Bureaucracy
Isegoria linked to an interview of Frank Herbert, author of the Dune series. I don't need to explain how great the books are, and how amazing a writer Frank Herbert is. You could feel that the man is Darkly Enlightened just by reading his fiction, in the same way you can feel that Isaac Asimov is an establishment technocrat when reading Foundation. This interview confirms my feeling.
JMS: In the Dune books, you seem to question a number of other cultural assumptions. One of them is the belief that the establishment of a democracy necessarily addresses all of humankind's problems and needs.HERBERT: One of the things I noticed as a reporter -- I was a journalist longer than I've been on this side of the table -- is that in all the marching in the streets in the '60s, the people who were shouting "Power to -the People" didn't mean power to the people. They meant "power to me and I'll tell the people what to do." When you questioned them it was confirmed at every turn.
This channels Foseti very nicely:
I don't think there's a fucking bit of difference between a bureaucracy that is instituted by a democratic regime, a state; socialist regime, a communist regime or a capitalist regime. Take a look at us right now. We have created a bureaucracy in this country which is completely out of the hands of the people. Your votes do not touch it. One day when I was working in Washington, D.C. as a speech-writer for a U.S. senator from Oregon, I was at a meeting of the Department of Commerce and a very, very high department official, a lifetime bureaucrat, was talking about another senator, who was giving them some trouble. And this high bureaucrat called this senator a "transient." And sure enough, that senator was defeated in the next election. So he was a transient. But the bureaucrat was, still there, and he retired on a separate retirement system for the federal bureaucracy.
There was a time when reporters were smart people like Frank Herbert, who went alone to Washington and very soon noticed how the levels of power actually work. Or maybe everybody knows, and it's just that he's the only one who disagrees.
The permanent bureaucracy is a very important issue in neoreaction, ever since Moldbug channeled Foseti and made it a topic of discussion. But I've always wondered. Does it really matter? Japan is famous for having a permanent bureaucracy, to the extent that it is common knowledge. Even sub-100 IQ lay people in the street know that it's the bureaucrats who hold real power. It is often made an issue of, especially in reformist discussion panels, often leftist, which claim that the bureaucrats are the source of all problems in the country, and that decision making should go to the people's representatives, "like in other developed countries".
But nothing ever changes, perhaps because becoming like other developed countries means that the bureaucracy rules just the same. That's the way it works, and I have the impression that's the way it has always worked. Doesn't Dostoievsky always describe bureaucrats as having socialist sympathies? Didn't the Chinese imperial bureaucracy woo the emperors and fooled them as they willed? As European states developed and modernized, the bureaucracy steadily grew in size and power, to the extent that they ended up creating by themselves a whole bureaucratic structure on top of all European nations without even nominal elections.
The realization of the reality of the permanent bureaucracy is usually met with disapproval. It's a farce, the subversion of the legal constitutions and every narrative on how power is supposed to work. To which Foseti always cautions: it's better like this. Having Congressmen actually take decisions would be catastrophic.
I don't think there's even a question. Modern political parties aren't structured to take political decisions: they're a fundraising organization, designed for the task of extracting money and funnel it to their associates, so they can run campaigns, get elected and repeat the process. That's what they are for, and they do it quite well.
But someone has to actually set rules and enforce them, to run the government. And so behind all these campaigns and dinner parties with lobbyists, lie the bureaucrats. Of course the problem of bureaucracy is that it is necessary, in the same way the putrefaction of organic matter is necessary. Nobody likes how it works, but it has to happen. Bureaucracy seems to spontaneously appear every time an institution is established with the purpose to last. Isegoria also recently quoted the great Cyril Northcote Parkinson:
This seem humorous, or perhaps the result of the dysfunctional mores of government, which being the highest power of society has nobody to rule over them. But it's not only government where dysfunctional bureaucracy operates. Look at this fascinating article on the Decline of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is not government, nor even a for profit company. It's run mostly by volunteer editors who through their sheer volume of work created a reputation, which led them to be regarded as authorities, and ended up being given power to set the rules of the website. Rules which of course do nothing but grow and grow, making the operation so annoying that newcomers are discouraged from joining.
