Bruce Charlton's Notions

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From 2010, on the Medical Hypotheses blog - for those who missed it... I regard this as probably one of my most important 'scholarly' articles. The post is about 2,500 words - so is better copied, pasted and printed-out before reading (assuming the 400 word summary seems sufficiently alluring)

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The cancer of bureaucracy: how it will destroy science, medicine, education; and eventually everything else

Bruce G Charlton. Medical Hypotheses - 2010; 74: 961-5


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.

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Everyone in modernizing ‘Western’ societies (roughly the USA, UK, Western and Central Europe) will, no doubt, have noticed that there has been a long-term, progressive growth and spread of bureaucracy. Except during major war; this has not been a matter of pendulum swings, with sometimes less and sometimes more bureaucracy, but instead of relentless overall expansion – albeit sometimes faster and at other times slower.

The bureaucratic takeover applies to science, medicine, education, law, police, the media – indeed to almost all social functions. Such unrelenting growth implies either that 1. Bureaucracy is vital to societal functioning and the more bureaucracy we have the better for us; or that 2. Bureaucracy is parasitic and its growth is uncontrollable. Since the first alternative has become obviously absurd, I am assuming the second alternative is correct: that bureaucracy is like a cancer of modernizing societies – i.e. its expansion is malignant and its effect is first parasitic, then eventually fatal.

While it is generally recognized that modern societies are being bled-dry by the expense, delays, demoralization and reality-blindness imposed by multiple expanding and interacting bureaucracies, it is not properly recognized that bureaucratic decision-making is not merely flawed by its expense and sluggishness but also by its tendency to generate wrong answers. Modern bureaucracy, indeed, leads to irrational and unpredictable decisions; to indefensible decisions which are barely comprehensible, and cannot be justified, even by the people directly involved in them.

In what follows, I will make a distinction between, on the one hand, Weberian, functional, ‘rational’ bureaucracy which (in its ideal type, as derived from the work of Max Weber; 1864-1920) incorporated individual decision-making and was evaluated externally in terms of results and efficiency; and, on the other hand, modern ‘parasitic’ bureaucracy which (in its ideal type) deploys majority-vote committees for its major decision-making, is orientated purely towards its own growth, and which by means of its capacity to frame ‘reality’ - has become self-validating.

I will argue that parasitic bureaucracy evolved from rational bureaucracy in response to the rapidly changeable selection pressures imposed by modern society, especially the selection pressure from other bureaucracies having constructed a encompassing, virtual but dominant system of ‘bureaucratic reality’; and that the system of rational bureaucracy is by now all-but extinct – having been rendered obsolete by computerization.


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The problem of parasitic bureaucracy

It is a striking feature of modern bureaucracy that nobody loves it, many loathe it (even, or especially, the bureaucrats themselves), yet it keeps growing and spreading. One reason is that bureaucracy is able to frame reality, such that the more that bureaucracy dominates society, the more bureaucracy seems to be needed; hence the response to any bureaucracy-generated problem is always to make more and bigger bureaucracies. It is this positive feedback system which is so overwhelming. Mere human willpower is now clearly inadequate to combat bureaucratic expansionism. Bureaucracy has become like The Borg on Star Trek: the next generation: it feeds-upon and assimilates opposition.

Bureaucracies are indeed no longer separable but form a linked web; such that to cut one bureaucracy seems always to imply another, and larger, bureaucracy to do the cutting. When the dust has settled, it is invariably found that the total sum and scope of societal bureaucratic activity has increased. And it is well recognized that modern bureaucracies tend to discourse-about, but never to eradicate, problems – it is as-if the abstract bureaucratic system somehow knew that its survival depended upon continually working-on, but never actually solving problems... Indeed, ‘problems’ seldom even get called problems nowadays, since problems imply the need and expectation for solutions; instead problems get called ‘issues’, a term which implies merely the need to ‘work-on’ them indefinitely. To talk in terms of solving problems is actually regarded as naïve and ‘simplistic’; even when, as a matter of empirical observation, these exact same problems were easily solved in the past, as a matter of record.

Over much of the world, public life is now mostly a matter of ‘bureaucracy speaking unto bureaucracy’. Observations and opinions from individual humans simply don’t register – unless, of course, individual communications happen to provide inputs which bureaucracies can use to create more regulations, more oversight, hence create more work for themselves. So individual complaints which can be used to trigger bureaucratic activity may be noted and acted-upon, or personal calls for more bureaucratic oversight may be amplified, elaborated and implemented. But anything which threatens the growth and spread of bureaucracy (i.e. anything simple that is also worryingly swift, efficient or effective) is ignored; or in extremis attacked with lethal intent.

The main self-defence of modern bureaucracy, however, is to frame reality. Since bureaucracies now dominate society, that which bureaucracies recognize and act-upon is ‘reality’; while that which bureaucracies do not recognize does not, for practical purposes, exist. Bureaucracy-as-a-system, therefore constructs a 'reality' which is conducive to the thriving of bureaucracy-as-a-system.

When a powerful bureaucracy does not recognize a communication as an input, then that communication is rendered anecdotal and irrelevant. Information which the bureaucracy rejects takes-on an unreal, subjective quality. Even if everybody, qua individual, knows that some thing is real and true – it becomes possible for modern bureaucracy implicitly to deny that thing's existence simply by disregarding it as an input, and instead responding to different inputs that are more conducive to expansion, and these are then rendered more significant and 'realer' than actual reality.

For many people, the key defining feature of a bureaucracy (as described by Weber) is that ideally it is an information-processing organization that has established objective procedures which it implements impartially. It is these quasi-mechanical procedures which are supposed to link aims to outcomes; and to ensure that, given appropriate inputs a bureaucracy almost-automatically generate predictable and specific outputs and outcomes.

However modern bureaucracies do not work like that. Indeed, such has been the breakdown in relationship between input and output that modern bureaucracies devote immense resources to change pure-and-simple; for example continually changing the recognition of input measures (i.e. continually redefining 'reality') and re-defining an organization’s mission and aims (i.e. rendering the nature of the organization different-from and incommensurable-with the past organization) and repeatedly altering the organizational outcomes regarded as relevant (re-defining making any decline in the efficiency of the organization formally un-measurable).

Such change may be externally- or internally-triggered: either triggered by the external demands of other bureaucracies which constitute the organizational environment, or triggered by the innate noise-generating tendencies of committees.

With endlessly-altering inputs, processes and outputs, bureaucratically-dominated organizations are impossible to critique in terms of functionality: their effectiveness is impossible to measure, and if or when they may be counter-productive (in terms of their original real world purpose) this will also be unknowable. Individual functional organizations disappear and all bureaucracies blend into a Borg-like web of interdependent growth.


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The nature of bureaucracy: rational versus parasitic

What is bureaucracy? The traditional definition emphasises that bureaucracy entails a rational human organization which is characterized by hierarchy and specialization of function, and that the organization deploys explicit procedures or regulations that are impartially administered by the personnel. A rational ‘Weberian’ bureaucracy was probably, on the whole, performing a useful function reasonably efficiently – in other words its effectiveness was perceived in terms of externally-pre-decided criteria, and its growth and spread were circumscribed.
In medical terms, Weberian bureaucracy was therefore – at worst - a benign tumour; potentially able to overgrow locally and exert pressure on its surroundings; but still under control from, and held in check by, the larger host organism of society.

But, just as cancers usually evolve from benign precursors, so it was that modern parasitic and useless bureaucracies evolved from the rational and functional bureaucracies of an earlier era. Probably the key trigger factor in accelerating the rate of this evolution has been the development of computers, which have the potential to do – almost instantly, and at near zero cost – exactly the kind of rational information processing which in the past could only be done (much more slowly, expensively, and erratically) by Weberian bureaucracy. My contention is that large scale rational, functional bureaucracies are now all-but extinct, destroyed by computerization.

I assume that, when rational bureaucracy was facing extinction from computerization, there was a powerful selection pressure for the evolution of new forms of irrational bureaucracy – since rational procedures could be converted into algorithms, formalized and done mechanically; while irrational procedures were immune from this competition.

The outcome is that, despite retaining a vast structure of procedure and regulation, and the organizational principles of hierarchy and specialization, those powerful modern bureaucracies that survived the challenge of computerization and are still alive and growing nowadays are non-rational in their core attributes. Irrationality is indeed an essential aspect of a modern bureaucracy’s ability to survive and thrive. Those bureaucracies which remain and are expanding in this post-computerization era are neither rational nor functional.

