Dizzojay's Dean Dreams

In defence of bureaucracy. I admit that, for my sins, I am still a bureaucrat at heart (second generation, even), and deeply distrust all forms of anti-statism. Power and hierarchy creep into human relationships whether we want them to or not . . . and I think the reality is a lot of people do want them to. Anarchists and libertarians aside, we evolved in hierarchies and I think most of us still have a primal part of our monkey brain that likes to know Our Place In The Group: “This is the Thing I do, this is how I Contribute and get Praise and Status.” I don’t think this is an inherently bad trait, nor an inherently good one. It’s simply a part of our squishy human biology we have to reckon with. We eat, we sleep, we shit, we fuck, and we are highly sensitive to group dynamics. Welcome to being the planet’s most social animal.¹

There are also a fucking lot of us, and how to scale brains that spent hundreds of thousands of years living in groups of a few dozen up to the millions (let alone billions) is something we’ve been working on only for the last six millennia or so. So we’re still pretty rough at it. But I’m not convinced that the fact that a lot of our attempts have been a bit shit means the only answer is to throw out the project entirely, particularly given a lot of the main advocates for that seemingly can’t even run their own households without exploitation, let alone any group larger than that. Like, Thoreau’s mum did his washing, the women on the commune are secretly treating the drinking water so no-one gets cholera, and anyone who’s had to sit in on COAG or some similar body will have to go practice box breathing after reading any anarchist proposal for post-state federated communities.

Decentralisation and voluntary organisation are great when it’s about, say, shitposting or SFF conventions. But would you trust a room full of fediverse instance admins or fandom concoms to manage aviation security?² And I say this as someone who has instance adminned with experience running huge government systems and also helped run huge government systems with people who’ve sat on concoms.³

Anyway. In the meantime, we have bureaucracy.

1. Before all the bee- and ant-defenders log on: I said “social,” not “eusocial.” ↩
2. Phrased glibly, but . . . I would actually be interested to hear a “yes” justification on this from anyone with actual direct experience in both government and community group organizing. Assuming there are any. ↩
3. Also, if your answer to that is “well we just won’t have planes,” then I would tentatively suggest that what you’re advocating for isn’t so much “anarchism” as it is “the complete destruction of the modern world.” In which case, firstly, at least be honest about it and, secondly, fuck you. ↩

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