The Nature of the Bureaucratic Beast

A great article on Zero Hedge around five months ago:  "Why Is Our Government (And Deep State) So Incompetent?" by Charles Hugh-Smith. I'll be pursuing Hugh-Smith's work, I think, because he operates from the same principle as I do:  "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity."

1. That which is cheap and abundant will be squandered until it is no longer cheap or abundant.

More or less the Tragedy of the Commons--but I like this better. It's true and trying to explain why it's true is a waste of time. We've reached a point in history where we can say, "This is what almost always happens. Let's stop thinking we can prevent it and start thinking how we can manage it."

2. The prime directive of any bureaucracy is to eliminate all accountability. The raison d'etre of bureaucracy, the very reason for its existence, is not to manage complex affairs but to dissipate accountability into a formless cloud so that no member of the bureaucracy will ever face any consequences for his/her actions.

 This is what I was getting at in my discussion of monarchy. The most contemporary example of this is the ongoing investigation of the IRS's Lois Lerner. It's extraordinarily difficult to pin anything on her because of the dissipatory nature of bureaucracies. When Tea Party groups are harassed, when evidence goes missing, everyone in the department just shrugs--"I don't know how that happened."

However, it's a major shift in our bureaucratic development that Lerner hasn't fallen on her sword to shelter the President's administration. Consider the chain of resignations after Watergate; each resignee announcing that he was responsible, not his superiors. Lerner is an administrative lifer and she's decided she's not going anywhere, no matter what her department did.

This is why it's important to consider a bureaucracy as an entity of its own, with particular traits like any creature has, a colony of ants or, more appropriately, kudzu. It's always going to grow and there is no single spot from which the growth originates.

3. Bureaucracies are intrinsically prone to group-think

What I'm  most interested in, regarding group-think, is the power of the disruptive member. The need for harmony within the group is obvious--no one wants to make unnecessary enemies--so the member who is the most willing to cause division can effect the most change.

This principle--group-think and its weakness for internal loudmouths--explains the increasing PC irrelevancy of our mass culture. Looking for maximum agreement, group members offer concessions to their most disgruntled members.

5. One systems-level consequence of tightly connected, interactive complex systems is that they generate routine failures known as "normal accidents," catastrophes that result from seemingly small miscalculations and miscues that cascade into systemic crises. When accountability has been lost, there are no feedback loops left to correct these "normal accidents," so the damage piles up within the organization until it collapses in a supernova model of accumulated incompetence.

In my experience, this is concentrating on fixing problems and not preventing them.

This I see in my day job at a small business, my first dealing with business-to-business matters. After about three months on the job, I said, "If everybody here and out there did their job correctly, half of the country would be out of work."

At least in private enterprise the money wasted on fixing mistakes has a cap--once operating expenses exceed revenues, something has to be done. It has to be worse in government bureaucracies.

6. The moral-hazard-riddled leadership of bureaucracies will choose whatever short-term politically expedient fix reduces the immediate political pain (also known as "kicking the can down the road") rather than risk shaking up the organization by imposing accountability and clearing out the deadwood.

Something I've been saying in private for years, but have never had occasion to say here:

Democracy is the theory that an infinite number of short-term solutions equals a long-term solution.

Assorted Thoughts on Monarchy (and a Goodbye to NRx)

A few weeks ago, I was considering coming to some kind of final reckoning with the ideas of neoreaction. The movement seemed to have stalled and spun its wheels with navel-gazing and back-slapping. And all without having come up with a definable perspective at its center.

I planned on digging through the fundamental texts listed in the Neoreactionary Canon and trying to figure out what exactly were the premises on which everyone was operating.

Then Trannygate happened and I became disgusted with the whole mess of them. It suddenly became clear--these guys think they invented reactionary thought and are too self-aggrandizing to understand that "inventing reaction" is a contradiction in terms.

The ideas they discuss--hierarchy, HBD, the dangers of mob rule--disappeared from the Western conversation only sixty or seventy years ago. For the most part, neoreactionaries don't say, "These old ideas are more true than modern assumptions." They say, "I have true and radical ideas. Me--I have them."

