The Necessity of Bureaucracy

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and start treating managerial scum like slime mold

At the present time it is not possible to do away with bureaucracy. But it is quite obviously the case that the vast majority of the problems we face in every domain that matters either arise from, or persist because of, the current state of bureaucracy. If one were to wave a magic wand and make all of bureaucracies disappear in an instant, they, like a slime mold, would reappear and begin wending their way back towards power almost immediately. 

Like mold, bureaucracy propagates because circumstances arise that are hospitable to it. Mold will always be an issue where moisture accretes on surfaces in breathable air. The way we deal with mold is by scrupulously cleaning , which is hard work and costs money, or by ignoring it, which is gross and unhealthy. Scaling the metaphor, Occidental Societies have decided to stock up on air fresheners and pretend that not only is the mold unavoidable, it's actually critical to the whole living situation¹. The obvious solution here is astringents and elbow grease, but something about the current level of spiritual obesity suggests to me that that is not going to happen without some kind of external event, by which I mean horrific cataclysm that does all the hard work for us. Maybe if there is a terrible fire and all the stuff gets burned but somehow the house stays standing, we can live in a mold-free house. This is a great setting for post-apocalyptic sci-fi story, but for better or for worse it does not seem likely in real life. So it looks like we are stuck with that mildew smell and the heightened chance that our children will suffer because we couldn't be bothered to put in the requisite effort. Sad! 

Suspending the metaphor, the question for the theorycels is this: can you have government and civilization without bureaucracy? In the present state, the answer is No. Bureaucracy is the manifestation of Rule By Proxy. Let's say my dream comes true and we become a Monarchy. This means that there will be a King with a submissive, skinny wife, a gaggle of obedient and talented children, a collection of sworn brothers and advisors, and a crowd of nobility that represent the best and brightest from every trade, industry, discipline, and region. There will also be some cool banners and stuff. In this made-up world, would there be a bureaucracy? Yes, of course. Anywhere the king cannot physically be but is perennially important, there a bureaucracy will develop. It is a terrible idea to have a bubble of order that is statically attached to the King’s corporeal form. We want the bubble of order to encompass the core, the periphery, and a goodly amount of the hinterland. For this to happen, the king must have proxies². 

Managing proxies is challenging, and always has been. Religion, ideology, ethnos, and identity are some of the tools that can be deployed in this endeavor. But the reality is that it will always come down to trust. The King has to trust in the people acting as his proxy, and the proxies have to trust that their great and good works will enrich their lives just as surely as any malfeasance or stupidity on their part will degrade them. This is a relatively simple setup when it's a single layer, meaning that the King's proxies are on a first name basis with him, or at the very least facially recognizable. In Liechtenstein, you could have a perfect monarchy, probably. You could probably do a pretty okay one in Switzerland, so long as the heritage stock are... Secure³. But any country worth having a god-emperor of is going to require more than one layer of proxies. 

I have participated in and worked for enough groups of varying type to state with confidence that one of the biggest points of degradation in any structure is the unwillingness of the top of the hierarchy to put their hand to the scut work of the institution. The entire reason HR exists is because the C-Suite can't be bothered doing the important but boring work, like hiring talent. I want to be clear that this is not some crypto communist rant about private property being evil or unfair. It is good and necessary that there are leaders who benefit bigly from the process of Enterprise. It is a waste of the CEO's time to be doing the janitor's job. But there is a big difference between cleaning the toilets and making sure the new hires are going to benefit the company culture. 

I think one of the problems here is that we have come to conflate boring with non-essential. People get to a certain level of status or influence and they don't want to be degraded by the perception that they are working beneath their station. In truth, because I am no entrepreneur, everything I am saying here is theoretical and academic. I am not going to be so presumptuous as to state, implicitly or explicitly, that I know a better way to do things. But I can state categorically that having an HR department in the current sense is a bad thing, and I challenge any one to proffer an example, real or theoretical, where this is not the case. In all circumstances, restricted to the topic of organizations, be they businesses or affinity groups, surrendering the hiring decision is surrendering a key power. I know that the power is very well camouflaged beneath the minutia of paperwork and interviews, but the whole Woke Fiasco is due in largest part to HR and Marketing being handed off to the dumbest, ugliest, fattest, and frumpiest people in any given organization. I think the initial idea was to put the diversity hires in a place where they couldn't do damage to the product or the brand, but it was a very short-term analysis that decided to land them in image management and culture maintenance. 

Likewise, we can see how much possibly irreversible damage has been done at the local level by letting cat ladies, sodomites, and illegal aliens insinuate into the boring aspects of county, regional, and state governance. Dumping the neo-nuns and flamers into the library system seemed like a good idea to somebody, but the infection spread and now these parasites can be found proliferating at every level. Just like with our mold metaphor, the optimal response is to expunge the entire system of these deleterious elements, no matter how challenging or expensive. But it would not appear that any one on the Right Side of Politics has the stomach to do what is best and required.

In a happier world, all of the above issues and circumstances could be greatly influenced by real and useful AI. If the tools were not controlled by the scum that passes for people in the greater San Francisco area, maybe we could trust software to identify the hotspots of decay. As it stands, AI is just a room full of Indians reading from a script written by a wine aunt who doesn't like gamers or vaping. I bring this up because, as a documented optimist with a sunny disposition, it may sometimes seem like I am speaking in absolutes. There is almost nothing good⁴ coming out of anything remotely close to AI at this moment, but when you get down to the underlying Theory, there is so much good that could be done with neutral and powerful AI tools. Possible does not mean probable, so we will leave this option out of it, for the time being. 

Let us pretend that I have argued skillfully enough to arrive at the following conclusions: 

• bureaucracy is unavoidable 

• bureaucracy is necessary 

• bureaucracy can be useful 

So, how to go about building and maintaining a useful bureaucracy?

1. It really ties the room together, see. I mean, who else is going to import illegals, eh?

2. This is the crux concept of bureaucracy: it is always, ALWAYS, a pure proxy of the Exception Decider

3. Everybody wants to be secure. Can you imagine letting someone convince you that the future of your children shouldn’t be secure? Crazy.

4. AI art is such a bad idea and the lot of you are just leaning into it like it's not going to ruin all the things we love.