Dear Friends,
It seems to me, as long as our bureaucrats wield the fallacy of appeal to authority, they can continue as criminals. Their authority protects them from consequences, just as bureaucracy’s distributed blame protects it and them from accountability. This way, the inept, stupid, and evil can work in darkness. Their actions are mixed in with so many others that accountability is nearly impossible, as long as they use the right number of paperclips to denote copies. In such a system, the adept are crushed by that same lack of accountability. So a system that is unaccountable selects for the inept, stupid, and manipulative. They are not Pareto’s minority but the majority. A destructive majority who can protect themselves with lies due to our not understanding the fallacy of appeal to authority.
Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. It means believing something based on the authority of the speaker instead of the strength of their argument. This has been the traditional definition since it was used against the Christian religion. Since then, however, the progressives changed the wording to appeal to “unqualified” authority. Now the definition means belief should be based on the “legitimate” authority of the speaker not the strength of the argument. There is now no need to check the quality of the argument if the authority of the speaker is sufficient. This is because once they had cultural, social, and political power… they wanted to wield appeal to authority for their own ends. Nevertheless, the real definition of the fallacy is “argument from authority.”
Distributed blame is a blurring mechanism. It thwarts accountability, and so allows stupidity to sprout and grow. Those who make decisions that cost money, economic vitality, and even human lives, escape accountability due to distributed blame. The Holocaust was enabled by distributed blame. Each person in the machine destroying human lives was only a cog. The cog can’t be held accountable for what the machine does. But a cog isn’t a human being. It’s a tooth on a gear. A human being has agency, morality, and ethics. This means people with those tendencies tend also to be conscientious. Conscientious people need to add value, destroying value violates their internal compass. As a result, many such people leave bureaucracies. This selects for those who are willing to be broken cogs.
Criminals must be created by such a system. In a system where there is no accountability, bad decisions are not investigated or countered. They just keep on harming. People within such a system know that they are harming the very nation they supposedly serve. To reduce cognitive dissonance then, those people will dislike the nation and people they are harming. Once that paradigm has played out, why would they ever tell us the truth about anything? Ask yourself, would such people come out and admit their ineptitude, stupidity, and literal manipulation? Especially when they can say anything they want and we are obligated to believe them. This is because they are the legitimate authority. This makes the weight of their arguments irrelevant. We are to take their word due to their authority.
The answer then is to recognize the fallacy of appeal to authority and not get manipulated by it. Secondarily, don’t let the blurring effect of distributed blame remove accountability. Wherever there is bureaucracy there will always be distributed blame. Corporations have spent billions of dollars trying to solve that riddle. This is because over time, bureaucracy selects for the destructive. This warps the Pareto distribution so there are too many non doers and almost no doers. Once some point is passed the corporation collapses… because it isn’t a national government. A government can continue eating itself for decades until it has hollowed out the economy so much that it implodes. That’s why government bureaucracy eventually destroys itself, its sponsor, and becomes untrustworthy.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
