Why I LOVE Big Government Bureaucracy
Or, how to be a cowboy 🤠
Those who know me will be utterly shocked by that headline. I HATE big government bureaucracy, BIG anything, red tape, depersonalization, freedom-squelching coercion, inefficiency, waste, corruption, paternalism, overbearing hidden-agenda administrative Anything. I’m (mostly) a libertarian, for heaven’s sake!
Okay, but here’s the thing.
I’ve been trying to figure out how the h— we can be a democratic people in the Anthropocene. Believe me, there are calls for authoritarian measures on the left as well as on the “populist” right. (Usually, the right doesn’t care much for the planet except in an old-fashioned conservative-conservationist way — which is incredibly important when it’s not overly romanticized.) The left cares about the Imminent Catastrophe !! (™), but despite massive amounts of lip service given to anti-authoritarianism, I believe many folks on the left would happily employ all manner of coercion as long as the Cause is correct. And how could it possibly be wrong?
If we’re not going to have Big U.N. or Big Gov’t Agency crackdown, control, regulation of economic and environmental affairs (Leviathan), how is an Anthropocene democracy going to work? How is the chaos of true democracy going to accomplish anything, especially as divided and divisive as we are as a people?
I’ve been reading lately all these studies of the American founders. How did they (both the founders and the scholars doing the studies) see democracy working, or not working? Suffice to say, history is a good teacher, perhaps especially fairly recent (but not present-day) evaluations of slightly older history. If you reach back even a few decades, there are wonderful, thoughtful books written from the 1980’s through the 2010’s by erudite, insightful, yet engaged scholars, eminently sensible, not esoteric, generalists who are top-notch teachers and mentors. Their works show signs of age, or rather signs of their times, but these qualms and analyses, taken with a dose of 10-15 years of hindsight, are instructive.
If you’d like my current reading list (er, book pile), or referrals to a handful of worthy authors, please:
What to Do?
Amongst this reading, one massive debate I’ve stumbled across concerning the American founding has to do with institutions vs procedures vs practices vs goals.
Let me put it this way. When you think of the US as a democracy, what do you think of?
Institutions, like Congress, the courts, the presidency, elections, states and federal/national government?
Procedures, like how laws get made, committees work, parties control candidates and campaigns, interest groups, budgets?
Practices like deliberation, citizen education, democratic participation, political influence, social media?
Or goals, like freedom, equality, the common good, public virtue, being a model democracy for the world?
How you think about problems of good democracy, reforming democracy, saving democracy in a changing world matters deeply, and there are different political philosophies, “Constitutional philosophies” even, and anthropologies tied up in these questions.
Some authors I’m reading right now are helping me formulate my own perspective. Maybe they will become part of my personal canon. But all of it speaks towards my end purpose, which is to figure out what I should do. Most of all, I to see smart, savvy people doing deliberative and collaborative things.
Most of all, I want to see smart, savvy people
doing things deliberatively and collaboratively.
If there’s a tension between freedom and government or civil society, the tension between individualism (DIY) and collaborative effort to accomplish something larger than any individual can alone.
Smart, Savvy People
Smart, savvy people tend to look for places to work that allow them to do their individual thing without collaboration — like in academia, or by starting little solopreneur online businesses for “creators.” They look for the minimum platform or infrastructure they need to support themselves and their thing. We might call it the lone ranger syndrome. Smart, savvy guru + adoring following does not make for constructive collaboration between multiples of competent people contributing as equals on a team.
Then again, if you don’t have a minimal platform and tools to allow you to “get out there” personally as a smart and savvy lone ranger — if you don’t have at least this — or if you prefer to work with others on mutually deliberated worthy projects — then an opposite danger presents itself. One can so easily end up a cog in the machine or a Girl Friday for someone else’s projects. People with Projects are more than happy to recruit quieter talents into their agenda, and the more competent and encouraging, and the less noisy you are, the better.