There's a small caveat, in that the lack of new editors can't be only caused by the increasing bureaucracy, but simply because of the law of diminishing returns. Wikipedia is big as it is, most low-hanging fruit in the form of articles that white American nerd with free time are motivated to write about are already there. And "editor diversity" just won't happen for obvious reasons unrelated to the red tape those evil white males are imposing on the rest.
Still it is a fact that the red tape is increasing, in a way not dissimilar from what Parkinson describes. Of course the obvious reason is self-preservation, which the Japanese, as experts in bureaucracy analysis, call 保身. Any member of an organization wants to preserve its status, and the best way of doing that is making it hard for newcomers to replace him. The amount of red-tape cancer growth depends only on strength of the self-preservation impulse (i.e. the importance the bureaucrat gives to his status in that organization), and the authority on top to prevent it. A powerful and involved ruler can fire any self-preservating red-tape creator. A headless and moneyless cooperative such as Wikipedia will produces go on producing more and more rules until the editor status becomes a hereditary title.
Any competent student of history can tell you that all civilizations fall into this same trap, to a depressing extent. There's no evolving out of it. I'm sure that students of corporate structure feel the same way. But the very nature of corporations (less Voice, more Exit) means that more experimentation can go on. Valve is a famous example, and they gave an extensive interview to WP this week.
Valve famously has no managers, no HR, no reports, everything works by setting groups ad-hoc whenever there's a project. There are fascinating insights in how they manage their people.
It’s sort of a good news/bad news situation that our industry is changing so quickly. If you look at the requirements for just one piece, like art, from one generation of games to the next, it will change radically. You need people who are adaptable because the thing that makes you the best in the world in one generation of games is going to be totally useless in the next. So specialization in gaming is sort of the enemy of the future. We had to think about if we’re going to be in a business that’s changing that quickly, how do we avoid institutionalizing one set of production methods in such a way that we can’t adapt to what’s going to be coming next.(...)It seems like a lot of this involves a lot individual experience for employees and you've figured out a way to make that really work with the current size of your organization. Are you at all worried about scaling that if you continue to grow? No. One of the nice things about having pretty distributed decision-making in the company is that it tends to scale really well. You can trust that lots of good decisions are being made all the time. That's one of the things that we try to explain when we're bring somebody in -- you guys know there are no monthly reports here? There's no "all of the information has to flow to Gabe." It's like, if I need to know something I'll figure out who is involved with it and find it because I'm just like somebody else. Nobody's going to put together a report for me so I can have a giant file of reports laying around that I never get around to reading. What that means is that a lot of bandwidth internally in the company frees up because you're not just constantly tracking a whole bunch of stuff so decision making is really distributed.
Of course part of how well a systems "scales", is how homogeneous the culture is kept. Valve is quite selective about which employees they let in. They also have a very wise priest-king, Gabe Newell who understands the psychology of his target workers, i.e. polymath nerds who want to take their parents to the yearly company trip. They're not making the best out of people, they're picking self-driven geniuses and setting an environment where they can cooperate peacefully. And with all that, as the first comment on the article says, Valve games actually aren't that special.
As I suspected, Gabe Newell just doesn't believe in hierarchy period:
He has a lot of other opinions about the business world, like a belief that mass manufacturing will lose out to highly customized creations. But he said the most "outlandish" idea he has is that the Internet will replace many of the things corporations do. "It'll be better at those old Coasian concepts of organizing labor and allocating capital," he mused, adding that the "egalitarian and democratic view of how we produce stuff as an economy is the one that I see increasingly winning out."
Again, it's easy to be egalitarian when you get a pick of you gets in the group. It seems pretty obvious that the optimal organizational structure depends in the ability of the members, with well-mannered intelligent people functioning better with a more egalitarian structure, and, as Jim likes to say, blacks more productive being enslaved.
