Samo Burja and Ben Landau-Taylor cover bureaucracy—why the golden age of bureaucracies worked so well in the early 20th century, how bureaucratic class interest overcomes checks and balances, and bureaucracy’s role in today’s Western governments.
Samo Burja on Twitter: https://x.com/benlandautaylor
Ben Landau-Taylor on Twitter: https://x.com/benlandautaylor
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Ben: The United States of America was founded as a republic, became a democracy, and these days has turned into mostly a bureaucracy. I’m here with Samo Burja. Samo, you’ve done a bunch of theory on the political science of bureaucracy. Can you tell us about that?
Growth of political bureaucracy (00:25)
Samo: Yeah, it’s a pleasure to be here again. With regard to bureaucracy, I think it was almost an unintentional development in the history of the United States, specifically. We think of a change in the form of government as a change in the sort of underlying theory of government and also the theory legitimating government. Bureaucracy, meanwhile, has sort of snuck up on us, right? It has come to control a shocking amount of the economy, a shocking amount of government operations, and it has become a purpose unto itself.
And democracy is not unique in its vulnerability to bureaucracy. We have many historical examples where, say, monarchies, perhaps even republics, could be argued to have been destroyed by their own internal bureaucratic structure. And one of the more important things on bureaucracies, which we both write about, is sort of the nature where the power that they wield is borrowed from some other source, right? A bureaucracy is almost always sort of a delegate of someone, be it the scribes and priests of the Pharaoh or the civil servants of the prime minister in the United Kingdom or the many, many administrators working beneath the President and Congress of the United States. The power is borrowed, but as it is rendered illegible, it becomes irrecoverable for the original source without destroying the bureaucratic structure.
I think a key point of bureaucracy is that it defends itself over time. At first, you delegate the work. The work becomes inscrutable to you. Perhaps you want to fire some people. You don’t know who to fire.
And at that point, everyone who has a job in the bureaucracy, maybe either the ruler or head of state has founded or inherited from their predecessors. Everyone who’s working in that structure is, in a way, first and foremost, a paid advocate of their own existence. You can’t automate fake jobs, unfortunately.
Ben: Yeah. So it’s become quite well known at this point that bureaucracies have this nature of they grow, they sprawl, they sort of devour all of the resources put into the organization, and yet we keep coming back. Every organization is like, “All right. Well, we know all of that, but we just need the bureaucracy anyway.” So it seems like they’re also doing something that at least many people believe, and I think in many cases they’re right, you just can’t do as well any other way.
So why do people need bureaucracies so badly that even with having had all of these stereotypes for over a century, people keep doing them?
Samo: Well, we could think of it as a two by two matrix, right? Where you consider competent people you delegate to, incompetent people you delegate to, people who agree with you and are your allies and pursue the same mission, and people who are your enemies. If you think about it, the worst possible quadrant to have in your organization is very competent, agentic people who actively disagree with you or are your enemies in an organizational mission sense. So really what bureaucracies solve, and I hate to invoke a metaphor with the fashionable technology, so AI and alignment, but really, in a way, it’s solving human alignment. Instead of having, say, as a king, very powerful dukes, you end up having relatively, at first, pliable bureaucrats, people who depend on their salary on your tax collection, do not have, at first, an independent base of power.
The strengths of bureaucracies (04:00)
Samo: I’m sure the Pharaoh thought the same way with the scribes, right? At a certain point.
Ben: So you’re saying at first. So it sounds like basically this gets you several decades where you’re reasonably in control, and then it just ends up becoming when you set it up, you know how the bureaucracy works, and then eventually you die and some other guy comes in who doesn’t know how to wrangle the thing. So it seems like you’re basically buying a decades-long boost at the cost of then these things. You see this in sort of the clearest cases with a lot of the Ford Foundation or these other big... Some big rich guy dies and leaves a bunch of money.
When he’s in control, he’s giving it to Carnegie’s building all of the libraries or doing whatever things they personally care deeply about and think is a good idea. Bill Gates has, while he’s been alive, he’s been giving away his money in ways that are kind of different to the ways a lot of the bureaucrats who are in control of the Ford Foundation and all of the Carnegie Foundation. They really don’t like nuclear power. Bill Gates personally does like nuclear power, and so he funds a bunch of things like that he cares about and thinks are a good idea. And it seems like he’s built this bureaucratized foundation which he can control while he’s there, but it doesn’t seem like its ways it’s distinctive are going to survive after Mr. Gates himself.
Samo: Well, and already you note that this is the case with technically non-government entities like foundations. Corporations themselves become bureaucratic. Anyone who doubts that can, say, look at a once great American aerospace corporation like Boeing or consider any of the other old companies, right? Companies that have been around for a century or more. So because of that, we can think of a of the rise of bureaucracy in American society as perhaps first beginning in business and the necessary scaling of industry.
