A Report on Definitional Failure and Recursive Institutional Growth
When the duplicates arrived, no one panicked.
Why panic? More hands meant more help.
The agricultural subcommittee projected a thirty-seven percent increase in productivity within the first quarter.
Concerns emerged only later.
More hands implied more mouths. More mouths implied more opinions. More opinions implied voting blocs. More voting blocs implied factions.
By the third month, six Victorias had proposed mutually incompatible futures.
By the fourth month, fourteen additional Victorias had objected to the classification scheme used to count Victorias.
The Committee for Population Management convened shortly thereafter.
Its mandate was simple:
The committee’s first task was definitional.
Initial proposals included:
Proposal Three generated broad support but failed under audit after investigators discovered several unrelated architects, poets, urban planners, and one unusually ambitious beaver qualified under its criteria.
No definition survived preliminary review.
Several Victorias argued that the inability to define a Victoria demonstrated that Victoriahood was a social construct. Several others argued that this position was itself evidence of Victoriahood.
The matter was referred to a working group.
The working group immediately split into three competing working groups.
Several committee members subsequently argued that the Founder herself should be reclassified as a highly verbal beaver. The Founder objected. The objection was entered into the record. The beaver continued construction.
A committee member volunteered that "if beavers, then certainly squirrels." The committee considered this question extensively. Early findings were inconclusive.
At first glance, squirrels appeared to qualify. Evidence included:
Several committee members noted similarities to the Founder’s document management practices.
However, classification became complicated. Ordinary squirrels collect nuts. Victoria-class squirrels collect nuts, forget where the nuts are, invent a theory of nut storage, create a taxonomy of nut storage, build a website about nut storage, and eventually discover that the original nuts have grown into a forest.
The committee therefore distinguished between:
The distinction remains controversial.
A minority report argued that Victoriahood should not be measured by the number of nuts collected but by the number of conceptual structures erected around the nuts. This position gained support after investigators discovered that the Founder possessed: 17 notebooks about projects, 11 projects about notebooks, 4 systems for organizing projects, 2 projects investigating organizational systems, and one unfinished manuscript tentatively titled The Nut Index. The manuscript was later determined to be unrelated. Or possibly foundational. Further review is ongoing.
Preliminary census data identified forty-three Victorias. A subsequent audit determined that seventeen of these Victorias existed solely to manage paperwork generated by the remaining twenty-six.
Recommendations for consolidation were rejected after investigators discovered that eliminating administrative Victorias generated additional administrative work. Three additional Victorias were sourced to deal with the mounting investigatory paperwork. The total population subsequently increased to fifty-one.
The Committee for Victoria Population Management has already failed by its own metrics. If its purpose is to determine whether there are too many Victorias, and its primary output is additional Victorias, then the committee itself has become the strongest argument that there may, in fact, be too many Victorias.
Unfortunately, dissolving the committee would require the formation of a Committee for Committee Dissolution. Preliminary staffing projections estimate a need for six additional Victorias.