It follows that the most important factor in a government bureaucracy is who gets to become a civil servant, and how much power they're given. The Chinese have a long tradition of caring about this, which I'll show on the next post. For those interested, I will translate from this source:
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replyI'm interested in a translation; if only because that guy gesticulates so awesomely with that fan. I don't know if Newell is right about the internet replacing the things that corporations do - though I am skeptical - but, Scott Adams (a pre-reactionary on many issues) wrote an interesting post recently about the internet disaggregating the elements of traditional bundling relationships - he chose marriage as the quintessential example - and being able to satisfy each of the elemental wants more perfectly than an bundler (i.e. 'spouse') ever could. The transition point is when the sum of all the better disaggregated goods and services overcomes the reliable but mediocre convenience of one-stop-shopping. And it occurred to me when I read it, "That's kind of what high-status people with options already do with other people. Alphas sometimes have different girlfriends most appropriate for crazy sex, or elegant cocktail parties, or meeting the family, etc." It's not exactly 'hypergamy' which is more always being on the lookout for a better one-stop-shop. But then you wrote Sluts and I thought, "Actually, that's exactly what that woman is doing with her men too. A (covert?) polyamory situation where she gets her various needs met in the most intensive or efficient ways." Of course, government has become the biggest bundler of goods and services of all, especially given its special powers and monopoly position. It should also face similar pressures from the internet and competitive innovations. And then Scott Adams wrote about that too. I think this is all very compatible with my general theme of 'bypass'. Don't trust, rely upon, or try to use elements or tools of the existing system to accomplish your goals if they conflict with The Cathedral. Don't believe in political parties or democracy or reform or 'getting the word out' - it's all futile and counterproductive. Never fight the system directly because you'll lose. If you play by the rules the bureaucrats set up, you'll also lose, because bureaucrats resist change, and you're that change. Instead, find a way to bypass the system and just try get around the things you don't like. The internet is awesome for that and has shown it can be very disruptive. Exit in place.
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On the topic of Japanese bureaucracy (but with implications for bureaucracy everywhere) I highly recommend Takahide Ikuta's Kanryo: Japan's Hidden Government. I read it before I ever heard of Moldbug or Foseti and it hit me like a sledgehammer. Some of the topics it talks about are Japan-specific (like the higher suicide rate among Japanese bureaucrats compared to the private sector) but a lot of it gives inside view into the infighting between agencies and elected politicians. The author started out as a leftist journalist. After years of covering the government he built a lot of relationships and learned about how the system really worked... My other recommendation for eye-opening reading material is the massive 3-volume History of Government by Samuel Finer. At 1,700 pages in total, it's not a quick read, but fans of Moldbug should not be scared. Professor Finer examines in great detail all forms of government from the Sumerian city states to modern democracy, including the various forms of Chinese imperial administration and the Tokugawa shogunate. He points out that a number of features arise again and again over the 5,000 years of recorded history; the rise of permanent bureaucracy is one of them. Others include the relentless evolution of any form of government into oligarchy, the frequent separation between ostensible power and actual power, and proliferation of titles that hide the fact that personal access to the final decision maker is the most important predictor of influence. It is a very reactionary book at heart, and when you finish it, the idea that there had been any progress in the art of government will strike you as laughable.
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Great recommendations. I already have Ikuta's book in my desk, but haven't put myself to it yet.
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It looks as though bureaucrats are frightened by anarcho-capitalism. This ideology of contempt for established forms of dispute resolution would meld with a vicious incarnation of social justice activism to create mob rule. “Back to blood”. Anarcho-capitalism's rigid distinction between public and private, state and anarchy, may be useful in economics but not political engineering. However, it's true that our system is overly centralised and in decline. The effect of the anarchic tidal wave depends on the fine structure and direction to which it is subject. Does it wash away cities, or clean the stables and generate electricity? Decentralising theories are all anarcho-capitalist in the same sense than every country with a bureaucracy is identical to the USSR. So, the way to make poseur ideologies—also the CEO idea—less attractive is to allow sane critics to transform antipathy into something constructive and safe. (But not futile and fictitious.) I can believe that our decadent state needs an unofficial censor to prop it up. It would be preferable for this not to be a retrospective censor that fails to communicate, and for there to be an intermediate step between silence and mortal threats. One possibility is that it would be legal to violate taboos and fictions, if that isn't inflammatory “hate speech”, and to advocate change, but strictly not to exhort, agitate or plan a revolution. Also, it's a problem if the author seems to target an audience less intelligent than the average bureaucrat. I guess it would be desirable to have no-one under the age of 25 or 30 express a political opinion, but (absent serious repression with harmful side-effects) that would be difficult. Bureaucratic enforcers might also bridge some, but not all, of the vast gulf between decaying official fictions and their real beliefs. It makes them more sympathetic, and takes away trump cards from extremists. Handle's darkest enlightenment is not, after all, difficult to comprehend. Just my $0.02.
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I don't understand anything you're saying here. Why is anarcho-capitalism even a thing? At least unicorns have real life relatives.
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Murray Rothbard and David Friedman are anarcho-capitalists. The idea is to have all lawful, legislative and regulatory functions replaced by institutions that are subject to market choice. This system almost certainly could not exist. But it's a “thing” in the sense that the political acts of those who identify themselves as anarcho-capitalists, who have an emotional attachment to images and fantasies about a free market in governance, would have an exploitable regularity. If anarcho-capitalism were a viral ideology of the masses, there would be all sorts of harmful civil disobedience, failure to recognise the moral authority of the law, and gangs of social justice thugs claiming to be “protection agencies”. I do think that public protest, e.g. about SOPA, can have good effects in the political domain if it's of a negative character, discouraging political acts that violate a norm. It cannot be an important and regular method of dispute resolution. But, one would certainly deserve a warning from the hypothetical censor for this type of speech.* Decentralisation could also mean that we revisit and repair our foundational concepts** such as sovereignty, checks and balances, the individual, government, etc., because clearly something is amiss in the progressive theories. They are failing on easy problems that were already solved; what will happen if there is an imminent automation or singularity crisis? *Again, this is hypothetical because I'm well aware of the real situation. **I think the same about ethics/meta-ethics.
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But is wide adoption of anarcho-capitalism by the masses even in the cards? Libertarianism, of which anarcho-capitalism is perhaps 1% only exists as a movement of sorts in the USA, and isn't really that big even there. Most political discourse as it happens today is intra-bureacratic factional debate, and any grassroots protest is mostly astroturf.
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Until recently, I didn't realise that these movements, neoreaction or anarcho-capitalism, were seen as a big threat by the Cathedral. I have only noticed that, e.g., fans of Ron Paul are more enthusiastic and earnest than others. But apparently it is so. I agree with bureaucratic enforcers that one shouldn't glorify contempt for the system, including its informal aspects, because those most apt to use antinomian brute force are the scum of the earth. We need more, not less procedural fine detail, albeit not necessarily more procedure. (I have undoubtedly crossed this line before, of bitter opprobrium towards good and necessary aspects of the system, or else things that have to reckoned with. I expect almost every young contrarian does so at some point; but I certainly retract such comments.)
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Actually, Herbert wanted to make the last Dune book about a return to democracy: http://www.jacurutu.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1112 (CTRL F for "democratic rule")
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Glad he never did.
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[…] Bureaucracy and its growth. […]
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[…] in talking about how all states end up surrendering real power to the permanent bureaucracy, I thought it interesting to look at the example of China, which has the oldest and most well […]
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[…] in talking about how all states end up surrendering real power to the permanent bureaucracy, I thought it interesting to look at the example of China, which has the oldest and most well […]
Absolutely covert. And yes, Scott Adams didn't see that alphas have been doing that for centuries, without the Internet. And betas are screwed anyway with the Internet. Probably more screwed than they already were.
Yep. Betas had this thing called traditional bourgeois civilization that was pretty good for them. Kind of a civilization-building conspiracy really. Everything that moves away from that just further enables the other '55%' conspiracy between all women and the top 10% of men.