How bureaucracy can undermine the State

Shrinking or dismantling the State through political processes – running candidates, lobbying against various policies, etc – is mostly a waste of time. The system’s rules are set up to favour the interests of those inside the corporate-State power structure, against those on the outside proposing fundamental change.

And the big corporate players that benefit from the interventionist State will always have more lawyers and money to play the game with.

But outside pressure on the State as a side-effect of shifts in public consciousness and culture – and using that pressure to exacerbate and encourage the divisions that inevitably emerge within all elites – may be very fruitful indeed.

The same is true of the Judiciary and particular segments of the State bureaucracy. Playing by their rules is a fool’s errand, as a means of advancing a positive libertarian agenda. But exploiting their rules against them is a powerful, low-cost weapon to impede their functioning.

The State, like a demon, is bound by the laws and internal logic of the form it takes. As that evil goddess said in Ghostbusters, “Choose the form of the destructor.”

When a segment of the bureaucracy is captured by its own ideological self-justication, or courts by the letter of the law they pretend to enforce, they can be used as a weapon for monkey-wrenching the larger system.

Bureaucrats, by following the letter of policy, often engage in de facto “work-to-rule” against the larger system they serve.

The State, like any authoritarian hierarchy, requires standing rules that restrict the freedom of subordinates to pursue the institution’s real purpose, because it can’t trust those subordinates. The State’s legitimising rhetoric, we know, conceals a real exploitative function.

Nevertheless, despite the overall functional role of the State, it needs standard operating procedures to enforce predictable behaviour on its subordinates.

And once subordinates are following those rules, the State can’t send out dog-whistles telling functionaries what “real” double-super-secret rules they’re “really” supposed to follow, or to supplement the countless volumes of rule-books designed to impose predictability on subordinates.”

So, while enough functionaries may ignore the rules to keep the system functioning after a fashion, others pursue letter of policy in ways that impair the “real” mission of the state.

Unlike the State and other authoritarian institutions, self-organised networks can pursue their real interests while benefiting from their members’ complete contribution of their abilities, without the hindrance of standard operating procedures and bureaucratic rules based on distrust.

To put it in terms of St Paul’s theology, networks can pursue their interests single-mindedly without the concupiscence

– the war in their members – that weakens hierarchies.

So we can game the system, sabotaging the State with its own rules – what’s called “working to rule” in labour disputes – but we can do much more.

We can pursue tactical alliances with dissident sub-groups within the State bureaucracy, appealing to their genuine attachment to the stated missions of the agencies they work for in ways that undermine their real missions.

Mr Carson is a senior fellow of the Centre for a Stateless Society