This evolution towards pure parasitism – with no performance of a substantive real-world function - is only possible because, for any specific bureaucracy, its relevant environment now substantially consists of other bureaucracies. It is 'other bureaucracies' that are the main selection pressure: other bureaucracies pose the main threat to survival and reproduction. A modern bureaucracy therefore must respond primarily to ‘bureaucratic reality’ – and any engagement with ‘real life’ (e.g. life as it is perceived by alert and informed individual human beings) simply stands in the way of this primary survival task.

So, the best adapted modern bureaucracies are those which most efficiently play the game of satisfying the constantly-and rapidly-changing requirements of other major bureaucracies. Success brings expansion by local growth and metastatic spread. But, in contrast, satisfying the stable requirements of ‘real life’ and human nature, by contrast, brings a bureaucracy little or no rewards, and a greater possibility of extinction from the actions of other bureaucracies.


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The role of committees in the evolution of bureaucracy

I will argue that the major mechanism by which irrationality has been introduced into bureaucracies is the committee which makes decisions by majority voting.

Committees now dominate almost all the major decision-making in modernizing societies – whether in the mass committee of eligible voters in elections, or such smaller committees as exist in corporations, government or in the US Supreme Court: it seems that modern societies always deploy a majority vote to decide or ratify all questions of importance. Indeed, it is all-but-inconceivable that any important decision be made by an individual person – it seems both natural and inevitable that such judgments be made by group vote.

Yet although nearly universal among Western ruling elites, this fetishizing of committees is a truly bizarre attitude; since there is essentially zero evidence that group voting leads to good, or even adequate, decisions – and much evidence that group voting leads to unpredictable, irrational and bad decisions.

The nonsense of majority voting was formally described by Nobel economics laureate Kenneth Arrow (1921-) in the 1960s, but it is surely obvious to anyone who has had dealings with committees and maintains independent judgement. It can be demonstrated using simple mathematical formulations that a majority vote may lead to unstable cycles of decisions, or a decision which not one single member of the committee would regard as optimal. For example, in a job appointments panel, it sometimes happens that there are two strong candidates who split the panel, so the winner is a third choice candidate whom no panel member would regard as the best candidate. In other words any individual panel member would make a better choice than derives from majority voting.

Furthermore, because of this type of phenomenon, and the way that majority decisions do not necessarily reflect any individual's opinion, committee decisions carry no responsibility. After all, how could anyone be held responsible for outcomes which nobody intended and to which nobody agrees? So that committees exert de facto power without responsibility. Indeed most modern committees are typically composed of a variable selection from a number of eligible personnel, so that it is possible that the same committee may never contain the same personnel twice. The charade is kept going by the necessary but meaningless fiction of ‘committee responsibility’, maintained by the enforcement of a weird rule that committee members must undertake, in advance of decisions, to abide by whatever outcome (however irrational, unpredictable, unjustified and indefensible) the actual contingent committee deliberations happen to lead-to. This near-universal rule and practice simply takes ‘irresponsibility’ and re-names it ‘responsibility’…

Given that committee decisions are neither rational nor coherent, and are therefore radically unpredictable, what is their effect? In a nutshell the short answer is that committees – overall and in the long term – generate random ‘noise’. Committees almost certainly increase the chances that a decision is wrong – but overall they probably do not have lead to any specifically biased direction of wrongness. While some committees using some procedures are biased in one direction, others are biased in other directions, and in the end I think the only thing that we can be sure about is that committees widen the range of unpredictability of decisions.

Now, if we ask what is the role of randomness in complex systems? - the answer is that random noise provides the variations which are the subject of selection processes. For example, in biology the random errors of genetic replication provide genetic variation which affects traits that are then subjected to natural selection. So, it seems reasonable to infer that committees generate random changes that generate variations in organizational characteristics which are then acted-upon by selection mechanisms. Some organizational variations are amplified and thrive, while other variations are suppressed and dwindle. Overall, this enables bureaucracies rapidly to evolve – to survive, to grow and to spread.

How much random noise is needed in a bureaucracy (or any evolving system)? The short answer is that the stronger is the selection pressure, the greater is the necessity for rapid evolution, then the more noise is needed; bearing in mind the trade-off by which an increased error rate in reproduction also reduces the ability of an evolving system accurately to reproduce itself. A system under strong selection pressure (e.g. a bureaucracy in a rapidly-changing modernizing society) tends to allow or generate more noise to create a wider range of variation for selection to act upon and thereby enable faster evolution – at the expense of less exact replication. By contrast, a system under weaker selection pressure (such as the Weberian bureaucracies of the early 20th century – for instance the British Civil Service) have greater fidelity of replication (less noise), but at the expense of a reduced ability to change rapidly in response to changing selection pressures.

I am saying here that committees using majority voting are responsible for the evolution of malignant bureaucratic growth in modern bureaucracies, and that this is why majority-vote decision-making permeates modern societies from the top to the bottom.

Although almost all major decision-making in the ‘Western’ world is now by majority voting there may be two significant exceptions: firstly military decision-making in time of war; secondly the personal authority of the Pope in the Roman Catholic Church. In both these types of organization there seems to be a greater emphasis on individual decision-making than on committee voting. Military command structures and the Roman Catholic hierarchy are therefore probably both closer to the ideal type of a Weberian rational bureaucracy than to the ideal type of a modern parasitic bureaucracy.

If so, the only major exceptions to majority rule decision-making at a world level, and probably not by coincidence, are the oldest and longest-enduring bureaucratic structures: that is, organizations which have retained functionality and have not themselves been destroyed by bureaucratic cancer.


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Why are there committees at all?

Although they may nowadays be almost wholly damaging, committees cannot in their origins have been entirely useless or harmful; or else the form would never have survived its first appearance. If we acknowledge that individuals have the potential for better (i.e. more rational and coherent) decision-making than committees, then the decline of individual decision-making must not be due to the lack of advantages so much as the perceived problems of individual decision-making.

The problems of individual decision-making are the same as the problems of individual power: in essence these problems are self-interest (i.e. the observation that power will be deployed differentially to benefit the power-holder) and corruption (i.e. the observation that over time power will corrupt, making the individual progressively a worse-and-worse decision-maker until he us note merely self-interested but progressively driven mad: power mad).

Since humans are self-centred beings living in an imperfect world, all individuals tend to be both self-interested and corruptible (albeit to widely-varying degrees!). Of course, self-interest and corruptibility applies equally to people 'serving' on committees - each of whom is wielding lesser but anonymous and irresponsible power. Nonetheless, it seems to me that committees are mostly favoured because they are seen as a solution to these intrinsic problems of individual power. The implicit assumption is that when a committee is run by majority voting then individual self-interests will cancel-out. Furthermore, that since power is spread-around more people on a committee, then the inevitably corrupting effect of power will be similarly diluted.

In reality, committees mostly solve the problems of power to the extent that they reduce the effective deployment of power. So that, if committees are indeed less self-interested and less prone to corruption than individuals, this is achieved mainly because the committee structure and procedures make decision-making so unpredictable and incoherent that committees are rendered ineffective: ineffective to such an extent that committees cannot even manage consistently to be self-interested or corrupt! Therefore, the problems of power are ‘solved’, not by reducing the biases or corruptions of power, but simply by reducing the effectiveness of power; by introducing inefficiencies and obscuring the clarity of self-interest with the labile confusions of group dynamics. Power is not controlled but destroyed…

Therefore, if committees were introduced to reduce the abuse of power, then instead of achieving this, their actual outcome is that committees reduce power itself, and society is made docile when confronted by significant problems which could be solved, but are not. And surely this is precisely what we observe in the West, on an hourly basis?

Because committee-based bureaucracy is predicated on an ethic of power as evil: it functions as a sort of unilateral disarmament that would be immediately obvious as self-defeating or maladaptive unless arising in a context of already-existing domination. And a system of committee-based bureaucracy can only survive for as long as it its opponents can be rendered even-weaker by even-more virulent affliction with the same disease: which perhaps explains the extra-ordinarily venomous and dishonest pseudo-moralizing aggression which committee bureaucracy adopts towards other simpler, more-efficient or more-effective organizational systems that still use individual decision-making.

