political equality would entail a measure of, should I say dare mention it, social and psychological blindness, even racial blindness and ethnic blindness, which is really another way of saying that the government officials who are selecting on the basis of applications, for whatever purposes, would have to do so in a manner essentially blind as to the background and profile of the individual doing the applying. This is not to say that those who have a criminal record should not be subject to screening on some level, or those with certifiable psychotic episodes, or those who have some other kind of dubious history of social deviance. But at some point, at what point, should profiling of average American people, and utilization of secret records kept on their identity, be allowed, manipulated and abused in secret, particularly among a petty and somewhat overpaid class of administrative gate-keepers?

Though the government increasingly uses market based designs and strategies borrowed from big Business, and even, often, the business leadership themselves, it remains basically the greatest and wealthiest re-distributive economy the world has ever known, which means that however much it may deregulate and privatize public sectors of the economy, it still fundamentally runs on the same basic framework of administrative "trickle down" of positive authority, opportunity, and resources availability. Among a lot of other things, this means that there is always going to be a huge bottleneck of money and power--the two biggest things that make up any political-economy, in the seats of centralized power. There is nothing unusual about this pattern as it is typical of any state-organized political system that ever existed.

If we want to look at classical anthropological and archaeological models of state systems theories, we can refer to the concepts of hyper-coherence and meddling as explanatory models of why bureaucratic systems grow into increasingly expensive and inefficient, self-sustaining, and somewhat parasitic structures that eventually incapacitate the adaptabilities of a society to meet new challenges or to respond effectively in local behavioral settings. Hyper-coherence and meddling both refer to the tendencies for government bureaucracies to grow in time in control of increasing details of a larger system, to the point of destructively interfering in the day to day details of the articulation of the system. The theory is, that in all its complexity and over-control, a system that is too hyper-coherent and too meddling in local affairs, is likely to break down in the structure of the long run, to suffer unpredictable "critical events."

The kind of system that has been created parallels, on some levels even exceeds, that that the Chinese have concocted, it seems, for surveillance and control of their own people, for cultural espionage abroad, and for control and manipulation of Chinese cyberspace and for digital espionage of the global Internet.

My concern is the rise of what I refer to as modern, post-industrial, administrative authoritarianism. How to define this new form of social authoritarianism? It invariably involves some level of coercion of authority--the principle modality of this coercion is not through threat of force, but through economic persuasion and exclusion. The bigger the government, the bigger the money it can throw at a problem, and the bigger the problems associated with the money thrown at the solution and the bigger the business needs to be that stands behind the government in both the problems it deals with and recognizes to be important, and the kinds of solutions it devises to solve these problems. So, we get a really Big Deal going.

The problem I have had with all this is the question, who is profiling the profilers? Who is holding whom to account in the administration of public or increasingly, private-based public affairs? At what point does the idea of public interest and public based or public derived control come back into a bureaucratically convoluted formula--or is the notion of control and accountability just some administrative "Catch 22" kind of euphemization of a tangle of manipulative power and misinformation, of closed doors behind a secretary behind a secretary behind a secretary behind a phone in front of a human being with a problem or a real need to be addressed.

I would define administrative authoritarianism, especially in the American context, as a centralized system of regulative social control based upon the arbitrary manipulation and management of redistributive resources, including vital and strategic information, and screens of opportunity within an exclusively capitalist state system. This social authority is reinforced primarily through a system of socio-economic exclusion, disenfranchisement and penalization, and through the manipulation and differential enforcement of legal systems to favor the interests of those in control over those being controlled, and to preserve the status quo of such structural and social asymmetries. Increasingly, the use of covert investigative and paramilitary agencies as a means of coercive control become depended upon in such systems in order to maintain a facade of social normality in the system. Such a system of social discrimination rests upon a framework of nomothetic typologization and categorization of people along different dimensions of cleavage and stratification, and is reinforced symbolically and legitimized by means of academic sanctioning, manipulation, publication and control of specialized knowledge. Routinization of these mechanisms of typological classification and control serve to background and embed the framework as a form of indirect constraint that is culturally sanctioned. Thus, such control is "normalized" as intrinsic to the order of the system. Presentation of class attitudes, values, and conspicuous consumption serve to behaviorally reinforce class-bias and class-based discrimination in such a system. Symbolic ascriptions and attribution of personality traits, of psychological attitudes, conditions and "states," serve to reinforce such a system socially and behaviorally. Within such a framework, the differential exercise of human rights becomes situationally relative to the identity, positionality and control mechanisms that are used to reinforce social control. 

The consequences of the rise and socio-structural embedding of such administrative authoritarianism is the closed stratification of society and its polarization between the systematically enfranchized and disenfranchised. The danger of such a pattern of development is the consistent undermining of the legal and political foundations of an open, democratic society, namely the exercise of blanket political equality and the social and structural reinforcement of social inequalities under a blanket ideology of social or communal based equality. Control over the results of open elections is largely achieved through the pre-selective manipulation of the items and individuals that are found upon a ballot, and through the persuasion of mass communications media that cultivates an atmosphere of social conformism, hierarchy, in-group/out-group identification and and a generalized sense of social insecurity. 

Being able to vote for one's own best interests on any ballot depends on having one's best interests represented on the ballot and knowing what one's best interests may be and how they might be served or not served by a particular ballot item. This is all well and good, but being able to vote on any ballot makes little difference at the end of the day if one receives a notice that one has been "downsized" or otherwise euphemistically disenfranchised from socio-economic and political economic participation within the system. 

Administrative control in the articulation of the American system is generally limited only by the bureaucratic delegation of negative authority and power and by legal precedents and liabilities in a common law system. Conflict resolution is always negotiable in such a framework. This control is not normally subject to the same kinds of structural constraints of government defined by the constitutional separation of powers, and the rise of a single party framework across all three branches of federal government will tend overall to blur and confuse the boundaries of such separation. We can in such a scenario expect that the processes of development of increasing administrative authoritarianism based upon class stratification to continue and the actual practice of democratic institutions in society to be further eroded as a consequence.

General Systems Essays, Vol. II