Medical Hypotheses 74 (2010) 961965

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Medical Hypotheses
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mehy

Editorial

The cancer of bureaucracy: How it will destroy science, medicine, education;

and eventually everything else
s u m m a r y
Everyone living in modernizing Western societies will have noticed the long-term, progressive growth
and spread of bureaucracy inltrating 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-ratication. 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 inefciency 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.
2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Everyone in modernizing Western societies (roughly the USA,

UK, Western and Central Europe) will, no doubt, have noticed that
there has been a long-term, progressive growth and spread of
bureaucracy. Except during major war; this has not been a matter
of pendulum swings, with sometimes less and sometimes more
bureaucracy, but instead of relentless overall expansion albeit
sometimes faster and at other times slower.
The bureaucratic takeover applies to science, medicine, education, law, police, the media indeed to almost all social functions.
Such unrelenting growth implies either that (1). Bureaucracy is vital to societal functioning and the more bureaucracy we have the
better for us; or that (2). Bureaucracy is parasitic and its growth
is uncontrollable. Since the rst alternative has become obviously
absurd, I am assuming the second alternative is correct: that
bureaucracy is like a cancer of modernizing societies i.e. its
0306-9877/$ - see front matter 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2009.11.038

expansion is malignant and its effect is rst parasitic, then eventually fatal.
While it is generally recognized that modern societies are being
bled-dry by the expense, delays, demoralization and reality-blindness imposed by multiple expanding and interacting bureaucracies, it is not properly recognized that bureaucratic decisionmaking is not merely awed by its expense and sluggishness but
also by its tendency to generate wrong answers. Modern bureaucracy, indeed, leads to irrational and unpredictable decisions; to
indefensible decisions which are barely comprehensible, and cannot be justied, even by the people directly involved in them.
In what follows, I will make a distinction between, on the one
hand, Weberian, functional, rational bureaucracy which (in its
ideal type, as derived from the work of Max Weber; 18641920)
incorporated individual decision-making and was evaluated exter-

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Editorial / Medical Hypotheses 74 (2010) 961965

nally in terms of results and efciency; and, on the other hand,

modern parasitic bureaucracy which (in its ideal type) deploys
majority vote committees for its major decision-making, is orientated purely towards its own growth, and which by means of its
capacity to frame reality has become self-validating.
I will argue that parasitic bureaucracy evolved from rational
bureaucracy in response to the rapidly changeable selection pressures imposed by modern society, especially the selection pressure
from other bureaucracies having constructed an encompassing,
virtual but dominant system of bureaucratic reality; and that
the system of rational bureaucracy is by now all-but extinct having been rendered obsolete by computerization.
The problem of parasitic bureaucracy
It is a striking feature of modern bureaucracy that nobody loves
it, many loathe it (even, or especially, the bureaucrats themselves),
yet it keeps growing and spreading. One reason is that bureaucracy
is able to frame reality, such that the more that bureaucracy dominates society, the more bureaucracy seems to be needed; hence
the response to any bureaucracy-generated problem is always to
make more and bigger bureaucracies. It is this positive feedback
system which is so overwhelming. Mere human willpower is
now clearly inadequate to combat bureaucratic expansionism.
Bureaucracy has become like The Borg on Star Trek: the next generation: it feeds-upon and assimilates opposition.
Bureaucracies are indeed no longer separable but form a linked
web; such that to cut one bureaucracy seems always to imply another, and larger, bureaucracy to do the cutting. When the dust has
settled, it is invariably found that the total sum and scope of societal bureaucratic activity has increased. And it is well recognized
that modern bureaucracies tend to discourse-about, but never to
eradicate, problems it is as-if the abstract bureaucratic system
somehow knew that its survival depended upon continually working-on, but never actually solving problems. . . Indeed, problems
seldom even get called problems nowadays, since problems imply
the need and expectation for solutions; instead problems get called
issues, a term which implies merely the need to work-on them
indenitely. To talk in terms of solving problems is actually regarded as nave and simplistic; even when, as a matter of empirical observation, these exact same problems were easily solved in
the past, as a matter of record.
Over much of the world, public life is now mostly a matter of
bureaucracy speaking unto bureaucracy. Observations and opinions from individual humans simply dont register unless, of
course, individual communications happen to provide inputs
which bureaucracies can use to create more regulations, more
oversight, hence create more work for themselves. So individual
complaints which can be used to trigger bureaucratic activity
may be noted and acted-upon, or personal calls for more bureaucratic oversight may be amplied, elaborated and implemented.
But anything which threatens the growth and spread of bureaucracy (i.e. anything simple that is also worryingly swift, efcient
or effective) is ignored; or in extremis attacked with lethal intent.
The main self-defence of modern bureaucracy, however, is to
frame reality. Since bureaucracies now dominate society, that
which bureaucracies recognize and act-upon is reality; while that
which bureaucracies do not recognize does not, for practical purposes, exist. Bureaucracy-as-a-system, therefore constructs a reality which is conducive to the thriving of bureaucracy-as-a-system.
When a powerful bureaucracy does not recognize a communication as an input, then that communication is rendered anecdotal
and irrelevant. Information which the bureaucracy rejects takes-on
an unreal, subjective quality. Even if everybody, qua individual,
knows that some thing is real and true it becomes possible for
modern bureaucracy implicitly to deny that things existence sim-