If we assume that committees were indeed introduced as a purported solution to (real or imagined, actual or potential) abuses of individual power; then committees will therefore usually achieve this goal. So long as the quality of decision-making is ignored, then the committees seem to be successful. Committees can therefore be seen as a typical product of one-sided and unbalanced moralism that has discarded the Aristotelian maxim of moderation in all things. Bureaucracy adopts instead unilateral moralism which aims at the complete avoidance of one kind of sin, even at the cost of falling into another contrasting kind of sin (so pride is avoided by encouraging submission, and aggression is avoided by imposing sloth).

However the subject matter of ‘trade-offs’ is avoided; and the inevitable self-created problems of single issue moral action are instead fed-upon by bureaucracy, leading (of course!) to further expansion.

Hence, modern decision-making means that societal capability has declined in many areas. It has become at best slow and expensive, and at worst impossible, to achieve things which were done quickly, efficiently and effectively under systems based on individual decision-making. To avoid the corruption of individual authority, society has been rendered helpless in the face of threats which could have been combated.


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Bureaucracy in science – the cancer of peer review

This situation can readily be seen in science. Although modern science is massively distorted and infiltrated by the action of external bureaucracies in politics, public administration, law, business and the media (for example), the major manifestation of bureaucracy actually within science is of course peer review.

Over the last half-century or so, the growth and metastatic spread of peer review as a method of decision-making in science has been truly amazing. Individual decision-making has been all-but obliterated at every level and for almost every task. The elaborateness of peer review has increased (e.g. the number of referees, the number of personnel on evaluating panels, the amount of information input demanded by these groups). And peer review or other types of committee are now used for admissions, appointments, promotions, grant review, project management, research evaluation, journal and book refereeing, the award of prizes… the list just goes on and on. Clearly, peer review fits the pattern of malignant expansion of bureaucracy that is seen in the rest of modern society.

And, as with the rest of society, the cancer of bureaucratic peer review eludes the immune system of science. It has now been widely accepted, by the other bureaucracies of modern society in particular, that peer review is intrinsically valid; and that any other form of decision-making is intrinsically corrupt or unreliable. This belief is not merely implicit, but frequently explicit: with ignorant and nonsensical statements about the vital and defining role of peer review in science being the norm in mainstream communication.

The irresistible rise of peer review can be seen most starkly in that any deficiencies in peer review triggers demands (especially from other bureaucracies) for more elaborate and widespread peer review. So that the endemic failure of increased journal peer review to maintain quality, or to eliminate what it is purported to detect; such as deliberate fraud, or multiple publication, or serious error - leads inevitably leads to plans for further increases in peer review. So there is peer review of greater elaborateness, with further steps added to the process, and extra layers of monitoring by new types of larger committees. The ultimate validity of peer review is simply an assumption; and no amount of contrary evidence of its stultifying inefficiency, its harmful biases, and distorting exclusions can ever prove anything except the need for more of the same.

Yet the role of peer review in the progress of science remains, as it always has been, conjectural and unverified. The processes of gathering and collating peer opinion as a method of decision-making are neither rational nor transparent – and indeed (as argued above) this irrationality and unpredictability is in fact a necessary factor in the ability of committee systems such as peer review to expand without limit.

In the past; the ultimate, bottom-line, within-science validation of science came not from the committee opinions of peer reviewers but from the emergent phenomenon of peer usage – which refers to the actual deployment of previous science (theories, facts, techniques) in the ongoing work of later scientists. This was an implicit, aggregate but not quantified outcome of a multitude of individual-decisions among peers (co-workers in the same domain) about what aspects of previous science they would use in their own research: each user of earlier work was betting their time, effort and reputation on the validity of the previous research which they chose to use. When their work bore fruit, this a validation of previous research (in the sense that having survived this attempt at refutation the old science now commanded greater confidence); but when previous research was faulty it 'sabotaged' any later research building upon it in terms of correctly predicting or effectively-intervening-in the natural world. Beyond this lies the commonsensical evaluation of science in terms of ‘what works’ – especially what works outside of science, by people such as engineers and doctors whose job is to apply science in the natural world.

But now that committee-based peer review has been explicitly accepted as the ‘gold standard’ of scientific validity, we see the bizarre situation that actual scientific usage and even what works is regarded as less important than the ‘bureaucratic reality’ of peer review evaluations. Mere opinions trump observations of objective reality. Since ‘bureaucratic reality’ is merely a construct of interacting bureaucracies, this carries the implication that scientific reality is now, to an ever-increasing extent, simply just another aspect of, and seamlessly-continuous-with, mainstream 'bureaucratic reality'. Science is merely a subdivision of that same bureaucratic reality seen in politics, public administration, law, the media and business. The whole thing is just one gigantic virtual world. It seems probable that much of peer reviewed ‘science’ nowadays therefore carries no implications of being useful in understanding, predicting or intervening-on the natural world.

In other words, when science operates on the basis of peer review and committee decision, it is not really science at all. The cancer of bureaucracy has killed real science wherever it dominates. Much of mainstream science is now ‘Zombie Science’: that is, something which superficially looks-like science, but which is actually dead inside, and kept-moving only by continuous infusion of research funds. So far as bureaucratic reality is concerned, i.e. the reality as acknowledged among the major bureaucracies; real science likely now exists at an unofficial, unacknowledged level, below the radar; only among that minority of scholars and researchers who still deploy the original scientific evaluation mechanisms such as individual judgement, peer usage and real-world effectiveness.

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What will happen?

The above analysis suggests that parasitic bureaucracy is so dangerous in the context of a modernizing society that it cannot be allowed to exist; it simply must be destroyed in its entirety or else any residuum will re-grow, metastasize and colonize society all over again. The implication is that a future society which intends to survive in the long-term would need to be one that prevents parasitic bureaucracy from even getting a toe-hold.

The power of parasitic bureaucracy to expand and to trigger further parasitic bureaucracies is now rendered de facto un-stoppable by the power of interacting bureaucracies to frame and construct perceived reality in bureaucratic terms. Since bureaucratic failure is eliminated by continual re-definition of success, and the since any threats of to bureaucratic expansion are eliminated by exclusion or lethal attack; the scope of bureaucratic takeover from now can be limited only by collapse of the social system as a whole.

So, if the above analysis is correct, there can be only two outcomes. Either that the cancer of modern bureaucracy will be extirpated: destroyed utterly. In other words, the host immune system will evolve the ability to destroy the parasite. Maybe, all majority voting committees will coercively be replaced by individuals who have the authority to make decisions and responsibility for those decisions.
Or that the cancer of bureaucracy will kill the host. In other words, the parasite will continue to elude the immune system. Modernizing societies will sooner-or-later be destroyed by a combination of resource starvation plus accumulative damage from delayed and wrong decisions based on the exclusions and distortions of ‘bureaucratic reality’.

Then the most complex rapidly-growing modernizing Western societies will be replaced by, or will regress into, zero-growth societies with a lower level of complexity - probably about the level of the agrarian societies of the European or Asian Middle Ages.

My prediction is that outcome two – societal collapse - is at present the more probable, on the basis that parasites can evolve more rapidly than host immune systems. Although as individuals we can observe the reality of approaching disaster, to modern parasitic bureaucracies the relevant data is either trivial or simply invisible.

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Further reading:

Although I do not mention it specifically above, the stimulus to writing this essay came from Mark A Notturno’s Science and the open society: the future of Karl Popper’s philosophy (Central European University Press: Budapest, 2000) – in particular the account of Popper’s views on induction. It struck me that committee decision-making by majority vote is a form of inductive reasoning, hence non-valid; and that inductive reasoning is in practice no more than a form of ‘authoritarianism’ (as Notturno terms it). In the event, I decided to exclude this line of argument from the essay because I found it too hard to make the point interesting and accessible. Nonetheless, I am very grateful to have had it explained to me.

I should also mention that various analyses of the pseudonymous blogger Mencius Moldbug, who writes at Unqualified Reservations, likely had a significant role in developing the above ideas.

