Molasses heralds authoritarianism

We need to term for things that slow government to a crawl. Corruption it's not a good enough term because not everything is driven by corruption. There really are stakeholders and lawsuits and EA impact studies, and so forth that have to be resolved. Different countries have different kinds of proceduralisms, different reasons, whatever. Let's just throw it all into one basket and call it bureaucratic molasses. 

Sometimes it pays to be very specific. We are going to zoom out a little bit and talk about all the molasses in government projects.

Molasses always has the flavor of the sacred. When you ask people why there's so much molasses inhibiting the construction of a new highway, a new High-Speed rail, turnpike, new housing, new ports, new refineries, new pipelines, and so forth they will give you very good valid reasons why it can't be done, or shouldn't be done. There is always a sacred injunction for why it can't be done. That's one of the characteristics of molasses. Either someone has to get paid off or some sacred totem is being violated. Rome can't dig that new subway because of ancient artifacts. California can't build that new High-Speed rail because Constitutional procedures must be followed, or the bones of Native Americans must be respected, we have to do our fifth environmental impact statement, or whatever. There's always a sacred reason why it can't be done. Molasses is the sacred and corrupt conspiring together to inhibit action. Molasses says: but you didn't consult the stakeholders! What about the property owners? What about the migratory birds? What about the prairie dogs?

Molasses causes authoritarianism. Now most people who love molasses will get offended by this. They will say that following procedures is how you prevent authoritarianism. But that's exactly backwards. Efficient proceduralism is how you prevent authoritarianism, not proceduralism itself. When the administrative state can move rapidly and build things despite having to check off all the boxes then you've got a recipe that works. When the administrative state can't do anything fast you've now got a moral justification for tyranny. Molasses gives moral justification to authoritarian government. The very people saying "Trump didn't follow procedure!" are the reason he got away with not following procedure. They are completely tone deaf because what people here is "I like to obstruct getting things done in order to keep myself employed." The other day I actually saw a video where some bureaucrat said that "Trump was moving too fast." Like that was the objection. Not what he was doing, but that he was doing it too quickly.

It's difficult to underestimate the blow to moral legitimacy the California High-Speed rail fiasco has done to the administrative state. It's quite possible that that fiasco all by itself added the one or two points needed to push Trump over the finish line back in 2016. This is not an exaggeration or a joke. When the bureaucracy is no longer capable of getting things done it is handing a moral justification for authoritarianism to the right. When sacred words are used to defend incompetence then moral justification is given to support the profane. If constitutional, bureaucratic, procedural government cannot get things done then unconstitutional authoritarian government will. When you say "we can't do it because of some sacred reason," you might as well say "go ahead and shoot all of us bureaucrats." Civil servants need to understand that things are going to happen no matter what, and molasses only justifies your oppression by authority. Every extra day you add to the high-speed rail fiasco is an extra foot of wall you will be lined up in front of. Molasses causes the inexorable movement of society towards authoritarianism and what's worse is that authoritarianism doesn't generally eliminate molasses, since while it can destroy the sacred half of the problem it won't eliminate the corruption.

Efficient proceduralism is the only way forward. Reform or die.

Summary of political design arguments

Democracy is leftist government

Socialism is leftist economics 

Capitalism is rightist economics 

Feudalism is rightist government 

Neoliberal societies commit the error of combining leftist government with rightist economics.

Feudalism should be paired with capitalism 

Democracy should be paired with socialism 

Capitalism inevitably converts democracy into feudalism. The methods by which this occurs are 1. legislative accumulation and 2. rent seeking laws

Marxist communism becomes so  stifling that it converts back into capitalism. This method by which this happens is bureaucracy so dense the only way to route around it is through a parallel institution of bribery.

In democracy, those who try to obstruct others rent-seeking only obstruct themselves from receiving their share.

The system accumulates cycles of money and power.

Socialism is one big cycle of money and power, encompassing the entire society.

Socialism starts left-wing and moves in a right-wing vector because someone has to work. 

Capitalism under democracy moves in a left-wing vector as those try to escape work by living off of others.

