Knots

     Among the developments least remarked upon as the Twentieth Century progressed were the steadily swelling bureaucracies that have come to be known as the Deep State. They seemed innocent at first, yet they gradually swallowed our nation, rendering elected officials largely impotent. By the end of World War II, they threatened to render the enactments of legislators and the actions of executives irrelevant.

     Writers who produce thrillers seldom mention bureaucracies or bureaucrats.

     If you’ve read 1984, you’ll surely remember Airstrip One’s four great Ministries:

• The Ministry of Truth, which produced propaganda;
• The Ministry of Plenty, which controlled economic activity;
• The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with the unending war;
• The Ministry of Love, which enforced the Party’s dicta against “thoughtcrime.”

     Those Ministries were the Party’s mechanism for maintaining its power.

     In a way, 1984 and Atlas Shrugged are the defining fictions of the Twentieth Century. They didn’t show us what was or is, but what could come, should we fail to arrest and reverse the trends in motion at their times of publication. Beneath the action, both of them – Rand as part of the gray backdrop; Orwell in fierce living color – were about bureaucracies.

     Few readers noticed the critical part bureaucracies played in those tales. That’s the bureaucrat’s indispensable asset: he’s invisible. His actions take place behind a curtain that shields his identity, his authority, and his purpose. He can dispatch men with guns to take everything you have, your property, your liberty, and your life… yet the chain of decisions and decrees that brought about your ruin can seldom be traced all the way back to him.

     We can easily learn the names and histories of the Secretaries of the Cabinet departments under which the bureaucracies function. But they are only superficially in control of what’s done by the men beneath them. Whether they can learn who is doing what to whom and at what cost is open to question. They’re seldom compelled to answer for any of it. That’s almost just, considering how little sway they can really exert over their “subordinates.”

     The federal bureaucracies have been engaged in an ongoing illustration of Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

     Behind Conquest’s laws stand immutable principles of human motivation and behavior, the consequences of which have become the fiber of other studies, most notably Public Choice economics. The late Jerry Pournelle expressed one of the outcomes, a restatement of Conquest’s Third Law, in his Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

     Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

     When we add that dynamic to the bureaucrat’s invisibility, all the rest becomes predictable.

     Few have discussed “the law behind the laws:” the aspect of human nature that makes all the above come to pass. Perhaps that’s because it’s like water to a fish: omnipresent, and thus as invisible as the bureaucrat himself. Ludwig von Mises expressed and explored it in his book Human Action:

     A coda to that law can be stated thus:

     Within a bureaucracy, Pournelle’s first group – those who work to advance the bureaucracy’s nominal goals – receive their salaries, nothing more. His “second group” – those dedicated to the perpetuation and expansion of the bureaucracy itself – benefit more from their actions. That gives them a stronger personal motivation than the members of the first group: an advantage in a competitive environment. Time magnifies that advantage. Cyril Northcote Parkinson and others have noted that this leads to a dynamic of bureaucratic growth, like unto that of a goldfish in a bowl: it will grow until it reaches the limits external constraints impose upon it.

     In our political system, the only mechanism that limits the growth of bureaucracies, which today is coextensive with government, is the election of officials we hope will rein it in. Whatever their true motives, until today no gaggle of elected officials – not even the Reagan Administration – has succeeded in enforcing any limits on the size or power of the bureaucracies.

     What remains is the Alexandrian solution.

     Herewith, the tale of Alexander and the Gordian Knot:

     As the story goes, in 333 B.C. the Macedonian conqueror marched his army into the Phrygian capital of Gordium in modern day Turkey. Upon arriving in the city, he encountered an ancient wagon, its yoke tied with what one Roman historian later described as “several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened.”
     Phrygian tradition held that the wagon had once belonged to Gordius, the father of the celebrated King Midas. An oracle had declared that any man who could unravel its elaborate knots was destined to become ruler of all of Asia.
     According to the ancient chronicler Arrian, the impetuous Alexander was instantly “seized with an ardent desire” to untie the Gordian knot. After wrestling with it for a time and finding no success, he stepped back from the mass of gnarled ropes and proclaimed, “It makes no difference how they are loosed.” He then drew his sword and sliced the knot in half with a single stroke.

     If unraveling a knot should defeat one’s patience, Alexander’s method becomes appealing. Not to the bureaucrats, of course; they would fight to their last breath to retain their empire. We’re seeing that in real time as the Trump Administration swings its sword at the knots of America’s federal bureaucracy.

     What makes the picture even more interesting is the frenzy of elected officials – mostly Democrats – to halt the sword in mid-swing. The personal motivations of those officials are difficult to determine. Yet those motivations must be very strong, for the power of the bureaucracies makes elected officials’ power a fraud. Perhaps we’ll learn more about them as the bureaucracies are disassembled. I have no doubt that they’ll prove to be as tawdry and contemptible as the officials themselves.

     It’s possible that this also explains the willingness of the Left – ideologically the promoter of the bureaucracies as well as their principal beneficiary – to defend violence as a political method. The two attempts on President Trump’s life stand in stark contrast to the rest of American political history. Yes, sitting presidents have been assassinated, but never before has the nominee of a major party been targeted. The closest we come is the 1912 attempt on the life of Theodore Roosevelt when he ran for a third term as the candidate of the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party.

     I’m an old man with a compulsion to think about things, and an equal compulsion to write about them. Thus, when I’m otherwise unengaged, I think about things like the above. I look for threads to follow, causes to pursue. I like historical comparisons, for as Ecclesiastes has told us, there is nothing new under the Sun. And I write about what occurs to me.

     I could be wrong about any of the above. Yet the progress of the Omnipotent State through the Twentieth Century (“the nightmare years” – Al Stewart) and up to the present speaks powerfully. Others cited above have provided analyses that I find persuasive. There’s a cohesion about it all that suggests that the dynamic of power really does operate in conformance to laws no Congress can modify or repeal.

     The federal Leviathan is our Gordian knot. President Trump and Elon Musk are our Alexander. The sword is in motion. Will the Left manage to halt its swing? Let’s ask the Magic 8-Ball:

     Stay tuned.

     Just a few early-morning thoughts. No, I didn’t sleep well. But do have a nice day.