Excellent analysis. Thank you. As a retired social worker who has worked within large ossified bureaucratic structures (the VA system) - which themselves were part of larger bureaucratic structures (the federal government itself) - I have certainly borne witness to difficulty of getting even hugely important information introduced into the system itself - and in a way that could effect change. Today of course the FDA and CDC come to mind as completely ossified institutional entities both structurally resistant to feedback and change for reasons the author outlined - AND simultaneously housing many individual members who are institutionally captured by monied interests in the form of pharmaceutical corporate lobby influence - offering a sort of "double whammy" in terms of preventing new actors such as RFK Jr. from being able to promote scientific evidence based "change" in those institutions. Watching "wild card" actors such as a federal judge weigh in to uphold institutional rigor mortis (and corruption) - only adds a Kafkaesque element to the daunting impediments we already face in our grass roots efforts to reform corrupt and unhealthy institutional functioning.
Important work. I have just read your excellent opening summary. I am thinking of where you - and I, and many of those seeing outside the tyranny without tyrants - are putting our efforts. I see that many of us work at developing and then spreading knowledge that encourages much greater perception of what is happening. The author of the article did not know everything he writes about when he began his exploration. So he has been generating new knowledge, new perceptions. And then he shares what he has found, and you (and others) further share that knowledge.
Excellent, this should be required reading for "leaders". Bureaucracy creates a crazy outcome where the fabric of a complex layered system tragically manages to subsume individual responsibility. Too many participants understand the system well enough to succeed in their careers while either blatantly accelerating system failure or having no meaningful system impact. In my corporate "career" Career happiness could only be found whenever successfully extracting full license to do provide advice without asking permission. Even this retrospectively, sadly, was really more like a truce. One would tell them with high accuracy of coming predictable failures explicitly documenting and mathematically demonstrating the mechanisms of failure. This sometimes got me "removed" from the decision pathway in my case often because of being too effective at directly influencing the groups nominally making the involved key decision(s). After the resulting debacle, I would eventually be pulled back in to solve the created issue(s). At times, I felt like I was working in an asylum! Retrospectively, I was. Thank you for a thought provoking article.
Virtually every institution in the Western world functions as you describe. These institutions by and large don't have to produce anything, their raison d'etre is their own continued existence. There is zero incentive for (even frustrated) insiders to rock the boat, since that will bring nothing but headaches. Since there is no accountability, little transparency, and no consequences for this soul-crushing behavior on the part of its members, nothing changes and nothing happens. Neither political party in America has any interest in changing this because if any of these institutions functioned effectively and fairly, we serfs would have a lot more time to examine what the institutionalists are doing.
When this is the case for generations, at some point you get a French Revolution or Pol Pot who simply assumes that everyone involved in these institutions is guilty and kills them en masse. That works until the revolutionaries create their own institutions, and the cycle begins again.
One thing to remember and those in the health care industry are the ones with the longest memories. Up until big tech was reigned in, censorship was not just by the mechanisms listed in this article, but also just deplatforming people and enlisting the help of government to use its police powers to jail dissidents.
Also this article assumes that democratic institutions are set up to allow dissent. Democracy is mob rule, that is 50.1% can impose absolute tyranny on the 49.9% of the people. I think when you use this definition of democracy, this essay can be shortened and the possibility of election rigging, especially if technology is involved becomes very real.
The real question is who allowed this to happen. Congress during the New Deal outsourced its legislative authority to the bureaucrats running the regulatory agencies by allowing in legislation to defer to their expertise. In other words, Congress is the one who allowed regulators and the paper pushers to make laws, when in fact, Congress has no authority to do that. And this allowed institutional capture of the government and has made Congress useless.
So in our minds, a mandate had the force of law and our change to a democracy from a republic (respect for the rights of the minority) allowed the institutional capture in the first place. Note that in order to change this, one needs authoritarian rule from a group of people who respect dissent and is a disruptor. We have that situation now and the uselessness of Congress has enabled these disruptors to rule by fiat (Executive Orders). I am not suggesting that this is OK. I am suggesting that disruption is one of the fastest ways to force institutions to reform themselves without a violent revolution. However, it does lead to mass cognitive dissonance, which is what we have worldwide.
This is a sharp articulation of how systems can become correct internally while drifting from reality externally. What stands out is that failure isn’t coming from bad actors or broken processes, but from the gradual loss of feedback that actually forces revision. Once that link weakens, institutions can keep operating, validating themselves through procedure and metrics, even as alignment erodes. I’ve been thinking about this same idea as “survivable wrongness.”
