Bureaucracies Run Amok!
Technofeudalism - Rise of the 'Smart' Algorithm?
...from Chuang Su in 323 BC who said, "For security against robbers who snatch purses, rifle luggage and crack safes, one must fasten all property with ropes, locker with locks, bolter with bolts. For property owners, this is elementary good sense. But when a strong thief comes along, he picks up the whole lot, puts it on his back, and goes on his way with only one fear that ropes and locks and bolts may give way.
Banks, financial power, and government puppets: It's the same with targets. If you have a target for the money supply or a target for the share price, it lets people predict what's going to happen next and they can start betting on it. And you've got the emergence of hedge funds which lay bets and become so powerful that even a government can say "we're going to ignore you". And this is a little bit of the problem we have.
Max Weber distinguished between bureaucrats and leaders. The ethic for a bureaucrat is to do what the leader says. "Did you say 6 million Jews over here or did you say 5.9?" You know, you don't decide if it's right or wrong to send all these people over here. You just want to make sure you've heard the order properly. That's being an ethical bureaucrat. The ethics for a leader would be to make a decision they take responsibility for.
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“For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain.' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”
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