forcing teachers and scholars to spend more and more of their time assessing and justifying what they do and less and less time actually doing it—are

Whereas the first variety of taskmaster is merely useless, the second variety does actual harm. These are taskmasters whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs.

Type 1 taskmasters can thus be considered the opposite of flunkies: unnecessary superiors rather than unnecessary subordinates.

Taskmasters fall into two subcategories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others.

This mentality seems to increase, not decrease, when government functions are reorganized to be more like a business, and citizens, for example, are redefined as “customers.”

We’re all familiar with box ticking as a form of government. If a government’s employees are caught doing something very bad—taking bribes, for instance, or regularly shooting citizens at traffic stops—the first reaction is invariably to create a “fact-finding commission” to get to the bottom of things. This serves two functions. First of all, it’s

I am using the term “box tickers” to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing.

about domestic hygiene as a form of revenge.

Sigmund Freud even spoke of “housewife’s neurosis”: a condition that he believed affected women forced to limit their life horizons to tidying up after others, and who therefore became fanatical