Over the weekend I reconnected with a cousin I hadn’t seen in decades, and we found we have a lot in common. She, too, found herself in Girl Friday positions for much of her career. She’s smart, technologically gifted, a fast learner, mature and trustworthy, but at the same time eager to help and not pushy about her own agenda. She certainly has strong opinions and ideas about what makes for worthy projects, but as a not pushy, and genuinely encouraging and constructive person, who wants to listen, help, and collaborate, she always ends up playing assist for someone else.
We need smart and savvy people to do worthy projects. But we don’t need a worthy project for every smart and savvy person out there. That’s just every cowboy for himself.
We need smart and savvy people to do worthy projects.
But we don’t need a worthy project for every smart and savvy person.
If nobody is doing anything together, if there’s no real collaboration or deliberation or public mindedness, there will only be minimal platforms and infrastructure (“tools”) and methods — void of content, empty — to tie anybody together.
Dilemma.
Dilemma
The question becomes: where do smart and savvy individuals ply their trade in some kind of tandem, in collaboration and deliberation with one another? Without becoming cogs in a machine?
Academia? Think tanks? A few nonprofit reform-minded organizations? Corporations? Google, where well-known “Free Fridays” or 20% time makes room for personal projects supported with space, time, funding? Some few government bureaucracies where civil service jobs are secure (maybe), and there might be latitude and largesse hiding amidst bureaucratic layers? Where can you find a bunch of smart elites collaborating, sounding out ideas, prototyping projects, all with just enough job security — i.e. a modicum of room to try? Was there something to LOVE there?
Arguably, the 20th century still had a few such places where public spiritedness, civic organizing, and citizen initiatives could thrive. That seems to be gone now, maybe taken down by the dubious promises of a democratizing internet.
What if today academia is failing? And, equally, the other institutions mentioned? Hyper-specialist projects driven by publish-or-perish departmental politics dictates much of “creative” academic work. What does get produced is by and large irrelevant and opaque even to well-educated lay people. This was not the case 30 or 50 or 75 years ago.
What if, after all, we don’t trust big government bureaucracies funding pet projects of lone administrators who think up a new program they’d love to foist off on unsuspecting “target” populations?
What if think tanks and NGO’s, per force, have ended up playing insider interest-group politics, hyper-competitive, resource-capturing, overtly partisan and polarized?
Where are all the genuinely civically-minded, non-bureaucratized, non-esotericized — but still smart and savvy, collaborative and deliberative — citizens to come together? IS there any place?
I think I have to build something. — But I can’t be the lone cowboy, either. I can’t be a refugee academic trying to build a little solopreneur business online if the real goal is to re-think Anthropocene anthropology, rebuild education, relocate public virtue, search out wisdom, secure essential competencies for non-expert lay people, push cultural renewal, and enact democratic reform.
It has to be smart. It has to be savvy.
Deliberative, collaborative.
— But not for lone cowboys.
Heads Together?
How do we put our heads together? How can we be allowed to be NPCs on many things, allowed to leave the game altogether when others are far better informed and trustworthy, and actively encouraged to engage with one other collaboratively, to Do the Things Together for what’s most worth caring about? How to safeguard against succumbing to interest-based groupishness and activism for activism’s sake?
Can we act like Hannah Arendt prescribed, thinking what we are doing, while still minding and caring about the thinking and acting of others? Can we keep the good of the whole and not merely narrow interests and predilections in mind?
Can we start something new in the world?
Our species, collectively, already has.
The west has been happy to send its Great Men (and Women) into colonize and organize the poor into cog-like places in factories. People think capitalism is about competition, but it's even more about massive coordination inside companies, which then (ostensibly) compete with each other. Have a look inside Asian auto, electronics, chip, and textile factories -- or inside Amazon in the US. Yes, there are masses of people around the world to be educated, gain skills, become employed, work jobs. But the ideal is not one Big Person and 10,000's of little people. (Cowboy gurus and their million followers not excluded.) *Collaboration* between equals, with diversified expertise (everyone in different areas), would be a different paradigm. Could it be done at scale? I don't know.
The problem is that there are simply too many people, and in the western world individualism has made too many cowboys. This is not the case everywhere. There are places in the world where smart, savvy visionaries are still a rarity, where competent leadership is still desperately needed. Just don't expect to get paid much for it.