@Overly Serious has mentioned before about solutions that work at small scales not scaling and I think this is the classic example.
It's something of a crusade for me because it's so fundamental, so obvious and so often overlooked. A principle of Cybernetics is that cybernetic systems do not scale. Those are systems of Response->Feedback->Response. If you're driving your car and you drift to the left you steer a little to the right. Feedback->Response, endless loop. Try to centralise all control and you're so remote from the feedback that your response is either inappropriate or far too late. And it's not a matter of ratios. You can have 7 people under the direction of one person making absolute decisions and it works - humans are evolved for this. 70 people making absolute decisions for 700 people doesn't work. Communication lines all break down, multiply as runaway factorials in number. The only thing that scales is
distributed control. I.e. 10 groups of 7 people each under the direction of one person is effective. Now at this point people are inclined to think there's awareness of that and the use of hierarchies is implementing that. But not really - because that only implements an administrative side, it doesn't actually devolve decision making which is the key element of it. Arguably it actually inhibits decision making.
Restating the above, a hierarchy mitigates the
administrative problem of scaling but only partially mitigates the problem of feedback->response loop being too large. It mitigates the latter only in so far as members of the hierarchy have autonomy and they have less and less all the time for many reasons.
TL;DR: The people in power have control but not cognizants. Like a man driving a car in heavy rain. They drift to the left and don't correct, or they imagine they've drifted and correct when they shouldn't. And nobody else is allowed to touch the wheel.
There are so many reasons for this. One is that the hierarchy is so distended that we have isolated status systems. I have quite literally seen US$5m+ thrown away, known it would be thrown away, predictably and shown it would be, because a guy didn't want to lose status amongst his peers by admitting he'd made a mistake. His status amongst all the people doing the work was in the toilet - he was regarded as an arrogant, smug, delusional loon. But none of the opinions of all those people mattered. Only the opinion of the directors. A wholly isolated status system. I remarked once that I would fix things (and I could have) if he said publicly that I was right. I knew he wouldn't. It could have been US$50m and it wouldn't make a difference. The status systems are entirely divorced.
And that's one of the issues with democracy. It is not allowable to be wrong. A monarch, confident in his power, can admit to his mistake. He may not want to, he may dress it up, you might get in trouble if you keep bringing it up. But he can change his mind. He can say "this didn't work, we're going to stop doing it." An elected official cannot do that. Or rarely. His opponents will devour him for having been wrong. In my personal experience related above I remarked to a colleague "you cannot compete with a promise". A hoped for outcome will almost always look better than the actual outcome. In a democracy, your performance is always compared to what your opponent says would and should have been.
We can relate this back to the issue of our cybernetic system. Not only do we have a system that has scaled beyond the point where feedback->response is complete and timely enough for effective decision making, but we have a system in which feedback indicating you have made a mistake is required to be rejected.
And that's the most valuable kind of feedback.
My comments here (and thank you to
@Otterly for tagging me) have veered more to the fundamental information theory problems than laying it all on culture and beliefs of the elite, but it's an important part of the problem. Robert Anton Wilson (bless his crazy brain) said that if you took Jesus and put him in charge of the USA but didn't allow him to actually change the way the system works, corruption and failure would carry on unchanged. Human society simply hasn't scaled.
And we're at the point where feedback is actively fought against. We can all say something isn't working and we can all be ignored. All hierarchies introduce disinformation. Those below don't want to tell those above things those above don't want to hear. And those above don't want to appear ignorant or dependent on those below. Most of us have seen that.
The system is self-perpetuating, resistant to outsiders.
@The Ugly One correctly gives many reasons why those at the top wont listen. I agree with nearly everything he says. My only contribution in this post, when you boil it down, is that not only wont they listen, but I'm not sure they can. Any attempt to do so and they self-select out of the system in power.
It's a worry view because the implication is that we can't get rid of one or two at the top but have to rip out the whole system and much of its middle layer, like Japanese Knotweed
en masse .
This wouldn't be a post by me if I didn't make a movie reference and there's an image which comes to my mind over and over recently and it's from the Terry Gilliam movie
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. A very silly and very good fantasy and the villain is a bureaucrat obsessed with order. At one point he has an exceptional soldier executed because his heroics are demoralising to the ordinary man. When this villain finally achieves his goals he is astonished as Death himself bursts out from underneath him. He is completely astounded and doesn't understand how all his behaviour has resulted in the Angel of Death himself flying out over the city.
I think about that image quite often now. Terry Gilliam is a great director - The bureaucrat, glasses askew, tumbling back as the angel of death spreads out his wings, and wondering "did I do that?"
