The Consensus of the Committee

J.R. Dunn writes his thoughts on the efficacy of bureaucracies in action in three news stories of late; the Iranian capture of the British sailors, the Virginia Tech massacre, and the War on Terror. The article is titled 'Bureaucratic Failures' and published in American Thinker.

[...]The reason bureaucracies fail, (Robin) Fox tells us, is "...because they are, in some sense, inhuman." By this he doesn't that they are vicious or cruel (although they can be), but that they are, by their very nature, at odds with human nature as it exists. Bureaucracies operate according to a certain fixed set of procedures. They are an attempt - heroic or otherwise - to force the world to conform to a rational system. But human beings, much as we pride ourselves on our rational thinking, are actually a grab-bag of instincts, intuition, and habit, with a handful of rationality thrown in to pull everything else together. This serves us well because it matches how the universe actually works, but it also means that there will always be a conflict between bureaucracies and human beings. The relationship starts out on the wrong foot and gets worse as it goes along. [...]

'... at odds with human nature...'; a seeming attempt to categorize Man as a machine. It stifles individual creativity and talents, especially leadership. It promotes mediocrity, squelching exceptionalism into conformity. Participation is not attractive to the 'best and the brightest', but to the mediocre. Its results are the same... in triplicate.