I'm not sure you have to keep pointing to the boogie man of soviet infiltrators to explain power hungry bureaucrats. Those have existed in literally every society since at least the early bronze age.
No, those features have also been intrinsic to bureaucrat classes as a whole since the dawn of organized society.
Bueracrats are sort of like neurons in the organism of society. They don't have a lot individual intrisic power, but gain power by moving to common (albeit very complex) beat, and commanding the other types of cells according to the machinations of that emergent beat. That manifests as both groupthink as they attempt to play their part in the neural system as a whole, and "ends justify the means" mentality as they look at the rest of us as other specialized cells that exist to serve the societal organism as a whole.
I guarantee you that on average a 15th century BCE Egyptian bureaucrat trended the same way, as it's core to the space.
A totalitarian state is prone to falling apart - the USSR is a prime example.
Long term, american bureaucrats stay in the government pushing for the same stuff for the length of their career. Even once they've retired, people like Robert Muller come back to put in bits of work.
Yes but they claim that the rise of bureaucracy and legitimate authority corresponds to the rise of the modern state, so I might be mistaken but it seemed to me that the intent was to contrast to earlier times than the 20th century?
Their whole concept of centralized governance is based on snitching and secret police since the Tsar days.
The US is also a massive chunk of land with heavily armed populace, how does it deal with state wide enforcement?
They both utilize a three letter agency that stands ready to infiltrate, assassinate, demoralize, discredit and reward snitches.
It appears that violence seems to be the root of all power, and power has positive correlation with access to secrecy. The more secret and violent you are, the more you are feared. Fear of violence and the unknown amplify the need for careful self-regulating behaviors amongst the sentient group competing for scarce goods.
thank you, sounds interesting about brainstem BIOS/etc... , while other staff (i looked up from Wikipedia):
" The federal government of the United States has ceded most of its power to private organizations and entrepreneurs.[3] Franchising, individual sovereignty, and private vehicles reign (along with drug trafficking, violent crime, and traffic congestion). Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts while private security guards preserve the peace in sovereign, gated housing developments. ... . The remnants of government maintain authority only in isolated compounds where they transact tedious make-work that is, by and large, irrelevant to the dynamic society around them."
sounds very similar to USSR/Russia around 1989-92. It were a fun times :)
Systems are operated by people, which is why many great ideas on paper devolve into dictatorships, oppression and death in real life. See Ukraine for an example.
Systems of governance are not static. They have to keep on evolving. We have pretty highly educated populations now compared to 50 or 100 years ago.
Raising the scare of communism seems to be a position of anti-change and resorting to the anti improvement TINA factor.
Like capitalism communism was another form of governance, an experiment that did not always work but the motivation as not negative. It was a reaction to feudalism and a effort to find a better alternative.
Currently we need more democracy and accountability as elections are increasingly becoming token gestures while special interests and organized groups indulge in lobbying and regulatory capture everyday.
Makes sense. A bit like how during Stalin's regime and later, there was a lot of emphasis on enemies of the people, on saboteurs, capitalist spies and so on.
The idea was it could effectively explain away the internal inefficiency, waste, stupidity, corruption and bureaucracy as everyone can point to and say "See, we can't have nice things because we have traitors in our midst"
Well, this is all my own, near life long, research: what is power, how modern state came to be, and how one can manipulate it.
Few interesting factoids from it:
Did you know that theocracy vs bureaucracy was not a decided topic in Europe until mid 19 century?
It was a single letter of a British envoy to China that shocked the crown so much as for it to institute the His Majesty Civil Service modelled after Chinese model of professional institute of career bureaucrats. Something that is traced to first Chinese states in known history.
My grandpa said that every modern state is made by "the 3 grave sins of Chinese people:" 1. Invention of paper, 2. Invention of money, 3. Invention of gunpowder. Indeed, without those there will be no career bureaucrats, no central banks, no conscript armies, and no modern state.
And on Prussians, rulers of the old Europe were not as much afraid of Prussian people themselves, than the spread of ideological "Prusianness." Today, the most relevant comparison to them are members of Ikhvan ul Muslimin in the middle east, and how Arab gerantocracy, and nobility is afraid of them as fire.
Just as with Prussia, Qatar is not as scare to Arab rulers than "Qatariness" - the virulent Qatari identity. An identity of people who are not afraid to demand their rulers to be rightful, and reward them with great loyalty for that.
Sadly, governments are almost always procrustean in their nature because they are bureaucratic. That doesn't have to be the case; the superior alterative being cybernetic governance, but we just don't see that and I don't suspect we ever will.
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