Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the best outcome that could result from our age’s insanity is a complete revulsion for bureaucracy, the deep state, and all forms of administrative government. I use them interchangeably. Unelected, unaccountable, and unassailable, where bureaucracy finds the right conditions it only grows. Those same attributes that make it suitable to grow out of hand, ensure that it does no good. Unelected means there they face no oversight from the public. Unaccountable means they can fail without an account. Moreover, unassailable means that administrative government is nearly immortal. Bureaucracy tends to only grow because of the asymmetric incentives. Failure grows it and success shrinks it. This is because a problem solved no longer needs the apparatus to solve it.
Distributed blame is why administrative governments are unaccountable. When hundreds or thousands of people are involved in a crime against humanity, it’s hard to punish them. Their part probably seems trivial to them. Moreover, if the economy collapses due to their poor decisions, they don’t get blame, they get more power to fix it. The bureaucracy grows. Indeed, failure is a growth mechanism for administrative government. Every failure is proof they need more power. The other side of the coin is, how do you blame the person for causing a mess if you are giving them more power to fix that mess? Cognitive dissonance forbids it. So no matter the evils an administrative state visits on the people, distributed blame ensures no single bureaucrat will be punished but they get more power.
The example of Adolf Eichmann epitomizes distributed blame leading to the banality of evil shows how mundane evil can become in an administrative government. Bureaucrats just doing their jobs can become the greatest force for evil there is. Bureaucratic red tape stops valuable enterprises in their tracks while it paves the way for waste, fraud, and abuse. Both hindering the good and facilitating the bad are banal evils. Moreover, bureaucracy fosters passivity. So if there is a Pareto distribution of active bad actors within a bureaucracy, the passive rest are their puppets. This gives administrative government the character of its worst participants. This means that even the most laudable of goals is undermined by the administrative state itself.
The cubicle conducts evil but not good. Like a diode only allows one way throughput. This is because power that emanates from a cubicle is by nature hidden. To sharpen the point, the cubicle empowers the id via anonymity. It’s a known fact that people will do things when anonymous that they would never do when exposed. Anonymity offers a kind of protection, this applies to online anonymity fostering trolling, doxing, and abusive behavior, as well as how laws are written into regulations. A bureaucrat who will never be known or seen has little resistance to allowing their id free reign. Moreover, that anonymity chafes their egos giving them all the more reason to visit their wrath via regulation. I think we can all agree, an unchained id given administrative power is a dangerous thing.
Bureaucracy allows government to do evil that would otherwise be impossible. Genocides require the coordination that only the bureaucracy can provide. Forced famines are a modern innovation brought about by the efficiency of bureaucracy. Even the mundane evils of day to day life that regulation visits upon us are only possible under an administrative state. That’s why I hope the lessons of our age will not be lost on the future. Maybe they will regard our age as a warning to future generations against allowing an administrative state to arise. Such is the best that can come of utter insanity… that it becomes a teaching moment for mankind. That’s all well and good for them, but what of us? I think it’s up to us to dismantle that administrative state, for the children.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