More social posturing, in other words, and that means it's doomed to obscurity, but not before a short-lived sweep through the alternative right because it assembles a lot of loose opinions under a cool-sounding name.

Consider pre-power Italian Fascism. Mussolini and his cohorts wrote millions of words describing how great and revolutionary Fascism was and how different it was from every other political theory. What it failed to describe was what exactly Fascism was.

The Reaction will put you in the driver's seat. The Reaction will be no rerun, brother. The Reaction will be live.

Neoreaction is the same way, all marketing puffery surrounding a few old ideas with no central perspective. So, I'm no longer interested, though I plan on checking in a year from now to see its state.

However, I realized that I'd never written out my thoughts on monarchy, which the mainstream media has erroneously attached to neoreaction but was once a lively topic of discussion. With no more ado, the advantages and lessons of having a final authority:

Monarchy has a human reach  Perhaps the triumph of democracy is really the triumph of bureaucracy, with the idea that good governance is too complex for one man to sit at the head of it.

In absolute monarchy, the government does what the monarch feels is important. If a bureau has outlived its usefulness, the monarch can single-handedly dissolve it. Consider how a strong monarch could have handled the civil rights movement, had he been persuaded that blacks were unduly disadvantaged. He may have instituted the exact same affirmative action programs that were placed but at some point he would have discontinued them as having done as much as they can.

In our current system, programs are easy to start and almost impossible to end. A final authority examines the efficacy of the programs and adjusts accordingly. The quality of the programs, of course, rests on the quality of the one ultimately responsible.

Most importantly, the fact that the monarch cannot control everything means that he’s more likely to control what’s important. Even though final authority rests in a single person, monarchy is naturally decentralized. He’s just one man, after all.

A bureaucracy without an ultimate authority, however, believes that everything can be controlled and never hesitates to try.

Monarchy is the ultimate arbiter of the law  Progressivism has a bad trait of wanting the tail to wag the dog. The existence of exceptions means that the whole of the law has to change. Gay marriage and transgender rights are the current hot buttons, but the best example is euthanasia.

Everyone can conceive of a situation in which it appears that snuffing out the life of another is an act of mercy and not of violence. Our laws are generally geared toward allowing someone to die--removing medical assistance--but progressive thought says that this is oppressive--the law should allow for situations in which it’s advisable to actively kill someone.

By providing a final authority from which the law springs--as opposed to our conception that the law itself is the authority--, monarchy provides an escape valve for especially difficult cases. The man who is charged with murder for putting a pillow over the face of his father who was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s can have his punishment reduced or rescinded by order of the monarch. The monarch has the power to say “This is a special case,” without establishing a precedent for euthanasia. The law applies to most situations but cannot apply to all--monarchy solves this through the final authority of a single person.

Monarchy comes with a set of inherited obligations  Perhaps the reason why dictatorships usually devolve into tyranny is because the dictators themselves were not morally prepared for true leadership.

Aristocrats and monarchs were raised in the culture of noblesse oblige--their blessings of rank required them to care for those lower in status. A future king was raised to respect his role and to understand the needs of his kingdom.

It’s always a gamble to rely on the moral compass of a leader (but hasn’t America consistently done this?), but the truth is that cruel leaders like Ivan the Terrible and prolifigates like Louis XIV were rare. The majority of bad rulers were mediocre and a surprising number were paralyzed by the enormity of their responsibilities, rather than abusing their stations.

The training of life-long leaders is the primary reason why a return to monarchy isn’t feasible today. The descendants of royalty have been separated from real power for so long that they will rule no better than your average ambitious colonel.

Monarchy provides a framework  One of the most eye-opening writers I discovered in my early days of conservatism was Justus Moser. In this conservative collection, he has a piece from the 1770s named “No Promotion According to Merit.”

I was amazed that something so fundamental had a period of debate. But Moser had some good points. His central argument was that a stable arrangement allows actors to work around the framework to accomplish their goals. A shifting arrangement--one that is always changing in order to “improve” it--is like building a house during an earthquake.

Likewise, in one of his books, Theodore Dalrymple marveled at the quality of life somewhere in Italy, which he ascribed to the complete ineffectiveness of the government. Because the people could not rely on the state to regulate their economy properly, they developed a black market for quality goods whose prices were not inflated by taxes and other regulatory costs.

