South Africa is a country that has been afraid of unspecified dangers throughout its history, a set of fears which manifest in ugly politics, uglier management and some of the ugliest crime in the world.

Our fears tend to form familiar, and universal vicious cycles. The farmer who is afraid of his workers because the farmer next door got beaten to death isn’t going to be as nice an employer as the guy who feels secure. The farm worker who ends up getting annoyed and becomes more likely over time as pressure builds to murder the farmer.

The majority of our farmers are perfectly decent to their workers, but as the murders grow so does the significant minority who aren’t. Much as the majority if farm workers simply wouldn’t turn violent on their bosses, but as tension grows in our rural areas the significant minority who would does too.

We turn authoritarian because we are afraid and the net effect is we have more to be afraid of. A part of the problem here is actually the management culture we have as a hangover from Apartheid. To a large extent contradicting the boss is seen by a lot of people as being presumptious.

Ours is not to reason why…

Basic problems don’t get communicated upwards before they become strikes (Where generally it is only the big problems that get raised rather than the small ones that more speak to us being people, not units of production) and the actual root to all the bitterness around gets forgotten while grudges don’t.

This also means that the boss had better be pretty brilliant because while in a decent, non-authoritarian management culture the lower downs would tell the boss about the problems in his or her plans, in South Africa the lower downs don’t want to be presumptious.

Ours is but to do and die

Alfred Lord Tennyson, figured this was pretty admirable. Personally I think he was a complete twit – but that doesn’t change what this attitude means for our country.

Our emphasisis on discipline, on unquestioning obedience in the workplace leaves our country highly insecure. In the military the sort of discipline we see as being desireable in the workplace is there specifically to make you violent – you have to be willing to do and die in that situation.

But in our workplace this sort of thing means that our workers are stressed out, in need of something to hit other than the boss (Or they crack and hit the boss in the worst possible ways) and so we end up with a culture of violence.

Now lets see what happens if we take Frank Herbert’s Dune. The approach there was that leadership was based on who laid the coffee hearth, where loyalty is exchanged and above all the workplace is a gathering of people who have the end goal in mind.

Fear is not good for us, it promotes two basic respones – fight or flight and quite frankly as a South African I am sick of both of them. We fight amongst ourselves to the point where our crime could be classed as a low level civil war if it had any direction to it, and we fly behind mile high walls topped with electric wire.

Meanwhile our jobs are still insecure, our workers are still going on strike for perfectly reasonable things like market related wages (And that is an important point here: A lot of the time our strikers have very good points which shouldn’t come to a strike in the first place) and our crime rates are still through the roof.

So it is time for us as South Africans to reach a new social deal between ourselves. We need to put an end to the fear leads to authoritarianism leads to things to fear cycle. That means bosses must listen to workers, and workers must work with bosses.