Turning Bureaucracy into Common Sense
I admire Prof. Jiang Xueqin’s predictive history channel. This is my take on his Death by Bureaucracy—how the Hydra grows and how we can raise a Unicorn instead.
How the Hydra grows
Bureaucracy is as old as civilization. It expands whenever power centralizes and performance is reduced to a single metric:
- Power narrows to one scoreboard—money, influence, KPIs.
Hustle maximizers and power brokers win by shrinking the game and externalizing costs. - Procedure outranks judgment.
Rules multiply; common sense shrinks. A Bureaucratic System Mentality (BSM) takes hold.
BSM is a belief–incentive system that prioritizes procedure over value and rule proliferation over common-sense spontaneity. Because any system of rules is either inconsistent or incomplete (Gödel’s incompleteness), BSM spreads new rules like tumor, while branding common sense “unprovable”. In the end it divides society like in Orwell’s Animal Farm and creates shortages like in Calhoun’s behavioral sink,
Organizations fall not from scarcity, but from bureaucracy: when rules outrun values, shortages begin.
Getting Back to Common Sense
Common sense lives where breadth meets speed. To move from Hydra to Unicorn:
- Use dialectics to unstick single-metric thinking.
Hold opposing values long enough to synthesize better options—beyond KPI dominance. - Make risk travel upward – Skin in the Game principle
If you make the mess, you bear the cost—à la the OECD’s polluter-pays principle. - Put authors at the frontline – ‘go and see’: Toyota’s Genchi Genbutsu
Policy is made where it’s lived—Street-Level Bureaucracy
Educating beyond BSM (the long game)
Bureaucracy feeds on mass ignorance: consumerism, rule-based schooling, centralized definitions of “good/bad,” and compliance as virtue. The antidote is generational:
- Decentralize schools. From one-size-fits-all to community pathways: Deschooling Society.
- Redefine “good” and “bad.” Move beyond utilitarian consumerism to dialectical intimacy: Redefining Good and Bad • When Right is Bad
- Teach synthesis. Start with leaders, educators, marketers and media:
Art of Compromise • Eye Opener for Leaders • Educators, • Marketers. - Learn from indigenous and grassroots wisdom. Stewardship, reciprocity, commons:
Braiding Sweetgrass • Sacred Ecology
Grow builders who outlast brokers
Pair KPIs with higher purposes. Entrepreneurs with clean intent and warrior-craft discipline outcompete narrow metric-maximizers over time:
Understand Consumerism • Designs for the Pluriverse • Deep Purpose • Corporate Purpose