Inherent in all bureaucracy is a level of incompetence and inefficiency that would astound anyone working in a normal organization. Normal organizations are relinquishing their prominence as regulatory environments, prohibitions and subsidies take over, favoring corporations and massive companies at their expense. Merit is not the major factor in promotion or pay increases, but instead our society increasingly relies on superficial factors and public perception.
The Peter Principle has been brought up before, I believe, but it references the idea that people in hierarchy tend to rise to the level of their respective incompetence. The larger the organization, the longer the road to hierarchy, the more likely it is that this is true. Sometimes promotion includes prior success, which often relies on the organization and not on any specific qualities of the leader, but when failure does exist, larger organizations are more easily able to shuffle things away, or sweep them under the rug, to hide the incompetence.
Military leadership is not immune to this. I have often remarked to those willing to listen that the higher you climb in rank, the more likely you are to find “company men and women” who see the organization itself as above criticism, or that will repeat bullets from slides written by themselves or their peers as if they are profound talking points. Like a flock of squawking parrots, they’ll annoy the heck out of you by saying things like “people first” while never evaluating their other twelve #1 priorities or even the idiocy of having that many priorities.
They can’t see fault in themselves, because they have been affirmed in their ridiculous level of ignorance.
There are exceptions, of course, but while climbing in rank has the effect of removing some of the bad actors engaged in illegal activities or with low moral character, it also has the effect of chasing away people with original thoughts and real leadership qualities, like courage. The trend is that the higher you go, you will find less of both extremes and wind up with a far more profound level of mediocrity.
For every general officer you find willing to be honest with a politician about defense policy, you will have ten others willing to sell their soul for that retirement paycheck and the revolving door to a 7-figure salary with a defense contractor.
The Department of Defense is small compared to the civilian side of the government. This same observed effect in the military is only exponentially worse among those organizations.
Occasionally a civilian government employee may be an exception, but generally, they are not. They are exceptions by rule.
Worse still, are politicians. There is a chance you can get one of high quality, but most who rise to the level of prominence have been successful there for the same reasons bureaucrats rise to the top…they’re mediocre but not overtly criminal. To make matters even more difficult, we don’t select them based on their merits of being good leaders or successful people. We select them for being polished orators and looking decent.
Those aren’t the hallmarks for top notch leadership. I’ll spare you the talk about why we shouldn’t give them any power, but what about conspiracy theories?
Some common responses are that expecting organizations so incompetent to carry out such a rigorous plan is absurd. They have a point. We joke about how Area 51 couldn’t exist because some junior enlisted Soldier would have talked about it for decades. Shoot, I’m not sure a senior enlisted member of our armed forces could be trusted with a secret like that for more than a few months, and I’ve seen officers avoid guard duty like work during COVID.
Still, it isn’t out of this world to then note that they seem to get it consistently wrong. Even if the incompetence would make it impossible to carry out an evil plan, you would expect them to accidentally make the right decision on more than just as an infrequent accident.
As freedom seeking people, we don’t see that. We never see an honest moment of remorse and a reduction in the size and scope of government. It just marches along hurting everyone who tries to resist.
I think there is an obvious case that both are true. The government is both inefficient and entirely incompetent, and simultaneously is conspiring against the citizenry.
The friction point is in terms of the checks and balances, and the nature of politics.
Incompetence renders the checks and balances of the different bodies of government obsolete. A congress unwilling to assume responsibility because of immorality, or unable due to incompetence, has the same effect. They authorize the use of military force without declaring war. They sign the legislation they are fed by lobbyists rather than actually legislating. They’re puppets, and whether they are immoral or incompetent is of no consequence.
This is true about the vast majority in positions of leadership. All it takes is a few key personnel in positions of influence trying to influence for a specific outcome, and a whole host of incompetent boobs willing to repeat whatever you feed them.
We’ve seen this in action. The rationale for Operation Iraqi Freedom was sold to the public on what we now know were lies. Those that told the lies knew they were lying at the time they told them. A whole host of incompetent NPCs repeated those talking points from their bully pulpits in government or on major media outlets.
If you dissented, you were “with the terrorists.”
We’ve seen this multiple times in our history. Spend an hour or so looking up government lies, and you’ll be astounded at how deep the rabbit hole goes, and also how well established it is that they lied to us. I’m not sure there is a single war we weren’t lied into, and those are only the lies we’ve heard about. With access to information, it is much easier to find stuff. The income tax was going to be temporary. The Federal Reserve was going to keep the dollar strong. Government spending pulled us out of the Depression. More recently we were told they weren’t spying on us, that Trump was colluding with Russia, that it would only be 14 days to slow the spread, and the vaccine would help you, or them, or something.
There are small groups of people pulling the strings, and they aren’t always the same people. It is the gullible and useless NPCs that comprise the vast majority of the bureaucracy surrounding them that make it a problem. The ones who don’t have the courage to say no, or that lack the intelligence to even understand what they’re doing.
Is government evil? I don’t think so. It is just a tremendously dangerous weapon in the hands of anyone, and those who seek to wield it most are those we can trust the least.