ply by disregarding it as an input, and instead responding to different inputs that are more conducive to expansion, and these are
then rendered more signicant and realer than actual reality.
For many people, the key dening feature of a bureaucracy (as
described by Weber) is that ideally it is an information-processing
organization that has established objective procedures which it
implements impartially. It is these quasi-mechanical procedures
which are supposed to link aims to outcomes; and to ensure that,
given appropriate inputs a bureaucracy almost-automatically generate predictable and specic outputs and outcomes.
However modern bureaucracies do not work like that. Indeed,
such has been the breakdown in relationship between input and
output that modern bureaucracies devote immense resources to
change pure-and-simple; for example continually changing the
recognition of input measures (i.e. continually re-dening reality)
and re-dening an organizations mission and aims (i.e. rendering
the nature of the organization different-from and incommensurable-with the past organization) and repeatedly altering the organizational outcomes regarded as relevant (re-dening making any
decline in the efciency of the organization formally un-measurable). Such change may be externally- or internally-triggered:
either triggered by the external demands of other bureaucracies
which constitute the organizational environment, or triggered by
the innate noise-generating tendencies of committees.
With endlessly-altering inputs, processes and outputs, bureaucratically-dominated organizations are impossible to critique in
terms of functionality: their effectiveness is impossible to measure,
and if or when they may be counter-productive (in terms of their
original real-world purpose) this will also be unknowable. Individual functional organizations disappear and all bureaucracies blend
into a Borg-like web of interdependent growth.
The nature of bureaucracy: rational versus parasitic
What is bureaucracy? The traditional denition emphasises
that bureaucracy entails a rational human organization which is
characterized by hierarchy and specialization of function, and that
the organization deploys explicit procedures or regulations that are
impartially administered by the personnel. A rational Weberian
bureaucracy was probably, on the whole, performing a useful function reasonably efciently in other words its effectiveness was
perceived in terms of externally-pre-decided criteria, and its
growth and spread were circumscribed.
In medical terms, Weberian bureaucracy was therefore at
worst a benign tumour; potentially able to overgrow locally
and exert pressure on its surroundings; but still under control
from, and held in check by, the larger host organism of society.
But, just as cancers usually evolve from benign precursors, so it
was that modern parasitic and useless bureaucracies evolved from
the rational and functional bureaucracies of an earlier era. Probably
the key trigger factor in accelerating the rate of this evolution has
been the development of computers, which have the potential to
do almost instantly, and at near zero cost exactly the kind of
rational information-processing which in the past could only be
done (much more slowly, expensively, and erratically) by Weberian bureaucracy. My contention is that large scale rational, functional bureaucracies are now all-but extinct, destroyed by
computerization.
I assume that, when rational bureaucracy was facing extinction
from computerization, there was a powerful selection pressure for
the evolution of new forms of irrational bureaucracy since rational procedures could be converted into algorithms, formalized
and done mechanically; while irrational procedures were immune
from this competition.
The outcome is that, despite retaining a vast structure of procedure and regulation, and the organizational principles of hierarchy