This leads to the sort of virtue of bureaucracy. One way to think about it is perhaps at its best, it’s a paperwork assembly line. You break down very, very complicated tasks into small, simple steps. You find people who are qualified enough so there’s an aspect in which bureaucracy is a form of talent rationing, right? If you’re scarce on aligned talent, and you have only very small or medium-aligned talent, or perhaps mixed in some unaligned talent, as we said earlier, you can go pretty far with still assembling these pieces in the right way.
So I do think that a functional institution, a functional bureaucracy can exist and can often scale very well for any kind of information processing. And many of the roles and tasks of government, industrial production, or other kinds of ventures are best done that way.
Ben: Yeah. In the first half of the 20th century, we had the American government bureaucracies were arguably the most effective organizations on the face of the Earth, where they would be the way that they were just electrifying a lot of the more backwater areas of the country, going to the moon, the stuff that the US Army was achieving during the world wars where they’re like, “We’re just going to sail across the English Channel, bringing with us an entire port.” The logistical and information process, the stuff they could achieve very reliably was just—
Samo: Staggering
Ben: Yeah. You look at it today and people just often just have a hard time believing it because it’s so far from what our bureaucracies are able to do now. And so, yeah, it does seem like in many ways it was still bureaucratized, but it was just a much more functional type of bureaucracy which was able to achieve a lot of the greatest logistical feats that this country has ever achieved.
Samo: Well, and perhaps it’s no accident that many of those greatest feats were tied to military organization in the first place. An army at war has a very clear feedback loop of success and failure, right? Whether you win or lose battles.
Ben: Well, that didn’t save them during Vietnam.
Samo: Not during Vietnam, but the interesting question is, were the war goals achievable in the first place? And arguably, the US military actually fought the Vietnam War fairly well. I know that there are all of these critiques that have been traditional for it, but consider the first unmanned drones were not deployed in Fallujah in the 21st century. They were deployed in the Vietnam War. The US Air Force actually deployed some drones during the war.
You can say what you will about chemical warfare. Winston Churchill was famously in favor of it, said that he didn’t see the reason for the squeamishness of blowing someone up versus having them choke on poison gas. I think most people’s intuitions are that there is a special reason for the squeamishness, but there’s some still gonzo ambition in being sort of proposing Agent Orange saying, “Oh, we’re going to just have the jungle cover die, and then just terraform the battlefield with mass deployment of chemical poisons and beat the Viet Cong that way.” That is arguably still like an echo of the military mindset.
Ben: Yes, but I think it is an echo, and I think that—I think that they are, by most standards, I think that they were working quite well at that sort of micro level. And yes, that’s a separate question from whether the strategic—
Samo: The macro level. Yes
Ben: orientation made any sense. But I do think if you compare it to the American army during the World Wars, which is, to be clear, an absolutely insanely high bar. I think it’s clearly not at that level.
Samo: I would agree. Especially their understanding of the sociological and psychological and other factors of war had greatly diminished by that point, where they essentially did not know how to break the morale of the Viet Cong.
Why the golden age of bureaucracy worked so well (10:23)
Ben: Yeah. So everyone loves to complain about bureaucracy, and even at its highly functional periods, people really loved to complain about it because there are, even when it’s working, there’s a lot of ways in which it can be annoying. But I would like to go deeper into, in that sort of golden age of American government bureaucracy, what was working so well about it?
Samo: Well, partially, it was very good at talent recognition. It was very good at ingesting huge numbers of people who sometimes were freshly literate, perhaps first-generation or second-generation literacy. Now, again, American society had been fairly literate for a long time, but had absorbed a large wave of immigrants who the literature at the time, today we see decried, “Oh, it’s bigoted, it’s wrong.” No, no. The literature was quite accurate about the masses of people coming in from Eastern Europe, right?
Including from, say, my country, et cetera. They were often not literate. They often came to the cities, experienced public schooling and education. The school system was already the first bureaucracy they encountered. The second bureaucracy was probably the US Army.
At that point, I think the typical US company was not yet deeply bureaucratic, except for the largest industrial employers. Say, Ford Motors is as much a bureaucracy as the Ford Foundation is, and it’s from about this time period. So what is happening, essentially, is that you have a standardized basic education, which is followed by a standardized military education at ingestion. You’re recombined into these new teams, given clear, well-worded, explicit instructions. And I think that part of what was happening by the 1970s, and has happened even more today, is that simply reading a set of instructions or actually even reading does not seem to have the same psychological effect on the masses that it once did.
I do not have a full theory of why this is the case, but I do think that there’s a very real way in which following simple instruction, we are sort of subliterate. So I’m not even complaining about the masses not appreciating the finer points of 19th century literature, right? Not really understanding Joseph Conrad when they’re assigned him in school, or Ernest Hemingway. But I’m actually complaining about the ability to follow basic technical instructions, and I think something has gone a little bit deeply wrong with human capital. So yeah, for a society to be bureaucratic and functional, it actually has to produce very punctual, reliable people who perform simple instructions.
