Felix is reasonably philosophical about the whole business, but he doesn't deny it's a disappointment. He'd been hired as a consultant on a major construction project; the client (a government agency) wanted to draw on his considerable scientific expertise in ventilation. Felix had studied a whole big sheaf of designs and a whole range of conditions, and he had come up with some not-too-expensive ways of getting around what could potentially be serious problems with heat and moisture retention. And at the last possible moment, senior bureaucrats, who had been resisting his recommendations, did a twinkle-toes nasty end-run around him, completely sabotaging his work.

The waste of his time and talents doesn't bother him so much; as he notes, he gets paid by the day. He does the work; he gets paid for it, and if they then decide to deep-six it, that's their affair. What does bother him, he says, is seeing a project he's worked on sent out in public with its pants around its ankles. Maybe it will all turn out all right in the end, but he suspects it probably won't, and that in a few years he'll be called back to deal with a real mess that could easily have been prevented. But that's part of the game.

I asked him why the bureaucrats had done it? Control, he said. They "owned" their little-bitty parts of the whole project; they wanted their bits to go in a particular way, to suit their own agendas, without any understanding of the overall shape of the whole. They were not aware of, or interested, in things that went beyond their own small parts of the project; they had no sense of or interest in the whole. And they were fiercely protective of their bits and pieces. "My tree, mine-mine-mine-mine --what forest?"

What was rather disturbing about the whole silly kerfuffle was that the bureaucrats had subverted Felix's work by attacking his competence. There had been problems with the process all along, but the bureaucrats themselves had caused most of them--by handing in poor submissions, by wildly missing their deadlines, by interminable petty squabbles amongst themselves. Some of them had done their jobs professionally and well--but they weren't the ones doing the end-run. The saboteurs were, in fact, mostly the people who had given Felix the most grief during his research. If the project gummed up, and the fault could be traced back to their own failures, they would look bad to themselves and to their superiors. Easier to go after Felix than to take responsibility for their share of the problems....

It's not such an uncommon picture, but it is a sad and disturbing one, this need to own and control something--even if by owning and controlling it, you destroy it in the long run--and this need to protect your own ego, at whatever cost. By Scott Peck's definition, this behaviour is evil; but if so, it's sad and petty evil, and transparently so. It's very ordinary evil. I don't know and can't imagine why the bureaucrats have to be like this. I'm not one of them; I don't really understand what makes them tick. Like Felix, I can only stare at the pattern and walk away perplexed, shaking my head.

But it does say something to all of us about letting go of the need to own and control our own part of things, for the sake of the greater good--of the whole. If we're Christians, we believe that God's intelligence controls and shapes the pattern of this world. We can hang on tightly to our own small patches of reality --our work, our children, our mates--or we can release our whiteknuckled grip and let God get on with his work. The former option rarely works out well, at least in the long term; the latter saves an awful lot of work and worry.

Insisting on control is really a combination of pride and failure to trust. We're convinced only we know what's best--which is really arrogance, when you think of it--and we're sure that unless we're running the show, everything will screw up--which, when translated means, "it won't come out the way I wanted it to." Everyone tends to be a bit in this direction (who, me? ) Happy are they who get the better of it.

Felix is wise enough not to be a control freak. He has walked away from this project, a little saddened and shaken by the way it turned out, but willing to let it go. When the problems surface in time, as they probably will, either he'll be given the chance to help remedy them, or he won't, but that's a different project and another time. For right now, he has other things to get on with.