Why bureaucracies win….

Being an “angry youth” at a demonstration is quite an experience.  You are full of youthful energy and idealism uncorrupted by real world experience.  You think you are going to change the world, and sometimes you just might.

The problem with passion and energy is that it quickly burns itself out.  After a month of demonstrations, you just want to get some sleep since changing the world is just plain exhausting.  At this point the bureaucracies start to win, because bureaucracies are slow, plodding, and boring, but they don’t get tired.  In a bureaucracy, you come in, you write reports, you file papers, and then you leave.  This is why bureaucracies are so effective.  They don’t get tired because they don’t get emotional.

To quote the fictional Star Trek character Khan Noonien Singh

“Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity. But improve man, you gain a thousandfold.”

What Singh misses is that if you improve the relationships between people who can improve productivity a million-fold or destroy it all together.  There is a story about Lu Xun in which he was studying to be a doctor and then saw a film in which Japanese solidiers were executing Chinese, and then became a writer because what was the point in saving lives as a doctor if you could save thousands as a writer.  That sort of enters my thinking which is why I’ve ended up spending a great deal of time studying bureaucracies and being a bureaucrat myself.  The worst serial killers in the world can kill dozens of people by themselves, but put one in charge of a bureaucracy and tens of millions of people die.  But it works in reverse, a doctor can maybe save hundreds of lives, but an efficient healthcare bureaucracy can save tens of millions.