The worst you can say is that they are not encouraged to really think about the instructions very much, which again, when the system starts dissolving, might produce the sort of effects we saw in Vietnam, micro-competence and macro incompetence.
Ben: Yeah, okay, this is interesting because it does seem like we’ve seen in a bunch of parts of society, I think we were talking about in the science video how the per capita number of PhDs in America is across the 20th century increased by 30 times. And if you look at the per capita bureaucrats across America, I don’t think it increased by 30 times, but I do think it probably increased by somewhere on the order of five to 10 times. And if you look at what is the station of a bureaucrat in 1910, then this is a pretty well-respected job. That’s notably in the higher income strata and tends to be quite sharp people. And then it seems like over time it is basically just a lot more people and they tend to be just...
Probably part of it is whatever’s happened to education over the last half a century, but also a lot of it seems to be, oh, we’re no longer trying to look for the sort of really sharp people and put them in the bureaucratic roles because we have so many bureaucratic roles that we just need a lot more people. And so the sort of median bureaucrat is just... I don’t think it’s ever been the case that the median person in a society would be able to just reliably be this functional, conscientious, reliable rule follower in the way that you’re describing. Obviously, no one is ever perfect at this. But it does seem like if you’re looking at the Babylonian scribes, these are all pretty sharp people, which you can do because this is a pretty small class.
And so, yeah, I wonder if part of it is this makes sense. It’s like you just need the sort of baseline median member of it to be a much more reliable node in the process than you’re getting with our current social sorting.
Samo: I think that intuition is correct. I think you are right about this. Partially consider among the more successful historic bureaucracies, the Chinese bureaucracies, right? Driven by the civil service exam system. It was incredibly selective.
Ben: Yeah. The sort of most cutthroat, meritocratic test-taking environment in the history of the human species.
Samo: And one of the few ones where bureaucracy was considered an explicit virtue. We said that usually bureaucracy doesn’t govern in its own name, but the Confucians come about as close to it as they can. Right? There is still a derivation of authority from heaven and the emperor. But the emperor is also supposed to be basically a good Confucian bureaucrat, if you follow the Analects and so on.
So essentially, I think that they felt that a bureaucrat should be both able to follow the paper instructions, be familiar with the correct rites, but perhaps also write some good original poetry. And I think that’s about the highest standard we have ever seen in any historical civilization for a bureaucrat.
How bureaucratic class coordination circumvented American checks and balances (16:20)
Ben: Yeah. One thing you said there reminded me of at the beginning, you were talking about how the American bureaucracy and the history of this country sort of came about almost by accident. Which doesn’t really actually match my impression, so I wanted to go back and poke at that because—
Samo: Let’s debate it. Yeah
Ben: So my understanding is that a lot of this was pretty explicit by the sort of Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson type of early progressive faction where they were talking about it as sort of like professionalization and how you need all of these apolitical roles, and I don’t think they were using the word bureaucracy explicitly that much, but the thing that they’re describing was very much this, we need this apolitical apparatus of permanent professionalized employees who are making the decisions about how the government functions, and they need to be insulated from all of these sort of democratic sort of mass movement winds blowing this way or that way.
Samo: And also isolated from the profit motive, right?
Ben: Yes. At the time, there was, I guess we’re certainly seeing it again, but the looting of the treasury by the sort of voting bloc factions was a huge thing that they were trying to circumvent with this, which I think they succeeded for a while. So I do think that that was very deliberately designed and installed, was my impression.
Samo: No, you’re definitely correct for the progressive era. And in the progressive era, the view was, and the fear was that, oh, we need to beat both the robber barons and the unions, right? And the unions today, we don’t think of them that way, but at the time, they were considered a dangerous form of mob rule.
Ben: Well, at the time, they were the literal bomb throwers who they’d be going up against the factory owners would hire a couple of thugs with, most of them would be coming carrying bats, and one would have a machine gun, and then the unions would get together and burn down the place in the middle of the night when the goons are gone. And yeah, it was, in fact, much more of a subversive force than it is since FDR just incorporated them into basically the government.
Samo: In a way, we could think of the rise of someone like Teddy Roosevelt as being essentially the wielding of the press and general public opinion against both of these forces to build something of a civil service. I concede that point, but I would still say that in the modern American telling of the history of the country, we have sort of the Republican turn in the American Revolution, and there’s a little bit talk about Andrew Jackson and Lincoln, so you could say that the expansion of a republic to democracy is also narrated. But I don’t think the rise of bureaucracy as its own power center as almost a new branch of government, perhaps the omni branch of government, right? Where it kind of weirdly fuses between, say, Congress and the presidency in a way that political theory never quite says today, or at least doesn’t look at today very closely. I think that is still a surprise, is an emergence from the early 20th century we stopped talking about even as it’s continued to grow and dominate our lives.