Editorial / Medical Hypotheses 74 (2010) 961965

and specialization, those powerful modern bureaucracies that survived the challenge of computerization and are still alive and
growing nowadays are non-rational in their core attributes. Irrationality is indeed an essential aspect of a modern bureaucracys ability to survive and thrive. Those bureaucracies which remain and
are expanding in this post-computerization era are neither rational
nor functional.
This evolution towards pure parasitism with no performance
of a substantive real-world function - is only possible because, for
any specic bureaucracy, its relevant environment now substantially consists of other bureaucracies. It is other bureaucracies that
are the main selection pressure: other bureaucracies pose the main
threat to survival and reproduction. A modern bureaucracy therefore must respond primarily to bureaucratic reality and any
engagement with real life (e.g. life as it is perceived by alert and
informed individual human beings) simply stands in the way of
this primary survival task.
So, the best adapted modern bureaucracies are those which
most efciently play the game of satisfying the constantly-and
rapidly-changing requirements of other major bureaucracies.
Success brings expansion by local growth and metastatic spread.
But, in contrast, satisfying the stable requirements of real life
and human nature brings a bureaucracy little or no rewards, and
a greater possibility of extinction from the actions of other
bureaucracies.
The role of committees in the evolution of bureaucracy
I will argue that the major mechanism by which irrationality
has been introduced into bureaucracies is the committee which
makes decisions by majority voting.
Committees now dominate almost all the major decision-making in modernizing societies whether in the mass committee of
eligible voters in elections, or such smaller committees as exist in
corporations, government or in the US Supreme Court: it seems that
modern societies always deploy a majority vote to decide or ratify
all questions of importance. Indeed, it is all-but-inconceivable that
any important decision be made by an individual person it seems
both natural and inevitable that such judgments be made by group
vote.
Yet although nearly universal among Western ruling elites, this
fetishizing of committees is a truly bizarre attitude; since there is
essentially zero evidence that group voting leads to good, or even
adequate, decisions and much evidence that group voting leads
to unpredictable, irrational and bad decisions.
The nonsense of majority voting was formally described by Nobel economics laureate Kenneth Arrow (1921-) in the 1960s, but it
is surely obvious to anyone who has had dealings with committees
and maintains independent judgement. It can be demonstrated
using simple mathematical formulations that a majority vote
may lead to unstable cycles of decisions, or a decision which not
one single member of the committee would regard as optimal.
For example, in a job appointments panel, it sometimes happens
that there are two strong candidates who split the panel, so the
winner is a third choice candidate whom no panel member would
regard as the best candidate. In other words any individual panel
member would make a better choice than derives from majority
voting.
Furthermore, because of this type of phenomenon, and the way
that majority decisions do not necessarily reect any individuals
opinion, committee decisions carry no responsibility. After all,
how could anyone be held responsible for outcomes which nobody
intended and to which nobody agrees? So that committees exert de
facto power without responsibility. Indeed most modern committees are typically composed of a variable selection from a number
of eligible personnel, so that it is possible that the same committee

