The Victorian Machine

How We Reinvented Control and Called It Progress

The sound still echoes in my memory, the sharp crack of a long wooden pole being battered against metal bedframes at 5:30 AM, followed by barked commands that could strip paint from walls. This was my introduction to British Army training in the early 1980s, a ritual designed not just to wake us but to break us down, to establish from the first moment of consciousness each day that we were no longer individuals but components in a machine.

Note: I have 10 days accountable service with the British Army, I had to leave due to injuries encountered just weeks before my enlistment. Years later I served in the Royal Air Force Police for 7 years

But that wasn’t my first encounter with institutional brutality. A few months earlier, as a trainee mental health nurse, I had discovered what it meant to be abandoned by the very system that claimed to be training me. Picture this: a twenty-something student nurse, barely out of school, left alone to manage thirty-six patients with severe and varying mental health conditions. Schizophrenia, severe depression, manic episodes, dementia—all under the supposed supervision of one terrified trainee who had received perhaps a few weeks of basic instruction.

These weren’t aberrations or failures of the system. They were the system, deliberate methods of control through overwhelm, abandonment, and shock. And while we congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve progressed since those dark days, I’ve come to believe we’ve simply gotten better at disguising the same fundamental mechanisms of control.

The Honest Brutality of Yesterday

There was something almost refreshing about the crude honesty of 1980s institutional life. When that pole crashed against your bed at dawn, no one pretended it was for your well-being. When I was left alone with thirty-six vulnerable people, nobody suggested this was “empowering” my professional development. The brutality was visible, nameable, and therefore, eventually, confrontable.

The military’s approach was particularly transparent in its dehumanisation. Strip away individual identity, overwhelm natural responses, and create dependency on the institution for meaning and survival. Break people down completely before rebuilding them in the organisation’s image. It was cruel, but it was honest cruelty.

In mental health care, the abandonment was equally transparent. Understaffing wasn’t spun as “promoting independence”; it was simply accepted as the reality of a system that didn’t value either patients or staff. The impossible caseloads weren’t framed as “growth opportunities”, they were acknowledged as institutional failures that we all had to somehow navigate.

This transparency, awful as the conditions were, created possibilities for resistance. You could name the problem because the problem wasn’t disguised. Unions could organise around clear issues. Reformers could point to obvious injustices. The public could see what needed changing.

The Sophisticated Deception of Today

Today’s institutional control operates with far more sophistication. We’ve developed elaborate languages of care, empowerment, and personal responsibility that obscure what’s actually happening. The pole crashing against beds has been replaced by the gentle ping of notifications demanding constant availability. The overwhelmed trainee nurse has become the “empowered” patient expected to navigate the Byzantine healthcare systems alone.

Consider modern mental health care. Instead of warehousing people in institutions, we’ve created “community care”, which often means discharging vulnerable individuals into situations they cannot manage, then holding them responsible for their own wellness. The language is beautiful: patient-centred care, recovery-focused treatment, personal autonomy. The reality is often the same abandonment I witnessed in the 1980s, just with better marketing.

In the workplace, we’ve replaced obvious authoritarianism with performance management systems that monitor every keystroke, productivity metrics that quantify human worth, and “wellness programs” that make employee health the company’s business. The military’s breaking-down and rebuilding process has been refined into corporate onboarding, team-building exercises, and leadership development programs that achieve the same psychological restructuring through seemingly voluntary participation.

The gig economy represents perhaps the ultimate evolution of Victorian control mechanisms. Like the old workhouse system, it creates desperate competition among workers while eliminating job security. But it’s packaged as “flexibility” and “entrepreneurship.” Workers thank the platforms that exploit them because they’ve been convinced that this exploitation represents freedom.

The Illusion of Someone Else’s Job

What makes these modern control systems so effective is how they’ve convinced the public that responsibility lies elsewhere. In my nursing days, if a patient was suffering, you could see it was happening on your watch. Today, we’ve created such complex bureaucracies that no one feels personally responsible for the outcomes.