Everyone escapes until nothing can be produced anymore at which point only bribery gets things done.

Bribery then reasserts feudalism because feudalism is a system where all government positions are property exploited by the office holder for personal gain.

One stops the cycle not by resisting it but by encompassing the whole society in the cycle of money and power, that is, by converting from capitalism to consumer based economic socialism, in other words a modified version of  "The Mondragon System." Consumer-based ownership of the means of production is the same model as a credit union but applied to much of the society.

When all enjoy the spoils then once again all have an incentive to work, and to demand others contribute. 

Democracy should be paired with consumer-owned socialism, and both the Republic and corporations therin governed through a loyalty scorecard system.

Capitalism should be paired with aristocracy under a competitive feudal system.

The antimemetics of politics

In politics, imperative-based arguments are the easiest and laziest to make, which is why they are preferred by everyone. The average person lacks the will to observe reality,  which is necessary to think well. The most difficult thing is seeing what is in front of your nose. This is also the most essential. Since politics is multidisciplinary it requires the greatest amount of observation in order to come up with successful policies, since these observations must come from multiple fields, and primarily economics. Economics itself has antimemetic properties since it is the study of a counterintuitive machine and by nature the human mind resists fully understanding it. A thing is anti-mimetic when it resists its own understanding, when it resists allowing the thinker to form memories of what they are thinking about. Politics is highly anti-mimetic due to being highly emotionally triggering.

The most likely outcome of any moral policy is failure. Not because the policy is moral but because the policy is NOT strategic. Actual success in any endeavor requires careful observation of the physical world. Morally motivated actions are a great way to fail in politics. Some humans cannot hold two opposite concepts in their mind at the same time. These people cannot understand how one would first work to understand the world, then come up with moral imperatives, and then implement strategic policy. For them, any understanding of the world leads to jadedness and the abandonment of principle. For others any understanding of principle leads to the abandonment of strategic thought. This is almost universally common behavior among people. The ability to marry close observation and moral imperative is actually incredibly rare in the political field with most people choosing sociopathy or hysteria (right or left wing) instead.

A principal, once understood escapes the mind. Therefore the most essential principles are the most difficult to articulate. The ability to retain a principle in the mind and then to think with it, and then to communicate it, requires mental self-control. The more naturally understanding of a principle or a piece of mathematics comes to a person, generally the more trouble they have communicating what they know to others. Natural talent is the enemy of becoming a good educator. It is those who struggle to acquire knowledge who are generally the best communicating what they know, because the special effort involved in learning it. 

A person has a moral imperative to think, but even more importantly they have a moral imperative to observe. Making a political argument with no strategy for success is both normal and foolish. Millions have died in bloody revolutions where the revolutionaries never fully thought through the strategic implications of their own ideas. Communism was an example of hysteria overriding observation. Nearly 100 million people died and the ideology had no chance of success to begin with, not because it is communist, but because the emotional reactivity of people means that all those who understand become sociopaths, and all those who refuse to become sociopaths become hysterical. The nature of politics creates a split in the personality of individuals where they choose one path or the other. Something like communism, or any kind of utopian project, would require both a deep understanding of the nature of reality and also a refusal to give up on principles. The trouble is that to understand one is inevitably to abandon the other. This tendency is so deep in humans that only a conservative could make communism "work" , and a conservative would never want to do that. Those who are most equipped to work out a Utopian project are the least interested in achieving it. A deep understanding a political consequences requires a deep understanding of human nature, which produces a deep disgust, which destroys the motive for the Utopian project. Propaganda works because there is a market demand for it, there is a market demand for it because people refuse to think. From the perspective of the powerful, to give the common man economic fairness is to cast pearls before swine.

All societies at all times are ruled by the most intelligent members. Asking for economic justice is asking the most intelligent members of that society to engineer conditions that benefit less intelligent people. That is not significantly different than asking the most intelligent people to marginalize their own genetics, since intelligence is a reproductive strategy inherently tied to out-maneuvering the stupid and insane for mate access.