963

may never contain the same personnel twice. The charade is kept
going by the necessary but meaningless ction of committee
responsibility, maintained by the enforcement of a weird rule that
committee members must undertake, in advance of decisions, to
abide by whatever outcome (however irrational, unpredictable,
unjustied and indefensible) the actual contingent committee
deliberations happen to lead to. This near-universal rule and practice
simply
takes
irresponsibility
and
re-names
it
responsibility. . .
Given that committee decisions are neither rational nor coherent, and are therefore radically unpredictable, what is their effect?
In a nutshell the short answer is that committees overall and in
the long-term generate random noise. Committees almost certainly increase the chances that a decision is wrong but overall
they probably do not have lead to any specically biased direction
of wrongness. While some committees using some procedures are
biased in one direction, others are biased in other directions, and in
the end I think the only thing that we can be sure about is that
committees widen the range of unpredictability of decisions.
Now, if we ask what is the role of randomness in complex systems? the answer is that random noise provides the variations
which are the subject of selection processes. For example, in biology the random errors of genetic replication provide genetic variation which affects traits that are then subjected to natural
selection. So, it seems reasonable to infer that committees generate random changes that generate variations in organizational
characteristics which are then acted-upon by selection mechanisms. Some organizational variations are amplied and thrive,
while other variations are suppressed and dwindle. Overall, this
enables bureaucracies rapidly to evolve to survive, to grow
and to spread.
How much random noise is needed in a bureaucracy (or any
evolving system)? The short answer is that the stronger is the
selection pressure, the greater is the necessity for rapid evolution,
then the more noise is needed; bearing in mind the trade-off by
which an increased error rate in reproduction also reduces the ability of an evolving system accurately to reproduce itself. A system
under strong selection pressure (e.g. a bureaucracy in a rapidlychanging modernizing society) tends to allow or generate more
noise to create a wider range of variation for selection to act upon
and thereby enable faster evolution at the expense of less exact
replication. By contrast, a system under weaker selection pressure
(such as the Weberian bureaucracies of the early 20th century for
instance the British Civil Service) have greater delity of replication (less noise), but at the expense of a reduced ability to change
rapidly in response to changing selection pressures.
I am saying here that committees using majority voting are
responsible for the evolution of malignant bureaucratic growth in
modern bureaucracies, and that this is why majority vote decision-making permeates modern societies from the top to the
bottom.
Although almost all major decision-making in the Western
world is now by majority voting there may be two signicant
exceptions: rstly military decision-making in time of war; secondly the personal authority of the Pope in the Roman Catholic
Church. In both these types of organization there seems to be a
greater emphasis on individual decision-making than on committee voting. Military command structures and the Roman Catholic
hierarchy are therefore probably both closer to the ideal type of
a Weberian rational bureaucracy than to the ideal type of a modern
parasitic bureaucracy.
If so, the only major exceptions to majority rule decision-making at a world level, and probably not by coincidence, are the oldest
and longest-enduring bureaucratic structures: that is, organizations which have retained functionality and have not themselves
been destroyed by bureaucratic cancer.

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Editorial / Medical Hypotheses 74 (2010) 961965

Why are there committees at all?