Excellent analysis. Thank you. As a retired social worker who has worked within large ossified bureaucratic structures (the VA system) - which themselves were part of larger bureaucratic structures (the federal government itself) - I have certainly borne witness to difficulty of getting even hugely important information introduced into the system itself - and in a way that could effect change. Today of course the FDA and CDC come to mind as completely ossified institutional entities both structurally resistant to feedback and change for reasons the author outlined - AND simultaneously housing many individual members who are institutionally captured by monied interests in the form of pharmaceutical corporate lobby influence - offering a sort of "double whammy" in terms of preventing new actors such as RFK Jr. from being able to promote scientific evidence based "change" in those institutions. Watching "wild card" actors such as a federal judge weigh in to uphold institutional rigor mortis (and corruption) - only adds a Kafkaesque element to the daunting impediments we already face in our grass roots efforts to reform corrupt and unhealthy institutional functioning.
Important work. I have just read your excellent opening summary. I am thinking of where you - and I, and many of those seeing outside the tyranny without tyrants - are putting our efforts. I see that many of us work at developing and then spreading knowledge that encourages much greater perception of what is happening. The author of the article did not know everything he writes about when he began his exploration. So he has been generating new knowledge, new perceptions. And then he shares what he has found, and you (and others) further share that knowledge.
Thanks, I really appreciate it.
Excellent, this should be required reading for "leaders". Bureaucracy creates a crazy outcome where the fabric of a complex layered system tragically manages to subsume individual responsibility. Too many participants understand the system well enough to succeed in their careers while either blatantly accelerating system failure or having no meaningful system impact. In my corporate "career" Career happiness could only be found whenever successfully extracting full license to do provide advice without asking permission. Even this retrospectively, sadly, was really more like a truce. One would tell them with high accuracy of coming predictable failures explicitly documenting and mathematically demonstrating the mechanisms of failure. This sometimes got me "removed" from the decision pathway in my case often because of being too effective at directly influencing the groups nominally making the involved key decision(s). After the resulting debacle, I would eventually be pulled back in to solve the created issue(s). At times, I felt like I was working in an asylum! Retrospectively, I was. Thank you for a thought provoking article.
Virtually every institution in the Western world functions as you describe. These institutions by and large don't have to produce anything, their raison d'etre is their own continued existence. There is zero incentive for (even frustrated) insiders to rock the boat, since that will bring nothing but headaches. Since there is no accountability, little transparency, and no consequences for this soul-crushing behavior on the part of its members, nothing changes and nothing happens. Neither political party in America has any interest in changing this because if any of these institutions functioned effectively and fairly, we serfs would have a lot more time to examine what the institutionalists are doing.
When this is the case for generations, at some point you get a French Revolution or Pol Pot who simply assumes that everyone involved in these institutions is guilty and kills them en masse. That works until the revolutionaries create their own institutions, and the cycle begins again.
One thing to remember and those in the health care industry are the ones with the longest memories. Up until big tech was reigned in, censorship was not just by the mechanisms listed in this article, but also just deplatforming people and enlisting the help of government to use its police powers to jail dissidents.
Also this article assumes that democratic institutions are set up to allow dissent. Democracy is mob rule, that is 50.1% can impose absolute tyranny on the 49.9% of the people. I think when you use this definition of democracy, this essay can be shortened and the possibility of election rigging, especially if technology is involved becomes very real.
The real question is who allowed this to happen. Congress during the New Deal outsourced its legislative authority to the bureaucrats running the regulatory agencies by allowing in legislation to defer to their expertise. In other words, Congress is the one who allowed regulators and the paper pushers to make laws, when in fact, Congress has no authority to do that. And this allowed institutional capture of the government and has made Congress useless.
So in our minds, a mandate had the force of law and our change to a democracy from a republic (respect for the rights of the minority) allowed the institutional capture in the first place. Note that in order to change this, one needs authoritarian rule from a group of people who respect dissent and is a disruptor. We have that situation now and the uselessness of Congress has enabled these disruptors to rule by fiat (Executive Orders). I am not suggesting that this is OK. I am suggesting that disruption is one of the fastest ways to force institutions to reform themselves without a violent revolution. However, it does lead to mass cognitive dissonance, which is what we have worldwide.
Blessings and appreciation from Sydney Australia.
This is a sharp articulation of how systems can become correct internally while drifting from reality externally. What stands out is that failure isn’t coming from bad actors or broken processes, but from the gradual loss of feedback that actually forces revision. Once that link weakens, institutions can keep operating, validating themselves through procedure and metrics, even as alignment erodes. I’ve been thinking about this same idea as “survivable wrongness.”