This argument builds upon several previous pieces of mine including: Conflicts of interest in medical science: peer usage, peer review and ‘CoI consultancy' (Medical Hypotheses 2004; 63: 181-186); Charlton BG, Andras P. What is management and what do managers do? A systems theory account. (Philosophy of Management. 2004; 3: 3-15); Peer usage versus peer review (BMJ 2007; 335: 451); Charlton BG, Andras P. Medical research funding may have over-expanded and be due for collapse (QJM 2005; 98: 53–55); Figureheads, ghost-writers and pseudonymous quant bloggers: the recent evolution of authorship in science publishing (Medical Hypotheses. 2008; 71: 475–480); Zombie science’ (Medical Hypotheses 2008; 71:327–329); The vital role of transcendental truth in science’ (Medical Hypotheses. 2009; 72: 373–376); Are you an honest scientist? Truthfulness in science should be an iron law, not a vague aspiration (Medical Hypotheses. 2009; Volume 73: 633-635); and, After science: has the tradition been broken? Medical Hypotheses, in the press.

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This is an era in which the major institutions are declining - to be replaced by The (single, linked) Bureaucracy.

This has been a major fact of my adult life - the gradual recognition that all of the institutions with which I was directly involved: schools, universities, the medical profession, the health services, biomedical science and science in general... have all Gone!

Sometimes the shell remains, but what is within the shell has been hollowed out and replaced with The Bureaucracy; what the institution used-to-do has been redirected and repurposed into the uniform objectives of The Bureaucracy.

And what does The Bureaucracy want? Well, at a proximate level it wants total-control; it wants to know what everybody is doing (ideally, what they are thinking) at every moment of every day, such that this can be regulated and directed. The desire for totalitarianism clearly suffices for short-termism - but raises the question of the ultimate goal.


Towards what is The Bureaucracy aiming?


This may be clarified by considering what superficially-seems to be The Bureaucracy's only rival: the Mass Media. In fact, they are merely rivalrous divisions within the same organisation.

The Mass Media attracts 24/ 7 attention and mental participation, it is very-highly addictive such that its compulsion is in the form of desire - and therefore the MM has the same objective of totalitarian thought-control as The Bureaucracy. And the Media, in its core activity and overall tendency, always pushes (either directly, or implicitly) for more surveillance and more regulation - for more Bureaucracy.

In sum, the Mass Media gives the impetus and justification to the Bureaucracy, and 'corrects' it when it strays from The Program; and each component of The Bureaucracy responds in part directly to the Mass Media, and in part to the other components of The Bureaucracy.

For The Bureaucracy 'reality' is what the Mass Media is saying, and what other parts of the Bureaucracy is communicating. That's it. That is the whole of reality: there is nothing more. 


As for the Masses - they are paid by The Bureaucracy (one way or another, usually directly - if not indirectly); and spend their money, time and effort on The Mass Media. These are the whole of reality: there is nothing more.

(Whatever else seems to exist is purely personal, subjective, evanescent, contingent - presumably some delusion, the result of ignornance or childishness, irrational; mere wishful thinking. Objective Reality IS the Bureaucracy and the Mass Media.)


But what is The Bureaucracy (considered as a cohesive Thing) aiming-at: why does it want totalitarian control?

That is the bad news - because it turns-out that The Bureaucracy and the Mass Media are both, at the highest levels, pursuing a demonic agenda; and therefore what it wants is destruction of The Good (truth, beauty, virtue, coherence) and to persuade all humans to reject (explicitly, deliberately) salvation into everlasting life in Heaven.

At the top, at the highest level, ultimately setting-the agenda are literal demonic powers. Not many of them - they work indirectly via humans using bribery, intimidation and lying propaganda - but they are the primary movers and shakers both.  

In sum, the modern world has become a vast machine of spiritual damnation; a single mechanism with an ever-finer mesh to capture ever-more people in an ever-tighter constraint - aiming to poison that which is good; to promote, reward, enforce that which is dishonest, ugly, wicked and insane.


SO - as individuals, we look at the world, and we look for groups, organisations, clubs, colleges, guilds, movements, parties and all manner of collectivities - to provide us with knowledge, encouragement, and to amplify our influence...

And we find that there are none (or hardly any, small, weak, poor, despised; and only minimally effectual. And that, for various reasons, we personally cannot participate in them).

We find ourselves confronted by this vast machine of damnation - and we are on-our-own.

On our own because of the wholesale corruption; the possibility of living-well by participation-in, obedience-to some Good external authority and groups has been deleted.

Every-body must - and this is not avoidable - therefore always exercise discernment; must evaluate, judge, discriminate; and must find their own motivations, courage, and direction. There is no other Good option on offer.

Like it or not, want it or not; this is un-evade-able: it is the inescapable situation in-which we find-ourselves.   


This is precisely the core situation of modernity; it is the experience we are here (in mortal incarnate life) to experience, it is the lesson we personally are here to learn; it is why we were born now and here, rather than some other time or place: it is the challenge that we, personally, must confront and overcome.

And, for a Christian with faith in a loving God who is our Father and creator of this world, and whose Son made possible our resurrection to divinity - and whose guidance and wisdom is universally and personally accessible to all men as The Holy Ghost - who is our living, individual direction-finder and inspiration...

For such a Christian this colossal monolith of inter-connected evil is a challenge that each of us - individually and 'alone' - can overcome.

I find it hard to recognize that most people do not feel - immediately and without having to reflect upon it - the innate evil of bureaucracy; the soul-killing properties of a world of monitoring and control of ever more of life; the world of ever more regulations, procedures, check-lists. 

And the adverse effect that bureaucracy has upon people - on their thinking, behaviour - on their souls... I am astonished that this is not more widely recognized, and opposed.  

My own aversion to bureaucracy is spontaneous and powerful; and has shaped my life for several decades - and much of the 'activism' of my younger adult life was directed against it in medicine, universities and science.

For one example, I was the editor of what was apparently the last international academic journal Not to be (bureaucratically) peer reviewed (Medical Hypotheses). And the (official) reason for sacking me from this job was my refusal to introduce peer review. 

But what I did not recognize about bureaucracy until a few years ago - was that it was not just a result of evil choices; but more fundamentally a consequence of bad choices operating on changes in human consciousness. 

Past societies were never bureaucratic in the way that ours is - and officialdom lacked the parasitic and malignant tendency of modern bureaucracy, primarily because they could not be like that. The minds of Men could not operate in the ways necessary for a modern bureaucracy. 

When modern Man 'evolved' (developed deliberately; as part of God's creation, part of God's plan) bureaucratic thinking was always going to be a temptation; but it was one that Men were supposed to reject. 

A handful of the early (and Christian) romantics (e.g. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Novalis) showed the proper path, the God-intended and God-hoped-for path. But instead most Men chose the path of atheism, leftism and materialism - which leads inexorably to bureaucracy, death of the spirit, nihilism and despair.

Now bureaucracy is the public face of Ahrimanic evil: it has occupied the world, including the means of production and communication, and extends its tentacles almost daily. 

Now - if we reject bureaucracy, we also reject the System - and the System is what keeps us alive. 

Yet the ultimate evil motivation of bureaucracy is evident in the fact of its parasitic, malignant nature - that it will grow until it kills its host. 

And its evil is evident in that the bureaucratic leadership class - the leaders of major government, institutions and corporations; are advancing in corruption beyond the Ahrimanic; and into more purely negative evil of the spitefully-destructive.

In other words, because of their developing corruption - because of being ideological bureaucrats; They no longer serve The System - but instead serve Satan and themselves. 

Therefore the System - the global bureaucracy - is not only killing itself distally by parasitic colonization of the means of production... But also killing itself from within - by leaders implementing mandatory policies for enhanced group and interpersonal resentment; and multiple PSYOPS leading to destruction at all levels. 

The bureaucracy is, in other words, no longer internally-'rational', rule-based and systemic in nature;  but convulsed from within by contradictory objectives, compulsory incoherence, value-inversions and other manifestations of the most advanced forms of evil.  

 

This is why the individual must step-back from any affectation of concern with the System, with Politics, with Civilization or Society... These are not an answer, because these are destroying themselves from both external and internal reasons. 

We now have a global bureaucracy, which is a global system for evil; and the system evil is one that is atheist, leftist and materialist - and which therefore innately has the property of damning all those who live by it, believe it, endorse it. 

I think everybody knows this at some unconscious (and usually denied) level: i.e. that we are in the End Times - although what that phrase means in detail is unsure. But I mean the sense that things are going spiritually downwards and will continue to go inexorably downwards, to some kind of terminus.  

Thus hope is in opposition to optimism. 

