Post: #1

An old article from the old manosphere on Bureaucracy which was unfortunately not expanded upon:

Quote:A single petty bureaucrat has almost no power; he can at most moderately inconvenience you. The petty bureaucrat is a slave to the rules. The biggest problem from a petty bureaucrat is not what the bureaucrat himself, but if he decides to put you into the system.

The system is a maze that is almost indecipherable to anyone who is not a lawyer or bureaucrat in that particular system. The system can ruin your life: whether it’s the family court system, the tax system, or what have you, but rare is it that a single bureaucrat can hurt you that much until you’re in the system.

The problem with the system is not with the people, it is the rules. Each person in a bureaucracy has a specific role and rules guiding his role. There are no deviations from your role or your rules. Even if breaking the rules in a minor way would benefit everyone involved, the bureaucrat is not allowed to deviate. There are also no exceptions to the rules, they have to be applied as written (and interpreted) to everybody equally, which is why you’ll occasionally here about stupidities, like bureaucrats shutting down children’s lemonade stands.

The rules are hard, cold, and unyielding. Even if they make no sense, the rules or roles are still paramount.

In most countries, most bureaucrats aren’t any more (or less) competent than employees the private sector. The US is somewhat of an exception, for reasons I’ll explain in a later post. Most can, and many do, switch between the private and public sectors.

There are some gross incompetents in government, and the government union system makes removing incompetents much more difficult for bureaucracies than for the non-unionized private sector, but most government employees are reasonably competent at their functions.

Also, most bureaucrats (again, there are the occassional exceptions) don’t care about you. They don’t want to fuck you and they take no pleasure in doing so. Some may want to help you, but for the most part, they simply want to do their job so they can get paid and go home, just like most people in the private sector.

That’s not to say they won’t fuck you. If the rules they follow require fucking you, they’ll follow the rules, and you’re fucked, but that is a problem with the rules not the people and most people won’t take any pleasure out of it unless you’ve been a complete ass to them. They will feel apathy. (Whether that’s better or worse is debatable).

http://freenortherner.com/2012/08/14/bureaucrats/

What's your thoughts on Bureaucracy and what do you think would ensure that the incentives are towards excellence,simplicity and efficiency?

Do you think that a lot of rules underlying bureaucratic system need to be scrapped.

Post: #2

The misconception, first, is that bureaucracy is confined only to government. It isn't.

All large organisations are necessarily dishonest - private or public sector, for-profit or charitable, military or civilian. This can be proven by the following exercise, adapted from John T. Reed:

Say you work for a boss in a very small business - just you as the single employee.

One day he asks you to do something dishonest. Or do nothing about something dishonest. It's a small thing, just an agreement to not tell the taxman about the additional $300 or so in cash the company is pulling in each year. Would you comply with that request?

If your answer is always "Yes:" you have a bright career ahead of you in mid to upper management, for this is the same path that every company man or mid-to-high level government bureaucrat trod in his early days. The guy who always does what the boss wants without question will always be promoted over the guy who has moral compunctions about what he is being asked to do.

This has a certain overlap with "Yes men" being promoted. Bosses say they want disagreement with their decisions, but this is a load of shit and contrary to all human nature, especially in our age of narcissism. Bosses fundamentally want not to get caught out or embarrassed, and someone who knows how to lick a boss's arse with sufficient alacrity so the boss thinks he avoided the pitfall is going to be promoted in place of someone who was honest about the facts.

There's a reason they call them "made" men in the Mafia: because they've killed someone, and more importantly, someone in the gang knows they have done it and has evidence about it. In short, once you have compromised your ethics on record, they have blackmail material on you and you cannot get out; you are caught and have to play by the rules of their game, those rules invariably being ones that benefit them and the institution. Your anointing as one who can be trusted to play by the rules does not happen with a heavy moral choice like that - not at first. See below.

If your answer is always "No:" you are heading out of that job, sooner or later. The mode of your sacking will be along the lines of "Does not play well with others" or "Is not a team player" or just "We don't require your services any further," but the reason will really be much simpler: "We don't trust you to keep your mouth shut." The first request to do something dishonest is always something small. That's because it's a test. Mafia and bent police have that in common: when they're considering bringing an outsider into their midst, the prospective member is always tested first to see if he can be bent, to see if he has an exit strategy, to see if he's strong enough to do the honest thing when everyone around him is dishonest. If he has moral convictions, he won't be brought into the conspiracy any further: does not play well with others, yes? Or more simply put: dishonest in small things, dishonest in large. This is John T. Reed's essential analysis of the state of the US Army based off his experience and those of many former and current military who wrote in to him about it; peruse his military articles if you want the full rundown there.

