Posted on 03/08/2025 3:04:21 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
Everyone living in modernizing 'Western' societies will have noticed the long-term, progressive growth and spread of bureaucracy infiltrating all forms of social organization: nobody loves it, many loathe it, yet it keeps expanding. Such unrelenting growth implies that bureaucracy is parasitic and its growth uncontrollable - in other words it is a cancer that eludes the host immune system. Old-fashioned functional, 'rational' bureaucracy that incorporated individual decision-making is now all-but extinct, rendered obsolete by computerization.
But modern bureaucracy evolved from it, the key 'parasitic' mutation being the introduction of committees for major decision-making or decision-ratification. Committees are a fundamentally irrational, incoherent, unpredictable decision-making procedure; which has the twin advantages that it cannot be formalized and replaced by computerization, and that it generates random variation or 'noise' which provides the basis for natural selection processes. Modern bureaucracies have simultaneously grown and spread in a positive feedback cycle; such that interlinking bureaucracies now constitute the major environmental feature of human society which affects organizational survival and reproduction.
Individual bureaucracies must become useless parasites which ignore the 'real-world' in order to adapt to rapidly-changing 'bureaucratic reality'. Within science, the major manifestation of bureaucracy is peer review, which - cancer-like - has expanded to obliterate individual authority and autonomy. There has been local elaboration of peer review and metastatic spread of peer review to include all major functions such as admissions, appointments, promotions, grant review, project management, research evaluation, journal and book refereeing and the award of prizes. Peer review eludes the immune system of science since it has now been accepted by other bureaucracies as intrinsically valid, such that any residual individual decision-making (no matter how effective in real-world terms) is regarded as intrinsically unreliable (self-interested and corrupt).
Thus the endemic failures of peer review merely trigger demands for ever-more elaborate and widespread peer review. Just as peer review is killing science with its inefficiency and ineffectiveness, so parasitic bureaucracy is an un-containable phenomenon; dangerous to the extent that it cannot be allowed to exist unmolested, but must be utterly extirpated. Or else modernizing societies will themselves be destroyed by sclerosis, resource misallocation, incorrigibly-wrong decisions and the distortions of 'bureaucratic reality'. However, unfortunately, social collapse is the more probable outcome, since parasites can evolve more rapidly than host immune systems.
"The need for NATO ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It should have been dissolved then, but bureaucracies never die, they just mutate and metastasize."
I then stumbled upon the article above and it seemed quite relevant.
A big symptom is the collapse of "peer review."
Peer review is a great way to strangle scientific progress.
All great new ideas are crushed.
...modernizing societies will themselves be destroyed by sclerosis, resource misallocation, incorrigibly-wrong decisions and the distortions of 'bureaucratic reality'. However, unfortunately, social collapse is the more probable outcome, since parasites can evolve more rapidly than host immune systems.
Half of our people are below average.
Bkmk
Try being a product development engineer in aerospace or medicine.
We would never fly and doctors would still be letting blood with leaches had the current regulatory environment been in place in the early 1900s.
Sounds like this author could be cribbing from Von Mises’ book on this very subject from 80 years ago.
Bureaucracy, by Ludwig von Mises, 1944
https://cdn.mises.org/Bureaucracy_3.pdf
“Mises describes bureaucracies as both self-interested and economically irrational. There is no reinventing government: if we are to have government do things for us, bureaucracies, which cannot behave efficiently, will have to do the work. This small book has grown in stature as Western economies have become more and more bureaucratized.”
“safe and effective”...
Far too many.
I really like the change in attitude / perspective.
This is good stuff.
IMHO a consequence of Trump.
The longer I spend time in this world the more apparent it is to me that the secular world favors those unencumbered by ethics, and those who parasitize - not create.
It just keeps growing.
You have to kill it.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.As for peer review, it was originally a chance for other scientists to duplicate the work. How often is a the work behind the paper duplicated now?Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
ping
Such as "Climate Change."
There are people who do, and those who say no. When the people who say no are in charge, nothing can get done.
In some ways the article misses a key point. One of the things that drives bureaucratization is the need to spread the responsibility for decision making. Spread it so thin so no one person can be blamed if it’s the wrong decision. One of the driving favors in this is fear of being sued. This comes from the over “lawyerfication” of our society. We’ve spent decades and decades graduated more lawyers than we need. We organizations whose whole purpose is a class action suit! So is it anyone everything business or government responds with bureaucracy!
Very good point.
Let me re-write I found some typos I need to correct for clarities sake.
In some ways the article misses a key point. One of the things that drives bureaucratization is the need to spread the responsibility for decision making. Spread it so thin no one person can be blamed if it’s the wrong decision. One of the driving forces in this is fear of being sued. This comes from the over “lawyerfication” of our society. We’ve spent decades and decades graduating more lawyers than we need. We have organizations whose whole purpose is a class action suit! So is it any wonder every business or government organization responds with bureaucracy!
Tell us again what you propose to replace “bureaucracy”.
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