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On R.A. Wilson's SNAFU principle and how it relates to Monstrous Regiment

The term SNAFU – Situation Normal, All Fucked Up – was first coined in the army. Robert Anton Wilson (author, psychiatrist, veteran of early Californian welfare, pothead, two-time polio survivor, Gnostic Priest, Discordian, and Aleister Crowley fanboy, to name a few classifications) applied this to a model of organizations, corporations and other hierarchical systems. His observation was that those in power, who have the capacity to punish or reward, are never told the whole truth, only what they want to hear. Therefore the ruling elite get more and more removed from reality and the people on the lower rungs of the organisation are forced to act according to a reality grid that's less and less in accord with their own observations.

All of us have probably come across the situation in which the boss, teacher or parent tells us everything is going well and we're all happy to work here and are being treated well and ready and able to present a bright smile to the guests or clients or visiting speaker. And we've murmured "sure" and "of course" and if we're particularly naughty children, even "whatever".

I personally encountered a situation in film school where we'd just finished a months-long project, where we showed several short films in a miniature film festival. The project was a disaster, a big audience disappointment. Afterwards, in a meeting, our leading teacher told us the festival was a great success and we all learned a lot from it. I'm afraid most of us murmured agreements, in complete opposition to hallway talk. I remain delighted by and in awe of a certain fellow student who gave voice to what everyone really thought, and did it with such style and gusto that no-one could have punished him for it. His honesty makes my own sheeplike submission shameful.

I was recently told by someone who specialises in these things that the function of a leader is to guide the organisation in achieving a mutual objective, which should be the success of the organisation. In any pay-based organisation, though, this motivation breaks down to the motive of the paycheck in the lower rungs. Especially the lowest-paid employees only care about getting that paycheck, because their basic survival is dependant on that teeny amount of money (or "biosurvival tickets", as Wilson calls them), but they could get another job in this miniscule payscale any day. They also resent the organisation in giving such a bare minimum in exchange for the employee's time and hard work. In the upper echelons, I imagine, the desire to hold this particular job and the objective of keeping the firm together might be more inducive to loyalty and dedication. The lower you go, the more people bitch, and the more they sabotage the firm, consciously or unconsciously: usually by forgoing certain work that no-one checks up on, or smoking indoors, breaking any of the less important rules they can and still get away with it. On this level, all the pep talks that come from above appear to be meaningless or outright lies, but receive murmured acquiescence and more lies in response.

In Wilson's words (through his character Hagbard Celine): "On each rung, participants bear a burden of nescience in relation to those above them. ... But this leads to an equal and opposite burden of omniscience on those at the top..." Any organisation, he's saying, no matter how many spies they have spying on their spies, leaves the top rung dumb and blind; in a Discworld context, Vetinari has apparently found a way to fulfil his burden of omniscience and thus make a working whole out of Ankh-Morpork. I wonder - how does he make sure his information is correct?

Can you imagine a worse job than soldiering in wartime? It must be down there among the worst. Monstrous Regiment, like other war-related stories I've come to hear, seem to embody Wilson's SNAFU principle to a tee. In MR, we have a military elite that keeps a war up for seemingly insane reasons and keep telling the people that they're winning, that the mothers of Borogravia want their sons dead on the battlefied, and that it's all for the sake of the motherland, and all the while the motherland is dying because of their war. Since there are spies everywhere, and the threat of the Grey Houses, of Nuggan's wrath, of the curtain-twitchers and probably lynchings that we don't get to hear from in the actual text, of forced drafts and military tribunals - would the people who are starving or dying or burying their sons really tell the people in charge what they think, what's going on, or what the real reality is like? No. And the people in charge wouldn't listen if they did. So one could imagine that General Froc thinks the people are behind her, that they are doing it for the Motherland, maybe even that the people will not starve to death if she keeps the war going... or that they would actually prefer that to surrender. This is what she would be told by the people around her. And, acting according to this faulty reality map, which Wilson predicts gets even more bizarre the longer it's kept up, as the different flattering lies pile up, her and the elite's actions would naturally seem insane to an outsider like Vimes.

Pratchett is a wonderful observer of human behavior, and often reminds me of Wilson, because of the philosophical humour, keen and unforgiving eye on human absurdities, and utopianish quick-fix philosophies one wants so desperately to believe. I can't help but think they have met or read each other, or possibly just the same books by earlier authors. They are approximately the same generation, which probably explains a part of it.