People witness NHS staff burning out and think, “Well, the government should fund healthcare better.” They see homeless encampments and assume social services should handle them. They watch vulnerable people struggling to navigate systems designed to exhaust them and believe mental health professionals should sort it out. The diffusion of responsibility is so complete that everyone can feel sympathetic while remaining completely passive.

This represents a profound shift from even the harsh realities of my training years. Back then, if you saw someone being mistreated in your community, it was harder to pretend it wasn’t partly your concern. Communities were smaller, institutions less bureaucratized, and individual actions felt more consequential.

Now we’ve professionalised and bureaucratized care to the point where ordinary people feel they have no role, and more importantly, no power. We’ve created the perfect system for perpetuating harm: everyone disapproves, no one feels responsible, and the mechanisms of control continue operating under the guise of professional expertise and institutional competence.

The Comfort of Invisible Chains

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of modern control is how often people defend the systems that harm them. When I describe the impossible caseloads of modern healthcare workers, people nod sympathetically but then praise “patient choice” and “personalised care”, never connecting these concepts to the systematic abandonment of both patients and staff.

When gig workers struggle with income insecurity and lack of benefits, the response is often to celebrate their “flexibility” and “independence.” The language of empowerment has become so pervasive that people genuinely believe being abandoned by institutions represents liberation from those same institutions.

This creates a kind of willing complicity that the crude Victorian systems never achieved. When workers in the industrial age were exploited, they knew they were being exploited. When modern workers are exploited, they often thank their exploiters and ask for more opportunities to be exploited.

The psychological sophistication is remarkable. Instead of external discipline, we now have internalised performance metrics. Instead of visible hierarchies, we have “flat” organisations where everyone is responsible for everything and therefore no one is responsible for anything. Instead of obvious oppression, we have gamified systems that make people compete for the privilege of being controlled.

Recognition and Resistance

What strikes me most about contemporary discourse is how rarely people make connections between their daily experiences and broader patterns of institutional control. They’ll complain about impossible workloads, unnavigable bureaucracies, and systems that seem designed to frustrate rather than help, but they don’t see these as connected phenomena or recognise them as evolved versions of older forms of control.

This blindness isn’t accidental. Enormous effort goes into maintaining the illusion that modern institutions are fundamentally different from their predecessors. We have diversity training instead of acknowledging structural inequality. We have mental health awareness campaigns instead of addressing the conditions that damage mental health. We have leadership development programs instead of questioning why we need so much leadership from so many people.

The language of progress obscures the reality of continuity. We’ve gotten remarkably good at changing everything except the fundamental power relationships that these systems exist to preserve.

The Personal Cost of Systemic Blindness

Having lived through both the honest brutality of the past and the disguised control of the present, I find myself in the strange position of sometimes missing the clarity of the older systems. When that pole crashed against the beds, everyone knew something was wrong. When I was abandoned with thirty-six patients, the injustice was visible to anyone who cared to look.

Today’s injustices are harder to name and therefore harder to resist. How do you organise against “patient empowerment” that leaves people more vulnerable? How do you challenge “flexible working” that makes life more precarious? How do you critique “personalised care” that systematically abandons people?

The sophistication of modern control creates a kind of gaslighting effect. People experience the harm but can’t quite articulate what’s wrong because the language available to them frames their suffering as empowerment, their abandonment as independence, their exploitation as opportunity.

This is perhaps the cruellest evolution from Victorian times. At least the workhouse didn’t pretend to be doing you a favour.

Breaking the Spell

Recognition is the first step toward resistance, but recognition requires tools for seeing through sophisticated deceptions. We need new vocabularies for naming contemporary forms of control, new ways of connecting individual struggles to systemic patterns, and new methods for organising that account for how dispersed and bureaucratized modern power has become.

Most importantly, we need to abandon the comfortable fiction that someone else will handle these problems. The diffusion of responsibility that characterises modern institutions means that positive change requires broad-based recognition and resistance. The systems won’t reform themselves, and the experts who run them have too much invested in their continued operation.

The pole may no longer crash against our beds, but the machine continues operating. We’ve simply learned to love the sound it makes.

The author is a writer whose experiences span healthcare, military service, and social observation. He writes regular newsletters examining the intersections of personal experience and social change.

Until Next Time