Hope is spiritual - for salvation: for resurrection to life eternal. And hope depends on being spiritually separate from the System bureaucracy. 

Whereas optimism (expectation of positive outcomes) depends on wishing for the bureaucracy to continue - wishing for it not to be destroyed by inner-spite or by its own malignant tendencies - or not yet, at any rate. 

Optimism dictates that we defend and try to reform the System; hope dictates that we neither actively nor willingly participate in the work of evil; that we do identify, repent and reject evil. 

The System demands that we identify-with its evil - demands that we want and favour inclusion for our-selves and for all. 

But Romantic Christianity instead has it that our hope be located in divine creation rather than the System; beyond this world rather than in this world; beyond death rather than in mortal life. 

Our task is therefore to live from this transcendental root. 

This task is not easy - but it is possible. 

Bureaucracy is identical with totalitarianism - a world (such as we inhabit) in which bureaucracy is constantly growing and increasing in scope and penetration; and in which the bureaucracies are linked, just is a totalitarian world: that is, an evil world.

It is not the aim of bureaucracy that is evil, it is the fact of bureaucracy which is evil. The medium is the message.


Most educated people are primarily bureaucratic functionaries; all are significantly bureaucrats, and in all instances the bureaucratic element is increasing.

The origin of bureaucracy is that deep impulse of rebellion against God and creation that we call Leftism - and most bureaucracies are concerned with Leftist projects - but bureaucracy's great advantage (as an instrument) is that its evil is in the form rather than the content: it appears to be a machine or tool, usable for various purposes - thus the enemies of he Left hoped to use bureaucracy against the left.

However, the opposite happened. All opposition to the Left was absorbed-into bureaucracy; and became the Left.

And bureaucracy is everywhere. Bureaucracy has become Real Life: What is not bureaucracy is not really real - bureaucracy is The Bottom Line.

Any attempt to attack, must bureaucratise to be Real; hence is absorbed before it achieves anything.


If the material world was all there is, we would be doomed. If groups were primary and the individual existed to serve groups, we would be doomed. If the public world of laws, regulations, and communication; of power, propaganda, punishment were the only Reality, we would be doomed. If what we did was all that mattered and what we thought was irrelevant - there would be no hope.

But it isn't, it isn't, it is Not.

And realising this; all may be well. Because there is God, direct knowing, participation in creation; because life extends beyond mortality - because of all that is left-out of bureaucracy; we are not helpless.

We have a job to do.

Bureaucracy is at the very heart of the modern world - it is the common factor that unites all organisations and nations and super-national organisations - because all such are primarily bureaucracies, and only secondarily whatever the organisation is supposed to be doing.

(Another surrent term for this is 'convergence' - because bureaucracy is intriniscally Leftist*.)

At an obvious level, the organisations become organised for the benefit of managers rather than doers: because there are more managers than functionaries, and the bureaucratic systems take all power to the managerial role.

This means that organisations do things that benefit (senior) managerial careers - things like reorganisations, initiatives, and publicity seeking activities.

But aside from providing an environment for a certain type of careerism; what does bureaucracy aim-at? Well, we can see for ourselves: control.

Bureaucracy aims-at an ideal of machine-like, computer-like organisation - and the main obstacle is human beings. So all bureaucracy intrinsically aims at first ever-closer monitoring and then ultimately at micro-control of the personnel (actions, attitudes, motivations - because all behavioural control aims-at thought-control).

Hence the vast apparatus by which people spend more time in data collection than in actually doing stuff.

As a single representative example: the engineers who come to maintain my central heating spend about half an hour on the job and a half hour afterwards filling forms and logging their activities so that the bureaucracy may monitor and control him. The cost is that he probably does only 2/3 of the maintenance work he could otherwise accomplish - productivity reduced by more than 30 percent.

Or, more extremely; after nearly thirty years of this stuff, the amount of actual medicine practised in a day by the average British doctor has halved (at least).

So, we can see that bureaucracy is aiming at something very different from doing any-kind-of-job; it is aiming at monitoring and control of... well, of every-thing and every-body, ultimately.

And because this trend is 1. across-the-board and 2. bureaucracy is unopposed, and indeed encouraged, by those with power and influence - we can infer that the ideal of total-control is 1. intrinsic to the nature of bureaucracy and 2. a strategic goal of those in power.

Now - the obvious 'functional' rejoinder is that bureaucracy is tending towards a situation of 100% monitoring and control, 0% functionality (a populace whose function is merely to-be-monitored, to-be-controlled) - and that is true; and great strides have been made towards this implicit goal.

Yet, obviously, this would be an end to human society, the death of human society. Yet still the process of bureaucratisation unrolls and is implemented... This implies first that those who are behind the process care nothing about whether human society continues or not; and that instead the goal of controlling actually-existing-humans - here and now, in the immediate term - is over-riding.

All this is no mystery if we recognise the Hidden Hand behind global bureaucracy as demonic.

My conclusion is that bureaucracy is both intrinsically and purposively evil; and this is The Reason why it is expanding so rapidly towards ever more complete totalitarianism.

*All bureaucratic organisations are substantially Leftist, and Left-tending - including churches; this being, indeed, a major mechanism for the Leftist corruption of churches.

Why do modern managers engage in 'virtue signalling' at the expense of income and profits?

This can be understood in terms of system-adaptive short-termist selfishness...  

Edited from Charlton BG, Andras P. What is management and what do managers do? A systems theory account. Philosophy of Management. 2003; 3: 1-15.

Understanding the functionality of management, or any other complex system, is best approached by considering the factors that lead to the evolution of complex systems. Complex systems cannot arise in a single step by pure chance but are built-up incrementally and elaborated from simpler systems. 

Complex management systems are therefore a consequence of selection processes, and the functionality of the system will depend on its history of selection. 

For example, a management system may be a product of the selection of organisations by interaction with their economic market environments. The nature of the management system affects the nature of the organisation, and the organisation interacts with an environment in which economics is the major selection pressure. The major determinant of managerial replication is then the economic viability of the organisation. 

On the other hand, the main environmental selection pressure on organisations may be political rather than economic. This often applies in the ‘public sector’ and nationalised industries. The main interaction of public sector organisations is with government and the public administration bureaucracy, and this shapes their functionality. 

Organisations that disobey or antagonise the state apparatus will decline or disappear over time, while those that remain are those that have been relatively better at satisfying the demands of the state. 

In a long-lasting centralised command economic system such as the former-USSR, the survival and growth of organisations was often more dependent upon political factors than economic efficiency. The function of management in this context was related to political goals - for instance maintenance of good relations with The Party, full-employment, and political discipline. 

The point is that both a market-place and command economy management system may be equally functional in the sense that both may be equally-well adapted to their environments. However, they may have adapted to radically different environments. It is the history of environmental interaction that accounts for different function of management systems. 

The Soviet Union management of a car factory was presumably economically inefficient by comparison with a Japanese manufacturer - but likewise a Japanese-style organisation with Japanese-style management could not have survived in the political environment of the USSR. 

*

The same mechanism applies to senior executive managers at the level who make major decisions - and who, in the modern West, engage in virtue-signalling at the cost of corporate income and profits. Senior executive managers are - in effect - not part-of the corporation system, but are each individually A System, a unit of selection.

(i.e. The corporation is selected by the system it operates in; and so are senior executive managers.)

The background context in the modern West is of institutions that have been subjected to fifty years of increasingly severe selection pressure from the leftist socio-political system. The larger the organisation, the more dominant is socio-political selection; hence their massive expenditure on PR propaganda, lobbying, funding parties and media, and deniably-bribing decision makers (e.g. by massive 'consultancy' and 'lecture' fees).

Beyond this, no large modern organisation is autonomous but all large organisations are linked by the unified bureaucracy, which includes - by a vast and intricately interconnected web of laws and regulations - political and governmental systems and also (via regulation, taxes and subsidies) private corporations, media, health services, education, police and military, major churches... everything.

And increasingly this vast and intricately interconnected web of laws and regulations is multi-national, tending towards being global... A unified global bureaucracy.  

The unified bureaucracy is the origin and basis of political correctness or New Leftism - which is social not economic. Indeed, political correctness just-is the inner rules and system workings of the unified bureaucracy.

(The unified bureaucracy has properties which I described for the mass media in a book called Addicted to Distraction.)