I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as those two, but one should know that monarchy provided a stable arrangement. The character of the reign was dictated by the character of the monarch, whose time on the throne may well last decades. Whether the most capable leader in history, a so-so ruler or a total incompetent, the subjects had time to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of their monarch. If the king was good, they prospered. If he was bad, they worked around him.

Monarchy is not driven by change  Modern democracy is built on the cry, “We can do it better!” Rare is the politician who runs on the platform that nothing needs to be done.

A monarch is more likely to accept that a system is generally working and leave it unchanged. Progressive thought is always looking for the exceptions and overhauling the system to correct them. When the overhaul creates further exceptions, more overhauling follows. It’s a cycle that produces instability and can never be judged for its effectiveness because it’s always about to be improved.

The days of powerful monarchs probably will not be seen again for a long time. The kings and queens of the past came from warriors who won their position through battle and cunning. Their descendants held their thrones by outsmarting and outfighting their rivals while earning the love of their subjects. The genes may still be there (though probably not) but the historical environment has been destroyed. There is no one to take their place.

Even though we can’t return to those days, we can see the failures of our current system by comparison. Absolute monarchy may be extinct but it is not obsolete.

More on the Shape of Democracy

A few weeks back, Captain Capitalism got himself all worked up about "The Unrelenting Ego of Leftists":

The problem for leftists and politicians in general suffering from CRA ["Chronic Regulation Addiction"] is that they fail to realize that there's nothing wrong with doing NOTHING.  That maybe over the past 250 years an adequate amount of laws and regulations were already passed and this body of legislation needs only mere and occasional tweaking.  No they "must do something" and so they're always on the hunt, always on a crusade to right and imaginary or made-up wrong. 

Cap argues that this is because of the personal failings of leftists. My argument has been that leftism is an inherent part of democracy. It is the politicization of petty personal feelings--envy, rage, and self-pity stitched together as a movement.

Secondly, another inherent quality of democracy is a drive to constantly change. How many people have been elected on the platform that they're not going to change anything while in office?

Democracy is always in motion. The most powerful force behind that motion is the accumulated desires of the individuals within the mob. The mass media stokes that force through stimulating the individual's outrage. The outrage is harnessed to expand government power. Leftism is the centrifugal force of democracy. At best, the centripetal counter of conservatism is considered an obstacle. At worst, we believe it shouldn't even exist . And so we spiral.

A Playground for Incompetent Sociopaths

Here's another example of where we can shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, that's democracy for you." From Zero Hedge and Charles Hugh-Smith, "Does Our System Select for Incompetent Sociopaths?"

Natural selection isn't only operative in Nature; it is equally operative in human organizations, economies and societies. People respond to whatever set of incentives and disincentives are present. If deceiving and conning others is heavily incentivized, while integrity and honesty are punished, people will gravitate to running cons and embezzlement schemes. 

What behaviors does our Status Quo reward? Misrepresentation, obfuscation, legalized looting, embezzlement, fraud, a variety of cons, gaming the system, deviousness, lying and cleverly designed deceptions. 

Let's connect the pathology of power and the behaviors selected by our Status Quo. What we end up with is a system that selects for a specific category of sociopaths: those whose only competence is in running cons.

In a sense, every system incentivizes sociopaths whose only skill is running cons. A con is all about satisfying the external signifiers while acting exclusively to enrich oneself. When the external signifiers are not indicators of success or achievement or completion that is the problem. That is, when what looks good is the same as what is good.

A well-formed system has little interest in the intentions of its workers. Whether the individual is trying to make a name for himself, impress women or, incredibly, simply takes satisfaction in a job well done, the system's interest is whether the worker is accomplishing the system's goals or not.

It hardly matters if a king fattens himself at the public treasury if he's created an overflowing economy.

As we know, there's no hope of creating a perfect system. The signifiers are supposed to be a description of how well things are functioning--what we hope for is accuracy. There's is always some wiggle room between the representation and the reality, which is where the con lies.

The question, again, isn't how to prevent the system from being gamed--it's how to minimize the possibility that it's gamed, how to minimize the damage that comes from being gamed, and how to best repair that damage. In other words, a robust system.