Ben: Yes. So I think this is basically a matter of the historiography tends to really downplay it. I think it’s been happening—and it’s been quite deliberate and has been drawing on these sort of progressive ideas of the professionalized civil service in a very explicit way. But it’s just—when you’re getting your history textbooks that talk about the three branches of government, it just doesn’t make it into these sort of self-descriptions. Yeah.
Samo: And I do call it an omni branch because the bureaucrats always copy each other’s homework. It might seem funny to Americans, but I guarantee whatever regulation the European Union passes next week, it’s going to substantially make its way into any proposal for new regulation in the United States.
Ben: Right. Often through very explicit, I’ve looked at this closely in the financial realm, where the different financial bureaucrats from the different countries will have conferences where they get together and the one where they’ll be like, “This has been working really well. You guys should do it.” Or they’ll be like, “We need a new standard because it’s a huge pain when each of us has our own different compliance, whatever. We need to get all of this on the same page. It’ll be so much more streamlined that way.”
And it’s very much like they’re just literally sitting down and—
Samo: Coordinating
Ben: coordinating. And I would imagine that in a lot of these other domains, you probably see very similar stuff.
Samo: Yeah. And because of that, I think they have bypassed the classic checks and balances in the American system to a great extent. Again, there’s some strange unholy fusion at play in a number of US federal agencies where you can find a theoretical authority of the president, a theoretical authority of Congress. Practically, neither of them could really dislodge the federal agency. And what is an interesting development in the 21st century is that for the first time, people have become aware of it as a center of power.
Now, whether it was successful or not, the DOGE administration, the DOGE attempt of the Trump administration, the second Trump administration, especially when Elon Musk was actively involved, was an explicit attempt to fight the bureaucracy. And I would say it 95% failed at dislodging the bureaucracy, but I’m sure it succeeded at saving US citizens some tax dollars.
US political structure today (22:29)
Ben: Yeah. And one of the mechanisms by which a lot of this has happened as it’s sort of been shading more and more into that is, at least in the American case, I know less about other countries, but a lot of this has been through the action of judges who are on the definition that you were talking about earlier, they are themselves a type of bureaucrat. They are in these positions of borrowed power where it’s because they are in this particular position that they’re forming this very particular, very sort of information processing, very local role in the overall network. And so I think part of the reason why they keep ruling in favor of expanding the powers of bureaucrats is because they are themselves bureaucrats and have a class interest, basically, in this being the way that the system is run. And so that is when you look at the American case, so much of the, “Oh, well, it says here that this is under congressional control. Why doesn’t it actually follow when the Congress changes its mind?”
seems to come down to this being the mechanism.
Samo: I think you’re broadly correct at this. In some countries, judges are just straightforwardly appointed. In other countries, there are elections or at least election recalls. However, interest in local government has waned at all levels of even the most democratic societies. Even if you go measure the social science statistics in a place like Switzerland with the most active participatory local democracy, that is the case.
Most people can’t really name judges that are responsible for their counties or anyone really short of the Supreme Court. And then the Supreme Court, I would argue, is a little bit different in the United States.
Ben: Yeah. It’s less bureaucratic in the United States and more like honestly, it’s the closest thing we have in the country to the role that Congress was serving in 1960.
Samo: There’s this interesting thing about politics where people assume that if you have a guy named a king or a group of old men called the Senate, that they do what the label says. But in politics, there’s this interesting way where even if you try to abolish the tsar, you just might end up with a general secretary. You might trade in Nicholas II for Stalin. If the body politic has a Congress or a legislature-shaped hole, your liver is not supposed to be a heart, but the Supreme Court is a surprisingly functional Congress right now. It’s not supposed to be, by the Constitution, the business of making of laws, but it manifestly is making—more laws than Congress.
Ben: Right. When Congress stopped doing that, the Supreme Court, they keep writing in their legislation that this is properly the role of Congress, and so this is how we’re interpreting the thing that Congress passed in 1983 or whatever. But if Congress makes a new law, of course it would supersede this, other than the Congress just doesn’t do that. They’ve basically just abdicated the legislative role, and I think it is better that the Supreme Court pick that up than just let it lie on the ground not being done, because you really need somebody doing that, even if it... In the ideal world, the Congress would keep doing it and the form would match the labels, but I think it’s to their credit that they stepped into the gap when nobody else was.
Samo: I once was very critical of people’s and general citizens’ perspective on the presidency, where they vastly overestimate the practical powers of the president, sometimes assuming he’s like the CEO of the country, which he really isn’t. It’s a very limited position, even today, even with the imperial presidency. But over the last two or three years, especially as I’ve looked at Congress much more, I’ve come to the conclusion that the people hallucinate great powers in the hands of the president because they correctly understand the presidency is the last lever of democracy still working.
Ben: Yes. It’s the only part of the apparatus in the American structure where the will of the people actually leads to changes in how the governing is done.
Samo: Exactly. It is the only place where the citizen can actually express their will. And people might say, oh, local politics and so on, and sure, maybe in a city like New York, the local politics still matter. But this has retreated so vastly compared to, say, 1880 or even 1980. The field of democracy, practical democracy, that is, people power, has shrunk, and it is now in the hands of the president mostly.