Although they may nowadays be almost wholly damaging,
committees cannot in their origins have been entirely useless or
harmful; or else the form would never have survived its rst
appearance. If we acknowledge that individuals have the potential
for better (i.e. more rational and coherent) decision-making than
committees, then the decline of individual decision-making must
not be due to the lack of advantages so much as the perceived
problems of individual decision-making.
The problems of individual decision-making are the same as the
problems of individual power: in essence these problems are selfinterest (i.e. the observation that power will be deployed differentially to benet the power-holder) and corruption (i.e. the observation that over time power will corrupt, making the individual
progressively a worse-and-worse decision-maker until he is not
merely self-interested but progressively driven mad: power mad).
Since humans are self-centred beings living in an imperfect
world, all individuals tend to be both self-interested and corruptible (albeit to widely-varying degrees!). Of course, self-interest
and corruptibility applies equally to people serving on committees each of whom is wielding lesser but anonymous and irresponsible power. Nonetheless, it seems to me that committees
are mostly favoured because they are seen as a solution to these
intrinsic problems of individual power. The implicit assumption
is that when a committee is run by majority voting then individual
self-interests will cancel-out. Furthermore, that since power is
spread-around more people on a committee, then the inevitably
corrupting effect of power will be similarly diluted.
In reality, committees mostly solve the problems of power to
the extent that they reducing the effective deployment of power.
So that, if committees are indeed less self-interested and less prone
to corruption than individuals, this is achieved mainly because the
committee structure and procedures make decision-making so
unpredictable and incoherent that committees are rendered ineffective: ineffective to such an extent that committees cannot even
manage consistently to be self-interested or corrupt! Therefore,
the problems of power are solved, not by reducing the biases or
corruptions of power, but simply by reducing the effectiveness of
power; by introducing inefciencies and obscuring the clarity of
self-interest with the labile confusions of group dynamics. Power
is not controlled but destroyed. . .
Therefore, if committees were introduced to reduce the abuse of
power, then instead of achieving this, their actual outcome is that
committees reduce power itself, and society is made docile when
confronted by signicant problems which could be solved, but
are not. And surely this is precisely what we observe in the West,
on an hourly basis?
Because committee-based bureaucracy is predicated on an ethic
of power as evil: it functions as a sort of unilateral disarmament
that would be immediately obvious as self-defeating or maladaptive unless arising in a context of already-existing domination.
And a system of committee-based bureaucracy can only survive
for as long as it its opponents can be rendered even-weaker by
even-more virulent afiction with the same disease: which perhaps explains the extra-ordinarily venomous and dishonest pseudo-moralizing aggression which committee bureaucracy adopts
towards other simpler, more-efcient or more-effective organizational systems that still use individual decision-making.
If we assume that committees were indeed introduced as a purported solution to (real or imagined, actual or potential) abuses of
individual power; then committees will therefore usually achieve
this goal. So long as the quality of decision-making is ignored, then
the committees seem to be successful. Committees can therefore
be seen as a typical product of one-sided and unbalanced moralism
that has discarded the Aristotelian maxim of moderation in all

things. Bureaucracy adopts instead unilateral moralism which aims

at the complete avoidance of one kind of sin, even at the cost of falling
into another contrasting kind of sin (so pride is avoided by encouraging submission, and aggression is avoided by imposing sloth).
However the subject matter of trade-offs is avoided; and the
inevitable self-created problems of single issue moral action are instead fed-upon by bureaucracy, leading (of course!) to further
expansion.
Hence, modern decision-making means that societal capability
has declined in many areas. It has become at best slow and expensive, and at worst impossible, to achieve things which were done
quickly, efciently and effectively under systems based on individual decision-making. To avoid the corruption of individual authority, society has been rendered helpless in the face of threats which
could have been combated.
Bureaucracy in science the cancer of peer review
This situation can readily be seen in science. Although modern
science is massively distorted and inltrated by the action of external bureaucracies in politics, public administration, law, business
and the media (for example); the major manifestation of bureaucracy actually within science is of course peer review.
Over the last half-century or so, the growth and metastatic
spread of peer review as a method of decision-making in science
has been truly amazing. Individual decision-making has been allbut obliterated at every level and for almost every task. The elaborateness of peer review has increased (e.g. the number of referees,
the number of personnel on evaluating panels, the amount of information input demanded by these groups). And peer review or
other types of committee are now used for admissions, appointments, promotions, grant review, project management, research
evaluation, journal and book refereeing, the award of prizes. . .
the list just goes on and on. Clearly, peer review ts the pattern
of malignant expansion of bureaucracy that is seen in the rest of
modern society.
And, as with the rest of society, the cancer of bureaucratic peer
review eludes the immune system of science. It has now been
widely accepted, by the other bureaucracies of modern society in
particular, that peer review is intrinsically valid; and that any other
form of decision-making is intrinsically corrupt or unreliable. This
belief is not merely implicit, but frequently explicit: with ignorant
and nonsensical statements about the vital and dening role of
peer review in science being the norm in mainstream
communication.
The irresistible rise of peer review can be seen most starkly in
that any deciencies in peer review triggers demands (especially
from other bureaucracies) for more elaborate and widespread
peer review. So that the endemic failure of increased journal peer
review to maintain quality, or to eliminate what it is purported to
detect; such as deliberate fraud, or multiple publication, or serious error leads inevitably leads to plans for further increases
in peer review. So there is peer review of greater elaborateness,
with further steps added to the process, and extra layers of monitoring by new types of larger committees. The ultimate validity
of peer review is simply an assumption; and no amount of contrary evidence of its stultifying inefciency, its harmful biases,
and distorting exclusions can ever prove anything except the
need for more of the same.
Yet the role of peer review in the progress of science remains, as
it always has been, conjectural and unveried. The processes of
gathering and collating peer opinion as a method of decision-making are neither rational nor transparent and indeed (as argued
above) this irrationality and unpredictability is in fact a necessary
factor in the ability of committee systems such as peer review to
expand without limit.