The progressive solution to the problem of poor administrators is to install a better class of person in the role. In a nation of nearly 360 million, how can we know whether a potential administrator is a better class?

Well, we go back to looking at external signifiers. You know who sounds smart and moral and compassionate? Someone who went to Harvard Law School, maybe showing his leadership by editing their Review. Someone who's worked among the people, out in the community, maybe organizing them. Someone who knows how hard the system can be on some people, maybe by virtue of his race.

In a massive centralized system, all we have to go on are the signifiers, the reports and the credentials. The most important order of business is making sure everything looks good. The name of the game is marketing--"Look, the number of unemployment claims is down and nine out of ten doctors agree that our policies are great!"

Democracy and the Media--Marshaling the Mob

Via Tumblr

Several months ago, I commented on Steve Sailer's blog (regarding Patton Oswalt's reference to him), "Louis CK? There's no hope for that guy. He's friendzoned the dark side."

For a time, I thought he was the best comic working but he's assumed the role of Righteous Speaker of Truth, and revealed himself to be just another idiot savant able to make the audience laugh despite having a head full of received wisdom. The above is applause-bait, a "clever" turn of phrase that relies on a shallow knowledge of history and a loose understanding of democracy.

But the sentiment itself is indicative of more. Earlier this week, 28 Sherman asked the question, "Who Pushed Women's Suffrage 100 Years Ago?"

Son of Brock Landers puts this cartoon circa 1912, four years before the issue made the Democratic platform. The answer to the question, "Who pushed it?," is, of course, the media.

Which brings me to Bruce Charlton's theory of the mass media being the very center of the left. And to my thoughts about the left being the inextricable degenerative force within democracy. 

The enfranchised is a smaller set within the total population. The mass media's audience is the total population. The trend, unless directly opposed (similar to Derbyshire's Second Law of Conquest/John Sullivan's First Law), is for the set of enfranchised individuals to approach the number of the total population.

So, who doesn't have the right to vote? Felons? "Felons Deserve the Right to Vote" Illegals? "Immigration Bill Gives Illegal Immigrants Full Voting Rights!" Children? "Why It's Time To Give Children The Right To Vote"

We could ponder why democracy pushes toward greater and greater enfranchisement. We could ask why the mass media is eternally shuffling the populace into newer and angrier mobs. John C. Wright has diagnosed the paradoxes in his Unified Theory of Madness.

But maybe it's better to view democracy and mass media as metaphysical objects. Why does democratic enfranchisement expand? Why do wolves howl at the moon? That's what it does, whether you want it to or not. 

The Tumblr comments are very much as one would expect, more righteous than even Righteous Louie himself. The Voting Rights Act didn't pass until 1965. Native Americans couldn't vote until 1924.

We could engage such thinkers with arguments, pointing out that the original democratic proponents were open about their contempt for mob rule. We could argue that there isn't a compelling reason for those that don't contribute to the state to have a voice in it, especially if their only contact with it is cashing the government's checks and being restrained by the police.

(The progression, by the way, goes from, "Why should those powdered aristocrats tell me, an educated and affluent man, what taxes to pay when I can't even argue?" to, "Why should those non-inebriated job-holders tell me, an ostensible human being, not to perform any act that pops into my head?" Is John Adams' indignation all that different from your average drunken "rebel?")

There's no point in convincing them, though. They believe in democracy. Instead, we should shrug when they rage at the government for corruption or at the press for being divisive. "That's democracy," we should say. "When you let a monkey in your house, you can't get mad at it for shitting on the floor."

When No One Can Be Believed

Outside In quotes Jim:

The climategate files not only give us reason to disbelieve “Climate Science”, but discredit all peer reviewed science. Peer review means you don’t get the actual evidence, but rather the consensus about what the evidence should show if it was not so wickedly prone to evil heresy. Peer review means that a consensus is quietly established behind closed doors, and then the evidence is corrected to agree with the consensus. This maximizes the authority and prestige of official science, at the expense of disconnecting it from reality.

