Calling a bureaucrat by its name

> There are widespread popular revolts against the evil bureaucratic pyramids: Milei, yellow vests, the recent Dutch elections, the Trucker revolt in Canada, the Bukele revolution in El Salvador; even Elon buying X and firing 75% of the head count. This will continue to spread as long as the bureaucrat remains unaccountable. Bureaucratic reform is the defining problem of our time. Bureaucrats and their NPC enablers have ruined much of what made Western Civilization worthwhile. They’ve corrupted the scientific process, technological development, subverted governments, ruined health, created conditions of anarcho-tyranny in the cities and have generally wrecked most of what they’ve touched. Their proliferation is slowly strangling everything, just as a proliferation of intestinal parasites will weaken and ultimately kill if unchecked. Parasites have no natural predators. You need some kind of medicine to get rid of them. We can study the work of successful bureaucratic reformers; Lee Kuan Yew, St. Peter Damian, Napoleon, Park Chung Hee, Deng Xiaoping, Putin, Marius, St. Ignatius of Loyola: also the unsuccessful would-be reformers such as Nixon. The most important first step, though, is recognizing the bureaucrat.

That being said, it's probably because I don't know what an NPC means in this context. Maybe it's because I'm one myself.

This post is just restating Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, but in way too many words and with a bit more of a polemic bent that makes it slightly less accurate than it could have been.

The trick is separating "people there to drive an organization's goals forward" (or 'innovator') and "people there to advance the power of the organization" (or 'bureaucrat'). You need to protect the first group of people from the second group of people- the more protected they are, the more productive your nation... to a point. There have been many attempts at this- this is the key insight behind Marxist thought, after all (the fact that it ends in complete ideological capture 100% of the time is positive proof that the optimal amount of "parasitic load" on a society is not zero, and that you actually need competent leaders else you get taken over by unremovable, unaccountable grifters).

Recent examples of this class's parasitic excess and non-accountability are left as an exercise for the reader.

Of course, the post is also wrong in another way: these parasites actually do have a weakness. They get fed to a conquering society by the productive if they perceive the parasitic load the enemy would impose on them is less than the one imposed by the domestic parasites. The fact that societies capable of conquering any Western nation are in short supply doesn't change the fact that, historically (and even still today, in some parts of the world) this is how it has always been.

In other words: it's unclear to me that he's qualified to make blanket statements about what "real" engineering is; his closest professional qualification is being a consultant with limited long-term responsibilities. I say this as someone who is also a consultant.

Every bad or ultimately invalid ideology or philosophy that appeals to anyone, necessarily has some sort of bits of rationality here & there to hang all their other arguments on to do that appealing.

When a conservative or libertarian wants to sell the idea of deregulation, there are legitimate examples of disfunctional regulation to point to.

When a neoliberal statist wants to sell the idea of abolishing guns or home schooling or cryptography or anonymous cash, there are legitimate examples of individuals misusing their individual agency to harm others.

Those examples are real, and any sane person should agree those specific stories are bad outcomes, but that does not mean they actually support the argument or that the larger argument or philosophy is valid.

It's wrong that Bill Maher can't build a shed. That does not mean that therefor the entire concept of building codes, zoning, epa regulations, etc are wrong and life would be on the whole better and saner without them.

I think the bits of truth in this article are like that.

"Bureaucrats are also almost universally reviled for their lack of accountability and the lack of pride in their work. While there certainly have been great men; leaders who were great bureaucrats (Napoleon), they’re mostly seen as mostly a caste of sniveling eunuchs who flee from taking responsibility or attempting to make things better or taking any risks, even when that is in their job description."

This is very, very inaccurate. Criticism of bureaucrats starts with the 1960s. While you can find an occasional novel or story that critiqued some aspects of bureaucracy (arguably some of Kafka's work, also maybe Bartleby, the Scrivener, though that is mostly seen as a critique of alienation, rather than bureaucracy per se) the rise of the "bureaucracy sucks" as a genre can be dated to the 1960s.

Others often make this point, but you can really judge the cultural transition by the careers of leading business commentators, such as Peter Drucker. In 1946 he published his study of General Motors, the book Concept of the Corporation. In it, he examined the large bureaucracy at General Motors and celebrated it as the pinnacle of human civilization, the absolute peak of what the last 6,000 years of civilization had all been building up to.

Drucker was not alone. In 1958 John Kenneth Galbraith published "The Affluent Society." A part of the book emphasizes the idea that "If we want to accomplish big things then we need big organizations." Once again, the book implies that large bureaucracies represent our success as a civilization, and those bureaucracies are what enabled that success.

Starting in the 1960s, there is a tremendous cultural backlash against bureaucracy. We are still living with that backlash today. It is noteworthy that the cultural backlash has not had a real world result nearly as significant as the cultural result: that is, bureaucracies have continued to grow, even as they have faced relentless criticism for 60 years now.

In my own consulting work, I've seen multiple promising startups fail because the founders were afraid of "becoming bureaucratic." I've seen other companies survive but never live up to their full potential because the CEO never set out to build a beautiful bureaucracy. My own sense is that the backlash against bureaucracy must come to an end at some point soon, because too much potential is being wasted by the lack of bureaucracy. At some point, business leaders must again commit themselves to building big, ambitious, beautiful bureaucracies, so they can capture the full potential of the organizations they are running.