Each individual senior executive manager's behaviour in any specific organisations has been selected-for by an environment which favours what-it-takes to progress the career of a senior executive manager. Rising managers typically move between corporations after making some qualitative change that conforms to the favoured dominant within-bureaucracy selection pressure.

Within-bureaucracy selection of senior executive managers is a very different thing from the usual assumption that strategic decisions are determined by between-corporation selection by 'the market'; i.e. by the economic-success of the institution being-managed. In the modern West, the market is itself embedded-in and controlled-by 'the unified bureaucracy'.


Modern executive managers of large corporations are therefore not really signalling their 'virtue' when pursuing a politically correct agenda - they are instead demonstrating their compliance with the unified bureaucracy and its internal system procedures. By conforming their (temporarily inhabited) organisation to the dominant selection pressure - by restructuring an individual corporation to the unified bureaucracy - senior executive managers reveal they have been selected-by a system that is not economic but socio-political.

Executive behaviour is not related to the specific corporation or organisation which currently but temporarily happens to employ them, but to each managers future personal career within the unified bureaucracy.

Thus executive managers, senior decision-makers in general, use their companies to enhance their careers... As do most people with most organisation. But for senior decision-makers the system of selection is the unified bureaucracy.

So do politicians who routinely act to destroy their specifically-political careers (and, if leaders, act to damage their political parties) by what appears to be virtue-signalling - but which is system-adaptive behaviour.

We can see that individuals in senior government positions routinely leave behind the wreckage of a specifically-political career, and failure of the political parties they have 'led'; and move on to occupy higher positions within the unified global bureaucracy. And this applies equally to senior executive managers in all the other major social institutions.

Political correctness in leaders has been competitively selected-for by a politically correct world (a politically correct system); and selection causes adaptation.


If you follow-up the careers of the individual managers responsible for making politically-correct decisions that have lost their companies large sums of money - I think you will discover that they, personally, have usually done very well out of it.


In a nutshell: Management is parasitic; but senior executive managers are fuel-injected, turbocharged parasites... on steroids.

To expand on a post from yesterday; people treat bureaucracy and the mass media as 'effects' (consequences of other, primary, social influences); when on the contrary - as we know from direct and personal experience - they are more like 'causes'.

We can argue over how and why B and the MM got to be as they are; but from where we stand now they are colossal Facts Of Life.

Not only that - but it is clear that both have a tendency to grow - and by similar mechanisms; because bureaucracy and the mass media Feed Upon the functional social systems - in other words they are parasitic, with a strong tendency to kill the host, before they themselves will die.

This happens because bureaucracy and the mass media can feed upon a wide range of hosts - they can even feed upon each other (although, so long as other hosts exist, that seems to have the effect of strengthening both).


Thus the media can happily feed upon politics, education, business, industry, the armed forces, the police, the health services, churches, the legal system... everything!

The media relate to other media - journalists and editors seek to influence and respond-to other journalists and editors. The major news stories in the most massive of the media move in lock-step.

The international media forms a single web, with a single - massively-amplified - voice.


And at the same time, all of these named functions have been infiltrated, colonised and subverted by bureaucracy - so that they are by now mainly 'generic bureaucracies'; each linked to all the others by rules, regulations and laws; and only to a limited degree is a hospital different from a school; or a civil service office different from the police or fire fighting forces.

All modern organisations consist mostly of managers, and are controlled by managers - and within-organisations, the managers look to satisfy the demands of other managers in other bureaucracies.

There is thus a single, linked, bureaucratic system - and it covers the world.


So that whether you look at government, schools, hospitals or the military - most of the activity in which people engage is bureaucratic; and only a small and diminishing percentage of personnel, man hours; resources of money, time and effort will be expended on the functional activity.

Although there is indeed a sense in which bureaucracy and the mass media began as 'means to an end' there is - here and now - a more important sense in which they have become (and overwhelmingly so!), ends in themselves; as when a useful epithelial tissue will break from control of the organism, become locally invasive, turn malignant, and metastasise lethally. 

The big question is why - to what purpose? If there is one massive and growing media system; one massive linked bureaucracy. And if - as we observe - both global phenomena share the same secular, leftist (= nihilistic hedonic) ideology... then what are they aiming-at?


Totalitarianism is the answer.

That is, total monitoring and control of human thinking and behaviour - the media is mostly concerned with controlling minds and the bureaucracy with controlling bodies, and the two reinforce synergistically.

The mass media and bureaucracy are aiming at totalitarianism; and they are themselves actually-existing totalitarianism: totalitarianism in action.

And who wants totalitarianism? The usual answer is 'those at the top' - but all humans are, sooner or later, brought-within the totalitarian system; indeed those at or near the top are the most closely regulated and monitored...

Every-one, every-body, all humans, stand within the system of control; only those who stand outside it will truly benefit from it.


It is not humans who benefit from a global totalitarian system, it is the immortal immaterial demonic beings who stand outside The System, that really want, aim-at, strategise-for, and stand to benefit-from totalitarianism.

And there is our answer; and the answer to why The System (the global web of media and bureaucracy) are by-their-nature secular and leftist: since secular leftism is the 'religion' invented by demons for the malefit of Man (although not, of course, shared by them).    

As always, public discourse focuses us upon the wrong issues. With Artificial Intelligence the focus is upon whether it can be 'better' than the human mind - but the real question is much simpler: whether AI can replace the human mind.

The point is that AI systems can replace human thinking whether they are better or worse. Better or worse doesn't matter...

AI will, in fact, be worse than the human mind: much, much worse - but that doesn't stop AI from replacing the human mind.

AI is an extension of bureaucracy - which has replaced the individual human with systems of committees; has replaced judgement with votes; has destroyed responsibility.

Is a committee better than the individual - No, it is worse.

Has that fact prevented committees replacing individuals in all positions of significant authority in all societies in the developed world? No. Bureaucracy is everywhere, all the bureaucracies are linked, the individual is is a slave of The System - not the slave of a person; and this slavery applies to all individuals, even/ especially those who are members of the committees...

AI is bureaucracy cubed - it is driven by the same intent, it has the same objectives, and it has the same indifference to consequence. Just as bureaucracy is intrinsically immoral, intrinsically evil, in its destruction of responsibility - so exactly is AI - but this is no accident. On the contrary this is precisely why committees run everything; and why bureaucracy can (and will, if plans go through) be replaced by AI. 

AI is bureaucracy 2.0.  The question is, who - or what - stands behind the bureaucracy? What purpose drives this long-term agenda to replace all human thinking - that is, to replace all human thinking, by all individual humans, ultimately.

(Clue: the answer isn't human.)

All through our world, the worse-bureaucracy has replaced the better-individual; responisbility and judgment have been annihilated on multiple fronts... The process continues, globally, without evaluation or negative feedback -  and this is the exact intention for rolling-out AI.

Bureaucracy is always worse, but it has happened anyway. AI will be worse, but it will happen anyway. 

(Unless, of course, we stop it. And the place to stop it is in our own minds, our own hearts, our own deepest understanding. AI is a vampire - it can only enter where it is invited; but at present we are inviting-in the vampire - we are indeed paying the vampires to assimilate our souls.)

Everyone who is active in politics implicitly subscribes to the ideal of piecemeal reform; the idea that small incremental changes in specifics will eventually lead to overall improvement of The System as-a-whole. This is almost compelled because all attempts at reform need to be 'realistic'.

However, piecemeal change can only be destructive - which is why it has been the platform of Leftism (pioneered by that most-successful of all Leftist organisations, the Fabian Society). And piecemeal change is effective because it is dishonest.

The dishonesty is in suggesting that a single Thing can be pulled-out of the weave of society and improved, and that this will not have any consequences. However, honest strategic thinkers realise that every significant change has consequences, and that these consequences tend to lead to further change.

The sexual revolution gives the clearest example. It began (early in the 20th century) with humanitarian arguments in favour of divorce, then easier divorce; and humanitarian arguments against the miseries of unmarried mothers and their children - then other victim groups were added: the intriniscally evil language of 'rights' was introduced...

Each change to the law, institutional regulations and to social norms was treated as an isolated reform addressing an injustice; but each reform destabilised The System in favour of more reforms - in an accelerating sequence.