This principle has been on my mind lately. At my day job, our industry has just gone through another federally-mandated materials change. Without getting too specific, one of the materials has had a tiny amount of a toxic substance. The "safe" level of this substance was set most recently about twenty years ago. This year, the manufacturers were forced to include an even smaller amount of that substance.

I won't go into the hours of conversation I've heard about how the old level is no more dangerous than the new level. What has happened is that, due to the law's specificity, parts with the old level are still available for sale. They can't be used in all applications, but they are still out there.

Naturally, the change in materials required a lot of research and development, followed by retooling. The new parts are more expensive than the old. I'm sure that there are a large number of end-users who continue to use the old products in now-prohibited applications--it's just cheaper.

Here's the thing:  Now we have a product that the government has labeled "Unsafe." A year ago, it was "Safe." Scientifically, there's no real difference in the dangers between the two levels. Those in the know have no problem using the products labeled "Unsafe."

The sign saying, in effect, "Danger! Danger!" is now meaningless. The line between "safe" and "dangerous" is so far within the safety zone that no one is paying attention to it. Which means that the real danger is unmarked. If people have no hesitation using "unsafe" products that are actually safe, how will they know when they come across something that really is dangerous?

Jim's quote points to this from a different direction. If scientific consensus is so easily manipulated, then what scientific information can we believe?

I've been trying to project what this phenomenon becomes. I think that America's most prominent example is vaccine truthism.

This brand of skepticism comes from progressives. Hippie values say that the medical industry's goal is to pump us full of chemicals, driven by profit and unconcerned with the long-term consequences. Some parents still believe there's a link between vaccinations and autism. Others are concerned with the particular chemicals used to preserve the vaccines.

If a significant portion of the population rejects vaccination, then the public becomes a breeding ground for vaccine-proof diseases. The disease always has a safe zone from which it can mutate and re-attack the general public--and re-attack as many times as it takes to be successful. The danger is increased for all.

But we should be distrustful of the medical industry and the government that regulates it. The days of WASP paternalism are over; persuasion is no longer accomplished by cautious logic but by hysteria and/or money.

This is end-stage democracy--no authority can be trusted. Not just because they are dishonest but also because they don't know what they're talking about. The warning signs are meaningless--the whole terrain is wilderness.

Thinking about Charlton's Theory of Mass Media

One would think that as a former journalism student, I'd have an easier time understanding what Bruce Charlton means here:

But at a more proximate level; the way the Left works can be seen by the one-and-only example of an institution which has actually grown in power, wealth, effectiveness and efficiency over the past three decades: the modern Mass Media.  

I have argued that the modern Mass Media is in fact the centre of Leftism and the central power in modern society - the Mass Media is the primary social system; and dominates all other social systems.  

And the modern Mass Media has zero social function - it is overwhelmingly destructive in its net effect - it destroys cohesion, it destroys all other social systems, it encourages a psychological state and social mechanisms which are intrinsically and open-endedly anti-functional. 

I certainly agree with that last paragraph but I'm having trouble marrying the whole of the Left to the whole of mass media. Charlton doesn't tag his posts, so I'm just going to have to stay tuned.

I do think that it has something to do with the idea I've been trying to articulate that leftism is the degenerative force of democracy and is intrinsic to democracy. Democracy, in theory and practice, is about mobilizing and amassing the desires of individuals. This, in itself, is a weakness that encourages selfish, anti-social political action. Democracy, in its demand for constant activity, will push until it has universal suffrage.

The left is the democratic force that stokes political individualism--that is, selfishness. It accomplishes this by framing issues as win-lose scenarios and pits groups of individuals against one another. As universal suffrage is achieved, it's necessary to create further divisions among society.

What we've seen in the past half-century is a relentless shaving of the majority bloc into tiny, single-issue blocs. These smaller blocs are amassed into a mob agitating against the majority. The advocate for slavery reparations has little in common with the feminist--except for their enemy, the average American.

I don't have it all worked out but the mass media is an integral part of the equation. The hottest issues--gay marriage, trans rights--are about increasingly small slivers of the population, but the introduction of each new issue equals another handful of voices shouting in the mob. The momentum grows stronger, even as there is less and less resistance.

I'll be thinking about it. And don't think that my distributist eye didn't catch the "mass" in "mass media."