The Memo Class
American institutional life is now governed by a professional class whose primary skill is writing memos that create the appearance of action while preventing any.
The memo is the technology of managed decline.
Consider the pattern. A crisis emerges. Internal warnings circulate. Someone writes a memo documenting the concern. The memo is acknowledged, filed, perhaps forwarded to a committee. A meeting is scheduled. Another memo summarizes the meeting. The crisis deepens. More memos. Eventually, the crisis becomes undeniable. Investigations follow. The memos are produced as evidence that someone knew. Shock is performed. Accountability is discussed. Nothing changes.
This is not dysfunction. This is the system working as designed.
The Professional Class
There exists in American institutional life a professional class whose primary skill is the production of documents that create the appearance of action while preventing any. Call them the memo class.
They are not stupid. They are not lazy. They are exquisitely adapted to their environment. They have learned that the primary function of institutional communication is not to communicate but to create a paper trail that protects the institution from future liability while distributing responsibility so widely that no individual can be held accountable.
The memo class writes in a distinctive dialect. Passive voice predominates. Actors disappear. "Mistakes were made." "Concerns have been raised." "It has been determined." The syntax itself is a technology for diffusing responsibility, for making agency grammatically impossible to locate.
The Grammar of Decline
Consider the phrase "going forward." You have heard it in every institutional apology, every corporate restructuring announcement, every political pivot. The phrase does two things simultaneously: it acknowledges that something has gone wrong, and it forecloses any examination of how or why. Going forward. The past is sealed. Only the future is available for discussion—and the future is always a matter of intention, never of accountability.
Or consider "best practices." The phrase implies that there exists somewhere a set of correct procedures that, if followed, will produce correct outcomes. The job of the memo class is to document adherence to best practices. The job is never to ask whether the practices are actually good, whether they produce the outcomes they claim to produce, or whether the outcomes they produce are desirable. Best practices are self-validating. To question them is to be unprofessional.
The Function of Dysfunction
The memo class does not produce dysfunction. The memo class manages dysfunction. Their documents do not prevent crises; they metabolize crises into processes that can be survived institutionally, regardless of the human cost.
The banking crisis produced memos. The opioid epidemic produced memos. The housing crisis produced memos. In each case, people inside the institutions knew what was happening. They wrote it down. The writing down was sufficient. The institution survived. The people did not.
This is what neutrality means in institutional life. Not the absence of a position, but a position so elaborately constructed that it cannot be held responsible for anything.
The Exit
The memo class will not reform itself. It cannot. The skills that make a successful memo-class professional—the careful deployment of ambiguity, the instinct for distributed accountability, the fluency in passive voice—are precisely the skills that prevent institutional change.
The only exit is documentation of a different kind. Not the memo, designed to be filed and forgotten, but the record, designed to be found and cited. Not the internal communication, protected by privilege, but the public document, exposed to scrutiny. Not the appearance of action, but the evidence of consequence.
The record is the product.
The record is the point.