Step by step each 'reform' led to consequences that implied further change - until continuing the sexual revolution became the core of Leftism, and Leftism ruled all developed nations (now, all significant political parties are Leftist, all bureaucracies are Leftist, indeed all mainstream institutions of all kinds - including churches - are Leftist - and their leaderships are all dedicated to continuing the sexual revolution).

Where is it going? Nowhere - the point is that it continues, not where it is going; the point is that the sexual revolution is destructive - not that it is trying to construct anything in particular. Each change drives further changes in an attempts at 'consistency' - yet there is no consistent outcome in view or aimed-at; therefore the sexual revolution is net destructive. 

And as the sexual revolution continues its incremental destruction; so bureaucracy expands - reaching into every home and workplace; monitoring and controlling at a finer and finer level. As the sexual revolution (and other allied Leftist permanent crusades) destroys all spontaneous, natural and voluntary forms of cohestion (marriage, the family, clubs and guilds) - bureaucracy emerges as the sole form of organisation: the totality of socio-political cohesion is one single, global, linked-bureaucracy.

The sexual revolution and bureaucracy are an unholy (literally unholy) alliance: the sexual revolution is justified by valorisation of instinct and impulse; yet always it is implemented by bureaucracy. The every expanding, ever-linking bureaucracy is validated by its work in implementing the sexual revolution - and the two collude in making sexual issues ever-more the centre of public discourse; The Most Important Issue for all major modern bureaucracies (including the mainstream churches).

But the sexual revolution and bureaucracy are both a socio-political process, not a socio-political end-point. In materialistic and this-worldly terms they are not going anywhere in particular.

They are a means to an end - but that end is spiritual, hence excluded from all mainstream public discourse.  The sexual revolution and bureaucracy are types of evil, and as such aim at the damnation of souls - and effective damnation must be chosen self-damnation.

Yet when we (as free, conscious individuals) look at modern society, we see a system of self-damnation with no apparent way-in; any reforms that seem necessary will in practice only get leverage by accepting and arguing-from the bulk of  The System. In effect, we are required to accept The System to change The System - we must 'work with' The System to try and induce positive change...

Not surprisingly this Never works; and all change feeds The System. and supports the demonic spiritual goals of The System.

This is a harsh truth and people don't want it to be true; because it induces despair. People want to be able to improve things a bit at a time, they want to see signs of such improvement - they love to interpret some changes as precursors of more and stronger changes in the direction they desire. But this is self-deluding nonsense.

The degree of change to The System required for change to be positive; to reverse the generations-long progression towards a System of damnation, is so great as to be almost incomprehensible. So much needs to change, all at the same time, that it is unimaginable - especially considering that hardly anybody would want such massive changes.

Thus the discontent and dissatisfaction of people, their alienation, their sense of being trapped like laboratory animals in an iron cage of bureaucracy, and equally trapped by the manipulation of the sexual instincts and other impulses... All this is deftly turned towards piecemeal reforms that have the net effects of tightening the mesh of the cage and degrading human motivation to the gratification of ever-more short-termist physical satisfactions...

Yet the way-out is there, available to every single human individual irresistible and for the asking - if they will turn their attention away from the self-blinded materialism of The System. There is only each one of us, isolated, as a conscious soul; and confronting the single vast, growing and innately-destroying bureaucracy - but that is enough.  

In modern life, there are many asymmetries; one is that 'the personal is political' is applied to monitor and control the smallest and most casual of human interactions, in the public and increasingly the private sphere - but only in a Leftward direction.

The breaking of even the smallest of politically correct taboos is never regarded as trivial - and indeed a single sentence in private, a single word has been enough to end many a career (only a few of which you will have been aware-of).

Yet there is near-zero resistance to the imposition of totalitarianism.

*

We are all aware of the personal experiences of being-controlled - yet any slight effort to link this personal to a long-term, pervasive, powerful, unrelenting Grand Plan for Man is dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theorising...

Nonetheless, the Plan proceeds apace - the world is ever more comprehensively monitored, brought under control and subjected to sanctions - rewards (including the highest - e.g. in the UK royal medals, knighthoods, peerages) go to those who are most diligent and effective in justifying and building the totalitarian control system.

Why does the Plan seek this control? For the sake of our damnation. The control is used to fill our minds with lies and false motivations, and distract our attention from realities with trivilality and wickedness; to corrupt us with sinful excitements (pride, greed, envy esepcially) and oppress us with crushing dullness, futility, despair.

*

What is totalitarianism? It is the coercive monitoring and control of all aspects of life, down to the smallest - with the objective of controlling thought. In our society it is being achieved by modifying the 'iron cage' of bureaucracy (Weber's phrase) into a smaller-and-smaller steel mesh.

The steel mesh of bureaucracy is a matter of daily, hourly, experience for nearly everybody in The West - and not only does everybody experience it, but an ever-larger proportion of people are actively engaged in its construction and imposition.

Probably, more people are 'managers' and 'officials' than any other paid job, such personnel now dominate numerically and in power all large organisations in all systems and sectors of society - and these jobs are ultimately all about devising and implementing the steel mesh of totalitarianism.

Almost everybody wants more bureaucracy for their own purposes - the equation of managerial control with responsibility, safety, how things 'ought' to be done is almost complete. The unmanaged is regarded as bad in and of itself.

Bureaucracy is the systematic embodiment of Schadenfreude. 

*

And this is why bureaucracy just grows and grows - and the lack of resistance is evidence of the very great, and unrepented, evil of our society - almost everybody is actively complicit in making, repairing, tightening their own corner of the steel mesh - and apparently this prevents them noticing or objecting to the totality of the mesh.

Everybody wants everybody-else except themselves to be 'regulated' - and everybody gets their own way with the exception of their own exemption. And indeed there are plenty who want themselves regulated - yet who live lives of quiet desperation as a consequence.

For the sake of our souls, this is something that everybody ought to notice; notice, acknowledge and repent - even if they cannot (or simply do not) resist it.

*

A world of endless and proliferating mutually-exploitative managing; of ever tighter thought regulation; unnoticed, collaborated, profited-from, and unresisted... this is Hell on Earth - universal evil incarnate.

Why? Because bureaucracy is the very instantiation of falsehood - the physical implementaion of multiple false assumptions, priorities and practices regarding the fundamental nature of Man, Society, and Reality.

Bureaucracy is materialism and denial of the realm beyond the senses and therefore it is active atheism and ultimate dis-order; it is denial of the validity of human judgment; it is denial of the reality of the transcendental goods of truth, beauty and virtue; it is the breaking of unity and coherence and thus bureaucracy is the inevitable destruction of meaning and purpose in Life. 

And as soon as we cease to be aware of the fact, we are in Hell; because to regard the false as true and the contingent as inevitable is of itself a choice to align with the domain of evil. 

The very least we must do (to save our souls from self-damnation) is to notice, acknowledge and repent the fact we dwell in and sustain a steel mesh of bureaucracy; a mesh that closes-in upon us, year by year!

Bureaucracy is, along with the mass media, the most powerful form of intrinsic evil in the modern world (that is, bureaucracy - like the mass media - is intrinsically and always metaphysically Positivist, hence evil in its form - quite aside from intent, it is evil).

1. Operational definitions
Bureaucracy works by reducing life to operational definitions - which are always wrong; wrong because simplified and distorted (wrong even-when, as is exceedingly unusual, the intention behind making an operational definitions happens to be honest and competent).

2. Procedure
Bureaucracy works by assuming that correct procedure leads to correct outcomes; which is again false - since all procedure (like all operational definitions) is necessarily simplified and distorted.

Furthermore, most bureaucracies are indifferent whether any particular procedure will yield good outcomes even on average and under normal situations - this is not tested nor evaluated honestly, it is just assumed - and contrary evidence ruled-out on the basis of falling outside of operational definitions and procedure.

Thus far, we can see that bureaucracy operates on the basis of constructing a model of reality, and like all models this must-be simplified and distorted. Of course, from within the model errors, bad-outcomes and contradictions are invisible - however, there is a danger that the falseness of bureaucracy would be unmasked by a human being evaluating the whole-situation.

Therefore to make the evil of bureaucracy impregnable requires:

3. Committee decision
Modern bureaucracy is ruled by committees which means that - since judgement is individual - all bureaucracies are non-moral which means immoral.

Even when an individual person is nominally in charge of an institution, he is regulated-by and can be over-ruled by, a committee.