That is probably the most impactful decision at all levels of government, everything from immigration and so on. Everything from immigration to energy policy to policy with China to war, et cetera. Deep, deeply important questions, not to mention also legislating on social issues. It’s sort of interesting how the president’s opinion on something like, say, gay marriage. It’s starting to approach something like the opinion of the Pope.
Ben: Yeah. There’s this common structure where the head of state sort of slowly transitions into a ceremonial, more of a spiritual leader. The popes were, at various points in their history, were also secular rulers. I guess it’s clearer cases in the Japanese emperors or the English kings or the Ottoman sultans, but there does seem to be fairly early aspects of that that we maybe see starting to happen with the US president. I guess there’s always been some of that, but it seems to be becoming more notable, just, I guess, by default, as the legislative power has three quarters disintegrated, one quarter just moved over to the Supreme Court.
Samo: Now, it isn’t necessarily the case that the only way to do a democracy is through the president. You could imagine a political reform movement that aims to make Congress functional again and would propose changes to Congress such as, I don’t know, maybe term limits to make sure that there’s a limited window within which people can have an impact or not, rather than just passively collecting rents from essentially the economy. Here, I’m also thinking of, say, Nancy Pelosi’s investment portfolio. Sometimes the rents are literal.
Ben: Right. And hers is the most famous, but it’s a very normal thing for that type of insider trading among the members of Congress these days. She’s far from alone.
Populism vs managed democracy (28:55)
Samo: Yeah. So I would say that what is usually called populism is probably the only broadly popular movement to reintroduce democracy in Western democracies, and it is the attempt to use the executive through the presidency, and in many countries, you could say maybe through the prime minister. There is a broad analog to, say, at least European populism. Interestingly enough, no one has really proposed fixing the legislature, probably because they correctly understand that the courts and bureaucrats have overpowered the notional representative legislature.
Ben: Yeah. So just as a terminological note, I think we need to distinguish democracy, as in the people, the demos, is making the rules versus democracy as the practice of elections, because I think that these are actually quite different concepts, and as we’re trying to distinguish them, we should be using different terms. But, yeah. In general, yeah, I think there’s a lot of... Sorry, where was I going?
I distracted myself with the terminology note, so I’ll kick it back to you. Sorry.
Samo: No, no problem. Terminology is important. If words are not clarified, things cannot be carried to their conclusion.
Ben: Yes. The rectification of names.
Samo: Exactly. Another good Confucian concept. I would say that, again Democracy, when people say populism endangers democracy, that would strike people in the 19th century and even in the 20th century as a really bizarre contradiction, right?
Ben: Right. But if you distinguish these two concepts, then the people ruling disrupts the practice of elections is a much more sensible concept that you can agree with or disagree with.
Samo: I think when people say populism threatens democracy, the most charitable take I can give it is that essentially, the people are being taken in by demagogues. This is a known failure rate of a failure of democracy. You can even find it in classical political theory in Athens and so on. It is hard to argue. There’s certainly elements of, say, populist administrations that are less competent than would be desired.
They certainly sometimes lack technocratic ability. That not always the case. There’s some excellent workers in them as well. But, I think that’s how they think of that. And then what they’re really saying, in a way, is that, okay, maybe the people vote for the general vibes of what they want done, and then professionals, AKA bureaucrats, decide what actually gets done.
And they sort of pick off the wish list of the unruly children. So it’s, in a weird way, a form of a paternalistic managerial democracy, a managed democracy. And I think if I were to propose a updated political science term for Western government, I wouldn’t call it liberal democracy. I would call it managed democracy.
Ben: Mm-hmm. I’ve been thinking of it in many ways as much more of a ceremonial democracy and that you follow the forms of the elections, but—the degree to which the elections end up actually determining how the country is governed has been attenuating and attenuating. And right now, the remaining big lever in the United States is through the presidency. In a lot of the European democracies, there just kind of really isn’t one at all. You’ll have these votes and that just ends up mostly irrelevant to the actual governing.
Samo: Well, Eastern Europe is a little bit different because the bureaucracy there is very young, so it ends up expressing itself as small national bureaucracies in balance with national governments basically clashing with supranational bureaucracies in Brussels and NATO and beyond.
Ben: Yes, I should say I’m talking about Western Europe there.
Samo: Western Europe. I would agree about Western Europe, though I would propose an exception to France, where while the President of France currently seems squarely aligned with the bureaucrats, right? Emmanuel Macron, for example, was always considered the technocratic candidate. And you know what do we mean by technocracy is rule of people with skill. Technically, it’s not supposed to be exactly the same as bureaucracy, just everyone interprets it that way.
