Chapter LXVII

LXVII

Now, as to advancement.

It was formerly understood, in the service I came up through, that a man who could do the thing would in time be set over men who could not; and that this arrangement, though frequently violated and nowhere guaranteed, was nonetheless the arrangement, and could be appealed to, and shamed people when it failed.

Observe the present method.

Advancement attaches to visibility. Visibility attaches to volume. Volume is now free.

Whence it follows that the man who ships a great quantity of generated matter, having read little of it and understood less, is preferred over the woman who prevented three outages; for the outages did not occur, and that which did not occur cannot be entered into a system, and that which is not entered into a system does not exist in the season of review.

I have seen a woman of considerable parts, who could hold the whole architecture in her head and did so for six years unasked and unremarked, passed over in favour of a young man of great confidence whose principal accomplishment that year was the closing of tickets he had himself opened.

She did not complain of it. That is the part I cannot forgive and do not expect to. She concluded that the deficiency lay in herself, having been raised, as I was raised, in the belief that the discipline was a meritocracy; and it is a great deal more comfortable to believe oneself deficient than to believe the instrument is broken.