Tuesday 19 December 2017

Bureaucracy and positivism

Bureaucracy is, along with the mass media, the most powerful form of intrinsic evil in the modern world (that is, bureaucracy - like the mass media - is intrinsically and always metaphysically Positivist, hence evil in its form - quite aside from intent, it is evil).

1. Operational definitions
Bureaucracy works by reducing life to operational definitions - which are always wrong; wrong because simplified and distorted (wrong even-when, as is exceedingly unusual, the intention behind making an operational definitions happens to be honest and competent).

2. Procedure
Bureaucracy works by assuming that correct procedure leads to correct outcomes; which is again false - since all procedure (like all operational definitions) is necessarily simplified and distorted.

Furthermore, most bureaucracies are indifferent whether any particular procedure will yield good outcomes even on average and under normal situations - this is not tested nor evaluated honestly, it is just assumed - and contrary evidence ruled-out on the basis of falling outside of operational definitions and procedure.

Thus far, we can see that bureaucracy operates on the basis of constructing a model of reality, and like all models this must-be simplified and distorted. Of course, from within the model errors, bad-outcomes and contradictions are invisible - however, there is a danger that the falseness of bureaucracy would be unmasked by a human being evaluating the whole-situation.

Therefore to make the evil of bureaucracy impregnable requires:

3. Committee decision
Modern bureaucracy is ruled by committees which means that - since judgement is individual - all bureaucracies are non-moral which means immoral.

Even when an individual person is nominally in charge of an institution, he is regulated-by and can be over-ruled by, a committee.


We have created a world run only on the basis of necessarily-false models, in which ultimate authority is impersonal.

In place, therefore - everywhere, at the highest level - is a global, linked system of bureaucratic power without responsibility: we inhabit a system that is necessarily evil in form and effect.