Editorial
The cancer of bureaucracy: How it will destroy science, medicine,
education; and eventually everything else
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Summary
Everyone living in modernizing ‘Western’
societies will have noticed the long-term, progressive growth and spread
of bureaucracy infiltrating all forms of social organization: nobody
loves it, many loathe it, yet it keeps expanding. Such unrelenting
growth implies that bureaucracy is parasitic and its growth
uncontrollable – in other words it is a cancer that eludes the host
immune system. Old-fashioned functional, ‘rational’ bureaucracy that
incorporated individual decision-making is now all-but extinct, rendered
obsolete by computerization. But modern bureaucracy evolved from it,
the key ‘parasitic’ mutation being the introduction of committees for
major decision-making or decision-ratification. Committees are a
fundamentally irrational, incoherent, unpredictable decision-making
procedure; which has the twin advantages that it cannot be formalized
and replaced by computerization, and that it generates random variation
or ‘noise’ which provides the basis for natural selection processes.
Modern bureaucracies have simultaneously grown and spread in a positive
feedback cycle; such that interlinking bureaucracies now constitute the
major environmental feature of human society which affects
organizational survival and reproduction. Individual bureaucracies must
become useless parasites which ignore the ‘real-world’ in order to adapt
to rapidly-changing ‘bureaucratic reality’. Within science, the major
manifestation of bureaucracy is peer review, which – cancer-like – has
expanded to obliterate individual authority and autonomy. There has been
local elaboration of peer review and metastatic spread of peer review
to include all major functions such as admissions, appointments,
promotions, grant review, project management, research evaluation,
journal and book refereeing and the award of prizes. Peer review eludes
the immune system of science since it has now been accepted by other
bureaucracies as intrinsically valid, such that any residual individual
decision-making (no matter how effective in real-world terms) is
regarded as intrinsically unreliable (self-interested and corrupt). Thus
the endemic failures of peer review merely trigger demands for
ever-more elaborate and widespread peer review. Just as peer review is
killing science with its inefficiency and ineffectiveness, so parasitic
bureaucracy is an un-containable phenomenon; dangerous to the extent
that it cannot be allowed to exist unmolested, but must be utterly
extirpated. Or else modernizing societies will themselves be destroyed
by sclerosis, resource misallocation, incorrigibly-wrong decisions and
the distortions of ‘bureaucratic reality’. However, unfortunately,
social collapse is the more probable outcome, since parasites can evolve
more rapidly than host immune systems.
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