If your answer is anything like "Well, it depends:" concentrate on how you feel when you give that answer. That feeling is the same horrible, anxious, uncertain feeling that most waged employees in corporations and government departments go through every day of their working lives. The cause is simple: they work in organisations where they're not sure if they'll have to/be able to compromise their principles on a daily basis, and there are few, if any, objective measures of performance to safeguard them in any way from dismissal or provide them with the defence that they're doing their jobs well.

It is the feeling you get when you have a modicum of moral convictions, but no real idea about when they are appropriate to act on. And make no mistake your boss will pick up on this eventually, and leave you exactly where you are - on the low ranks, able to be trusted with a little dishonesty, but dangerous to bring anywhere further up the chain where you might actually develop some backbone when you see how the real cash is being laundered every day.

It is a situation where you can and will kid yourself that your performance actually matters, but you'll be asked to make dishonest decisions now and then, and you'll be sickened to realise your performance actually doesn't mean a damn thing if the boss really is more interested in your willingness to look the other way while he bones a 14 year old boy in his office.

Bear in mind we're talking about a single-employee business, just you and the boss. Ultimately, if you would keep your moral convictions in your work, it requires that your boss be as honest as you are. Depending on your convictions, that may be harder or easier to achieve. But here's the real horror: the only way you keep your moral convictions intact working for a large organisation is if every single boss above you in the chain of command, from the CEO down, is as honest as you are. Because a dishonest decision from on high will be passed down the chain to those underneath without demur by dishonest bosses, and you will be expected to act on it. Honest, moral employment is only possible when you work for yourself or you work in an organisation small enough that the entire chain of command above you has integrity and is honest.

Oh, I know what you're thinking. "Christ, Paracelsus, everyone dabbles in a little bullshit on the side. Everyone abuses their privileges in their job from time to time. We're all human."

I agree. But notice what I said: you only keep your job if everyone above you in the chain of command is as honest as you are. If you're not honest, I'm sure you'll do fine in a dishonest organisation. Just notice how I said that those who are deepest into dishonest activity are those who are trusted and consequently admitted to the brass ring: eventually, you will be asked to make a choice. That choice defines you.

This is why bureaucracy is invariably corrupt, and why there is no such thing as the "few bad apples" argument in bureaucracy. And as a corollary, there is no such thing as "Changing the system from within" when you are working for such a body.

As proof of the argument, ask yourself this: what do these three women all have in common?



They're all former employees of the organisations they blew whistles on, notwithstanding all the lauding from regulatory bodies for their morals and ethics.*

Let that sink in for a while.

Union organisations do not make any of this easier. Indeed the contrarian, almost Kafkaesque nature of the way union membership works only raises the joke even higher: the very employees who could most benefit from a big guy with a stick watching over their positions are the same ones who benefit least from union membership. Quite the opposite.

There are two other principles to bear in mind here as well:

Government, and all large organisations to a greater and lesser extent, is process-oriented. It is much more interested in the rules being followed than in what follows from those rules. It's probably a lot worse in the US - I am constantly amazed by the very idea that a government official and not Congress can create regulations, i.e. create law - but that is the heart of the issue. They are far more interested in the process than the results. If you would markedly change bureaucracy, you must change this. Create objective measures of performance and make sure the person doing the measuring is honest like Jesus Christ.

Time and again, when you look at the biggest achievers under capitalism, what is found is a ruthless focus on results rather than process. It's one reason Donald Trump is the US President, and you can see it in his tweet about the whinging that he got less votes: if the electoral college had not existed, he would have campaigned differently. That is results orientation - orientation to the result of winning the election. Or you could try someone like C.C. Myers. Or Steve Jobs: gave zero fucks about people's issues, gave fucks about making great products, gave fucks about giving people what they wanted. Hence why Apple under him was a world leader in consumer sales and Apple without him is a joke selling exploding phones.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean "outsource everything" is the solution. That's because...

Private sector tends to suck at managing common assets. Private sector is for-profit. Management of something like Yellowstone is not really meant with that philosophy in mind; "open to all" is more or less the reverse of capitalism, but at the same time, there are elements of our society that should be managed as a commons. And process orientation (say with a court) is arguably the way to do that; philosophically, courts really believe that justice is what results from just procedures, it does not exist prior to the case. Hence due process; hence the right to examine and be cross-examined; hence the adversarial process even though it doesn't amount to a search for truth.

And as said: absent ruthless orientation to results, large organisations also become process oriented. This is part of the reason CEOs are in a sort of strange caste where all they really do is move from one company to another and are paid massive bonuses even on company failure: because what's at hand is really the process, not the CEO's results - indeed the very fact of CEOs getting huge golden handshakes on company failure is proof the organisation has passed from result-orientation to process-orientation.


* And note Sherron Watkins' appearance here is itself questionable; she was roundly criticised because, for all her testimony before Congress about Enron, she sat on the incriminating accounting evidence for five months after she became aware of it. And she's thrown up by Time as a paragon of corporate responsibility.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm