Aphorisms and Provocations

By Tom Kando

An aphorism is a "a concise statement containing a subjective truth or observation cleverly and pithily written." (Wikipedia). A provocation is a statement meant to rile up the reader, to make him/her think. For example the well-know statement (attributed to George Bernard Shaw ?): "Those who can, do, and those can’t, teach." Or French Utopian Socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's famous dictum: "Property is Theft."Perhaps the key characteristic of a provocative aphorism is that it is both true and false. How true it is, depends on its degree of generalization. But the beauty of such zingers is precisely that they are terse and categorical. The sophomoric reply, "well, it depends" is silly. No duh! Of course, everything depends. Are some teachers incompetent? Yes, some are and some aren’t. Is some property stolen? Yes, and some isn’t.

But "it depends" isn’t the point of provocative aphorisms. They have a different value. A provocateur can be largely wrong, but his insight can be an eye opener. He is expressing a perspective. You may not share that perspective, but to him, based on his experience, that is how things look.

Here are some examples - some are mine (at least the formulations), some are not: Take bureaucracy for instance. The last person to praise bureaucracy was probably Max Weber. Today, the word has a bad connotation, right? Here are two aphorisms which capture the badness of bureaucracy succinctly and wittily. The well-known Parkinson’s Law, and Peter Principle:

1) The function of bureaucracies is to create useless work so as to fill employees’ time.

2) Bureaucracies maximize inefficiency and incompetence: Employees who excel are promoted, while those who do not are maintained in their positions. Thus, everyone is promoted until they reach their level of mediocrity/incompetence.

I have some of my own aphorisms about bureaucracies. Obviously, these are not original thoughts. I just wrote them down:

3) The goal of bureaucracies is to fail, for only then will their budgets be augmented.

4) Failure leads to reward and success leads to punishment, for failure is interpreted as the result of under-funding.

6) An important budgetary goal is to waste money: Unless you spend the maximum budgeted for a given year, the next year’s base-line budget gets reduced.

Or how about the helping professions and the social sciences? Here are some of the things I have said to my criminology students at one time or another, so as to provoke them (again, these are obviously not my ideas):

1) Society needs its deviants

2) Psychiatrists need their patients more than the patients need their psychiatrists.

3) the more laws there are, the higher the crime rate is.

4) The result of prisons is to increase criminality.

5) The function of the criminal justice system is to create jobs in corrections, in the courts and in law enforcement.

6) The result of social services (Child Protective Services, Social Work, Probation, Parole, Counseling, Juvenile Reformatories, Rehabilitative Services, etc.) is an increase in family dysfunction, delinquency and maladjustment, which increases the need for those services.

Well, you get my drift. What most of these aphorisms have in common is that they reverse the conventional wisdom. And each is both true and false. For example, do prisons protect society against criminals? Of course they do. Do they also criminalize people? Absolutely.

I invite you to send me some of your favorite aphorisms. If we get a bunch, maybe we can compare them, and even recognize and acknowledge the best one(s)... leave comment here