I claim that there is such a thing as uncredentialed technocracy, but that’s a whole extra debate that maybe you, me, and five guys would enjoy. So let’s just propose that the President of France has many great powers. So I see that the President of France or the President of the United States could conceivably grow in the power of their office, and then in a weird, contradictory... No, not contradictory. In a very straightforward way, increase the power of democratic oversight over their governments.
Now, whether that will happen is a different matter, but I think it is conceivable that the ebbing of the democratic aspect of the governance of what you call ceremonial democracies, what I call managed democracies, maybe that could be revived. Maybe that’s not a good idea. I think it’s worth a shot.
Ben: Yeah. I mean, at this point, I just think the Greek political philosophers maintained that every form of government has the virtuous form and then eventually degenerates into the corrupt form. And I think that’s as true of bureaucracy as the sort of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy stuff that Polybius and all those guys were talking about. And—
Samo: Perhaps technocracy then is the virtuous form of bureaucracy.
Ben: Yeah. And in their theory, once you have the decrepit, corrupt form of any of them, it’s going to get circumvented by the part of Polybius I don’t agree with is he’s like, they go in this order reliably, which I just don’t think historically holds up. But the idea that you need to be circumvented by one of the other forms makes me just be like, all right, so given that we are in the sort of late stage corrupt form of bureaucracy, I’ll look for circumventions from whatever quarter.
Samo: Yeah, I think that is wise, and I also think that there are exciting tech possibilities opened by technology where we’ve not really imagined how digital technology could change the relationship between citizens and their governments. We had sort of a burst of enthusiasm in the 1990s and things like the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, right? If you remember that famous essay. It’s very foundational, and even today you hear echoes of it in e/acc and all of these other ideological strands that are, at this point, let me propose, effective accelerationism is already a reactionary movement, and it’s already a backward-looking movement seeking to restore the internet of the 1990s, right? And I think that shows that we are rather not fundamentally different in our idea of how the digital should reshape society than what China is proposing.
And usually what China does is called totalitarian, and in some ways it is. No, I think it’s actually technocratic and bureaucratic. It’s the idea of, oh, we can collect the license plates of every car in the city and see exactly where the cars are driving and have a smart system determine when the traffic lights are red versus green to optimally increase the flow of traffic through the city, and we can catch all criminals. And of course, let’s put it this way, maybe in China, they do catch all criminals, right? Beijing has a lot of cameras.
Anarchotyranny and judicial ideology (37:09)
Samo: Well, anarcho-tyranny, I think this was a concept first proposed by Sam Francis, which sought to explain why is it that the law-abiding are often harassed by the instruments of the law and the organs of the state. Meanwhile, violent criminals or dangerous criminals are let off the hook and left to freely commit crimes with seemingly little consequence. This phenomena is very obvious in the Western world. We can talk about many examples.
Ben: I don’t think we need to belabor the specifics.
Samo: We don’t need to belabor the specifics, but it’s good to establish them. When I bring this up with my friends, at first they’ll say it’s not true, but usually a trip to the DMV, including seeing the graffitied streets or seeing a broken window here in San Francisco from a store that was vandalized.
Ben: Or walking by the open shoplifter markets that are right outside the subway stops, which are widely known, and some of the political leaders and city supervisors have been keeping the police from doing about the ones running in their districts and stuff.
Samo: Or some of the horrendous outcomes, such as the grooming gang scandal in the United Kingdom and so on. So people either can read about that or they see it with their own eyes, and often they come back to me and they say, “Samo, I’ve been thinking about anarcho-tyranny. I now see it everywhere,” right? It is the policing of the innocent and the enabling of the guilty. And part of it, of course, is the power.
I have two theories on this, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on them. And the first theory is a purely pragmatic administrative theory. Imagine you are a bureaucrat who is set a quota. You have a quota to arrest, say, 50 people. Tell me, if you want to do this job most efficiently, exactly as it is defined, will you stop 50 seemingly law-abiding, nice citizens and give them a parking ticket?
Or are you going to go for the one that’s dangerous, that might physically overpower you?
Ben: Yeah. So I think this is a big part of it in especially Britain, perhaps other parts of Europe. I think this is not a big part in the US, because if you look at—a San Francisco police officer’s day, they are mostly dealing with a lot of the people who would most obviously seem like the dangerous criminals. The police will be arresting them and doing a lot of paperwork, and then the judges will be letting them out. But if you look at what the police’s day is, it’s much more dealing with those people.
Whereas then if you look at England, it seems like it’s very different. And in fact, they have a police force that is one-third female, which is largely just not capable of physically going and overpowering and taking in a lot of the more dangerous people. And as far as I can tell, it seems like a much smaller fraction of the median police officer’s time in London is spent dealing with that element than in San Francisco. So I think that’s a difference depending on where you are.