We have created a world run only on the basis of necessarily-false models, in which ultimate authority is impersonal.

In place, therefore - everywhere, at the highest level - is a global, linked system of bureaucratic power without responsibility: we inhabit a system that is necessarily evil in form and effect.

Well, we are not truly blind - rather we are self-blinded; which is much worse state - one immune to learning; one which is as bad as any state can be...

Everybody 'feels' the evil of materialist bureaucracy, managerialism, reductionism ('nothing but-ism', the accountancy culture) as it is applied to the workplace, the family, marriage etc. We feel it when in the presence of recent architecture and design; or when filling-in long, tendentious forms that are based-upon assumptions we oppose.

When I say 'feeling' I mean exactly that. It is a cold, suffocating or crushing feeling. We can feel the life being squeezed out of us, our humanity filtered or crystallised. Weber termed bureaucracy the 'iron cage' - that is true, but the worst of the cage is that we know it as a cage yet have chosen to inhabit it, and that we disbelieve in the possibility of a life outside of the cage.   


We all feel this - or have felt it when we were younger (the horror of compulsory schooling is a foretaste), yet fail to recognise its intrinsic evil to the extent that a large majority of people support it by their votes, their arguments, ideology - and their docile compliance.

We feel the iron cage is necessary; and by this simple choice we become self-blinded to its evil - because we are saying, in our hearts, that evil is necessary, and that this fact over-rides other.

We sense evil, but choose not to oppose evil; because we believe a System of evil to be necessary.


If you consider what this decision entails - to feel evil in one's heart, and yet nonetheless to embrace that felt-evil because we want some of its consequences - we can then understand the pervasive and increasing nature of evil in modern societies everywhere. 

The evil of bureaucracy is therefore not so much in the System itself (which is indeed evil, but this mortal life is - after all - full of evils). The evil of bureaucracy is that we have embraced its evil, and built our society, and our lives, upon it. So much that the evil has become invisible.

Is there an alternative? Yes, if we really believe that there is a larger world than that of materialist mortality - then there is no reason why we need to regard this world's 'inevitable' features as also Good.

If Life is measured by eternal and transcendent goals, then there is no irrationality in rejecting bureaucracy even if the probable consequences (so far as we can determine) were deleterious for health and happiness in this world.


The question of bureaucracy is, then, not merely a matter of optimising this-worldly gratification...

By knowing that bureaucracy is evil, by deciding it is inevitable, and then by joining-with The System and 'making the most and best of it in our lives - We have In Fact crossed over to the Dark Side, and chosen the path of active damnation and the corruption, not merely of our-selves, but of our fellow Men. 

So, when it comes to bureaucracy 'the stakes' are as high as stakes can possibly be.

They get their name from the advance guard of an army; but misunderstand this to be a group who are leading. In fact, the avant garde do not decide where to go.

They are merely a part of the main army extended forward, with a particular job; which is temporarily to engage with the enemy until the real army arrives from behind.

In cultural terms, the avant garde are the intellectual class, radical academics, controversial journalists, progressive theoreticians, 'modern' and 'shocking' artists etc... What is their job? Merely to be a temporary distraction until arrival of the main force; which is is The Bureaucracy.

The avant garde emerged in Western Culture along with the Bureaucracy. As The Bureaucracy grew - so did the avant garde - simply because the AG are creatures of the Bureaucrats.

The avant garde do not decide on the nature of the enemy - that has already been decided by the generals (The Establishment) back in the main part of the force. The avant garde fight don't choose their skirmishes, but merely fight who they are instructed to fight.

But the avant garde are deluded. They have been fed a fantasy, which they believe - and they have convinced plenty of others; so that the enemy imagine that their job is to defeat (only) the avant garde!

This is a brilliant tactic of the Establishment - The Bureaucracy roll slowly into-place after the avant garde have begun the fighting; but unexpectedly - unrecognised - unopposed; and typically will incrementally tie-up, pin-down and crush the enemy.

The avant garde delusion is that it is they who lead, make decisions, choose the enemies and direction; and everyone else follows in their wake - and (merely) occupies the territory that the AG have won for them...

But the reality is that the avant garde are - and always have - been merely a functional part of The System; that part which the ruling Establishment has projected forward from the Bureaucracy to do a job.

The avant garde are therefore useful, but inessential to victory. The Bureaucracy are the Heavy Infantry, the occupying force.


From the Romantic Christian perspective, we who are enemies of the avant garde/ Bureaucracy/ Establishment - the AG are not our real enemy. Our enemy is the Bureaucracy and Establishment. We ought not to be duped into supposing that a victory against the avant garde has achieved anything other than delay us from engaging the real foe.

Of Robert Conquest's three 'Laws'...

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

The one which I used to find hardest to agree with was the Third.
(Note: I can't find any authoritative internet provenance for these Laws - but they have been posted on numerous blogs.)
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But I have come to realize that the Third Law is correct - so long as we notice that it refers specifically to a bureaucracy - and not to every type of organization.

Indeed, the point at which Conquest's Third Law is noticed to become true can be taken at the point when an organization actually becomes 'a bureaucracy'.  
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The point is that any bureaucracy shares more in common with other bureaucracies than it shares with its former or historical self before it became a bureaucracy.

In other words, every bureaucracy usually begins life as an organization with a distinctive, sometimes unique, ostensible function - it's 'bumper sticker' role, or 'what it says on the tin' - but when it becomes a bureaucracy it starts behaving as if it was aiming and structuring-itself to do everything-except its ostensible function.
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I have experienced for myself two types of organization crossing that line and becoming bureaucracies - the National Health Service - which shed its professional domination and became a bureaucracy in the early 1990s - quite suddenly as a result of intentional legislation; and the British university system which lagged by just a few years and changed less abruptly, but crossed the line in the late 1990s.

Take the example of universities. Leaving aside the research function ; universities used to function mainly to pursue educational goals. They would try to admit those students who had the best educational qualifications and who would do best in examinations, and beyond - within the educational domain.

I am not at this point trying to defend the way that universities used to function: they were very imperfect institutions! But simply to note that - within the limits of human incompetence, the survival need for income, idleness, corruption and bad luck - they operated to pursue what they considered to be educational goals.
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But now universities are bureaucracies, and Conquest's Third Law applies; so that - overall and on average, they have become organizations that pursue everything-but educational goals. This may sound far fetched but it is true! The educational function is now treated as a constraint rather than as the aim.

As a constraint, this means that universities more-or-less have to pretend to do educational things; but they do as little as possible of this, and what little they do (if you know what is really going-on, in actual practice) is mostly a matter of appearance rather than substance.
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This can be seen in the number of things which British universities now do, and which they state to be aims, that they did not used to do - and this corresponds to the deployment of resources (money and time) including manpower: affirmative action/ inclusion/ multiculturalism/ sexual revolution across all activities (such that this is perhaps the single major aim) - and activities now including 'engagement' with the local community, sustainability and other green issues, active and frequent publicity via the mass media, internal advertising (propaganda directed to faculty and students about the success and excellence of the institution), programmes of new building and environmental enhancement.

When it comes to teaching, the activity is redefined in terms of a multitude of things which are not actually teaching - matters such as the structure and organization of courses; the procedures for approving and monitoring courses; the aims and objectives of courses; achieving uniformity across courses; gathering feedback and responding to feedback on courses; the use of visual and audio-visual aids, internet and new technologies in courses; educational research and auditing of courses; and the allocation of teaching awards and prizes to people who teach little or not-at-all, and whose contribution has been administration of teaching 'innovation' in teaching subjects or methods, or research into teaching; schemes and notions for improving teaching of neglected or oppressed groups such as women or people who cannot speak well the language in which instruction is given...

The point is that all this new and extra effort, all the extra personnel and resources concerned with 'teaching' are directed at pretty much everything-except actual... teaching (teaching being that inter-human activity that goes on, or is supposed to go-on, in the classroom). 

And therefore: de facto, the bureaucratic emphasis on 'teaching' is at-the-expense-of real teaching.
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The same applies mutatis mutandis in all bureaucracies.

In a nutshell; just as bureaucracy is parasitic upon organizations, so bureaucrats make all organizations into generic bureaucracies of a primarily bureaucratic nature; thus bureaucracies are intrinsically organizations that are parasitic upon their ostensible function. 

And this is the explanation of Conquest's Third Law.