Samo: Well, also, it is the case that you can have a relatively disarmed police force if you have a disarmed populace. And in places like Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, until recently, the populace was fairly well-behaved and disarmed, so the police forces were disarmed. But as that has changed, especially due to the introduction of international criminal networks, such as in the Netherlands, well, that’s not a problem in the US, right? In the US, the citizenry was somewhat armed. The criminals, of course, are also armed, but the police force has also been armed since the early 2000s, at least with the almost militarization of the police with the use of surplus equipment sometimes pioneered in Fallujah, and then introduced in Philadelphia.
Ben: Yeah. So that was one of the two aspects you wanted to mention.
Samo: Exactly. The other aspect I think is universal and extends to the United States as well. I suspect that there is something about the nature of power, and this is much more subtle, partially psychological, but partially quite realpolitik, where power unexercised diminishes. Power exercised increases. If the law prescribes a pretty clear punishment for a crime, the power of judges increases almost directly proportional to them being able to find loopholes, exceptions, and generally just find ways to not apply the law.
Ben: So the replacement of rule of law with—
Samo: Rule of judges
Ben: yeah, with personal power is just—
Samo: It’s intoxicating
Ben: and it’s a natural, people are always going to be like, “Yeah, I should just be making the decisions.”
Samo: And perhaps people will always think that, though perhaps people will think, “Ah, we are barely keeping this country together. It is my job as the judge to, say, prosecute dangerous subversives.” This is how maybe, say, a judge in China would think, or a judge in Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union before they broke apart, or maybe a judge in Europe during the 1930s, right? But today, there’s an additional strand, so maybe this is a third explanation, where many of the people who have gone into criminal law have gone under the assumption of great injustices befalling marginalized groups and that all disparities in the policing of groups across socioeconomic sectors, like poor racial minorities, whatever, are the result of injustice. Having believed that, they were motivated to enter the law school system, and they became judges disproportionately rather than go to the better remunerated professions of...
Law offers many well-remunerated professions. Judges are actually not that well-paid in the US.
Ben: Yeah. So this is certainly true of—
Samo: So ideological entryism would be my third answer. People who believe that the law should not be applied then come to be judges. They feel the rush of personal power and the sense of moral righteousness for releasing the criminals.
Ben: Yeah. So this is certainly happening in San Francisco. If you look at the particular judges who we have here, it’s an elected position. And I think just as a sort of terminological quibble, I think that this is actually the same as the growth of personal power thing that you were talking about, and this is the way that they are choosing to wield that personal power. But the general thing going on here is just that same phenomenon of replacing the rule of law with the discretion of the individual.
Samo: I would agree it’s a subtype. I perhaps even raised it as a subtype. The ideological entryism. But I do think the entryism makes the effects for the general population much worse. You could imagine a form of personal power where the judges are taking massive bribes for business interests, and this is a country that has no rule of law in economics.
But, for example, personally believe that this is justified because they keep the peace and are, say, tough on crime. For a while, arguably, Brazilian judges were like that, perhaps 60 or 70 years ago. So I’m just saying that the personal power growth makes the system dysfunctional, but might make it dysfunctional differently depending on the prevailing ideology of the judges seeking personal power.
Ben: Yes. And you get the synergy between it because the ideology also gives a justification for why people should coordinate in the pursuit of replacing it with the discretion in a way that if people are taking bribes, then in a sense, they may be allied with each other, but they kind of have to do it. They can’t just post on their blog that they are one of the bribery judges and so we should work together. But when you have an ideological cover, it’s much more out in the open the way the coordination works. And you can get fellowships for it and all that stuff.
Samo: Well, there’s also something interesting that happens where even when, say, judges are elected, or representatives of unions are elected. We mentioned earlier that in the 1900s era, unions were seen as a dangerous instrument of mob rule. Today, if we had unions like that, we would probably call those unions populist. Why have they become so bureaucratic? And I think the answer is, well, when it comes to a company, the unproductive always outnumber the productive.
So the unproductive have a voting advantage, and they select their leaders in such a way. That contributes on the boundary to more bureaucratic policies being enacted inside the company or being demanded by organized labor.
Ben: So it’s just the sort of slow, steady accretion. Whenever you’re within a system, you just build up these increasing barnacles on the outside, just sort of sucking out the vitality to feed themselves.
Samo: Partially, it’s also their integration into the legal system because as they abandoned, let’s call it direct action. Because unions did use to be violent, and they had other modes of organizing, providing services, et cetera. As the membership of American unions has dwindled, yet their power has not. They can’t provide, say, votes, for example, quite as easily because their membership is smaller to politicians. They are no longer that dominant in the labor pool even, yet they remain very powerful because they can sue, and they have started to become mostly an organized vehicle for lawfare around the country.
And this is, I think, true in some other countries as well. And then this puts them into a natural alliance with the judges, civil service administrators, and so on. So I think that the unions are important because they demonstrate that even bodies that were meant to be democratic bodies can come to become bureaucratic bodies, even in their nature. It’s not always that you’re overpowered. You could even imagine a version of the presidency where the president ceases to be an instrument of democracy whatsoever and also becomes a bureaucratic body.
In fact, most of the presidency is bureaucratic. It’s just the office of the president that’s not.
The ideological basis of American vs European democracy (47:43)
Ben: Right. And it’s just this sort of odd historical quirk of America that we have the head of state be directly elected. In most of the Western countries, they are appointed, and so that’s just a totally different setup.
Samo: Yeah. It’s deciding the coalition negotiations between parties in parliaments. Who’s going to be prime minister? The citizens don’t vote for them directly. And then, I often wonder who else is in those negotiations other than the elected parties.
Ben: Yeah. Because so much of it comes down to who’s going to coalition with whom around what, and that is very explicitly something that happens in this sort of backroom alliance sort of way. And then in the functional version, they’ll then announce what they’re aiming for before the election, and people can... But yeah, the justification and the political philosophy behind it is totally different than the American system in a way that we kind of imagine that the ideological grounding of the American and the European democracies are more similar than they actually are. You get this in sort of the silliest versions of Germans and British people imagining that they have First Amendment rights, when in fact that’s just a—totally different country.
But the mechanics of how the power at some level grounds out in elections is quite different, and I think that a lot of the philosophical justifications for why we’d even have that end up being based on quite different ideas, and it feels like that sort of gets muddled together the way we have this sort of transatlantic media blob.
Free speech (49:54)
Samo: In a way. But it’s also true that the conception of democracy differs between the European countries themselves—to a great extent, and there is an attempt to homogenize it, mostly through EU bureaucracy and so on, as far as even the failed attempt in the early 2000s to have a European constitution. And when we add Europe here, let’s not forget the Anglosphere. I used to think that, and I used to argue, let’s say 2014, as late as 2014, that there’s no substantial difference between the sort of written or unwritten constitution, because if you looked at Anglosphere countries, they seemed sort of about equally free in 2014. The United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Canada.
But since then, it seems that the US having an explicit written constitution has protected, say, freedom of speech much better, though perhaps it is a mere delay rather than a genuine antidote to have something like the First Amendment be just written down that clearly in law, and the law itself is supreme in this way.
Ben: Yeah. We’ll see how that shakes out. Certainly there are a lot of people trying to chip away at it. It’s certainly not the first time that a lot of people have tried to chip away at free speech in America, and the previous rounds didn’t really stick. So I don’t feel fatalistic about it.
We’ll see how the fight goes.
Samo: Well, I’m going to point back to lawfare and the means of opinion making and say that it’s kind of a fluke of history that Elon Musk bought X.com, and that other than X.com, I think all the major social media platforms were implementing essentially European-tier censorship on Americans.
Ben: European-tier censorship in the sense of what would get you banned, but very different if you will get banned or thrown in jail.
Samo: That’s true. And it’s true, that is a big difference, but it still is a chipping at the sort of spirit of free—speech, which is that we should—
Ben: Absolutely. And you’re absolutely right that a lot of that depended on this kind of historical fluke, but historical flukes can often turn things in a very big way. So—it does seem like the combination of the ideological shifts and the sort of technological possibilities of having the robots do the quick first pass over all of the nicely categorized digital information make a gradient, sort of the river flows in a particular direction, but these things are very far from deterministic. You can get a tendency in one area, which then a person or a small group of competent people pushes against successfully. For example, with the writing of the First Amendment in the first place.
So I think that it does still seem to be a live fight because there are a bunch of these people who have recognized, okay, if the landscape has shifted, then that means we’re going to have to shore things up.
Samo: Yes, and the preexisting social landscape does affect how material technologies change the balance of power. Say, the introduction of the printing press in Europe made the means of expression, perhaps the means of thought, if we were being extra poetic, in a way much more democratic, resulted in the creation of the springing up of lots of new centers of spiritual authority outside the papacy. The papacy, of course, was at the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Europe’s largest bureaucracy. So you could argue that the printing press, when it became economical in Europe, pushed against the power of bureaucracy. In China, there was no such development with their introduction of the printing press.
What it resulted in was an increase of government power because it improved the economics of paperwork, literally. So, the printing press can be considered, in the first impact on society, either empowering bureaucracies or weakening bureaucracies, and I don’t think it was the technical differences between Gutenberg’s printing press and the less advanced Chinese version of it.
Ben: Right. And with the internet, we’ve seen that for a bunch of, say, the central and western European nations, it’s been a tool of state centralization and increasing control, and in a bunch of the Middle Eastern countries, it led to the governments being overthrown.
Samo: Yeah. Those were relatively weak states. So maybe, I don’t know, maybe Balaji shouldn’t be trying to make the network state in Malaysia. Maybe he should camp with some really well-armed guys to Libya.
The internet seems to be stronger in North Africa than elsewhere.
Ben: Yeah. The freebooting approach to the network state.
Samo: Yeah. Well, for now, it seems that bureaucracy has defeated democracy, but we can remain hopeful for good government and good outcomes in the future, democratic or not, bureaucratic or not.
Ben: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Samo.
Samo: It was a pleasure.