Editorial / Medical Hypotheses 74 (2010) 961965

In the past; the ultimate, bottom-line, within science validation

of science came not from the committee opinions of peer reviewers
but from the emergent phenomenon of peer usage which refers
to the actual deployment of previous science (theories, facts, techniques) in the ongoing work of later scientists. This was an implicit,
aggregate but not quantied outcome of a multitude of individualdecisions among peers (co-workers in the same domain) about
what aspects of previous science they would use in their own research: each user of earlier work was betting their time, effort
and reputation on the validity of the previous research which they
chose to use. When their work bore fruit, this a validation of previous research (in the sense that having survived this attempt at refutation the old science now commanded greater condence); but
when previous research was faulty it sabotaged any later research
building upon it in terms of correctly predicting or effectivelyintervening-in the natural world. Beyond this lies the commonsensical evaluation of science in terms of what works especially
what works outside of science, by people such as engineers and
doctors whose job is to apply science in the natural world.
But now that committee-based peer review has been explicitly
accepted as the gold standard of scientic validity, we see the bizarre situation that actual scientic usage and even what works is
regarded as less important than the bureaucratic reality of peer
review evaluations. Mere opinions trump observations of objective
reality. Since bureaucratic reality is merely a construct of interacting bureaucracies, this carries the implication that scientic reality
is now, to an ever-increasing extent, simply just another aspect of,
and seamlessly-continuous-with, mainstream bureaucratic reality. Science is merely a subdivision of that same bureaucratic reality seen in politics, public administration, law, the media and
business. The whole thing is just one gigantic virtual world. It
seems probable that much of peer reviewed science nowadays
therefore carries no implications of being useful in understanding,
predicting or intervening-on the natural world.
In other words, when science operates on the basis of peer review and committee decision, it is not really science at all. The cancer of bureaucracy has killed real science wherever it dominates.
Much of mainstream science is now Zombie Science: that is,
something which supercially looks-like science, but which is
actually dead inside, and kept-moving only by continuous infusion
of research funds. So far as bureaucratic reality is concerned, i.e.
the reality as acknowledged among the major bureaucracies; real
science likely now exists at an unofcial, unacknowledged level,
below the radar; only among that minority of scholars and
researchers who still deploy the original scientic evaluation
mechanisms such as individual judgement, peer usage and realworld effectiveness.
What will happen?
The above analysis suggests that parasitic bureaucracy is so
dangerous in the context of a modernizing society that it cannot
be allowed to exist; it simply must be destroyed in its entirety or
else any residuum will re-grow, metastasize and colonize society
all over again. The implication is that a future society which intends to survive in the long-term would need to be one that prevents parasitic bureaucracy from even getting a toe-hold.
The power of parasitic bureaucracy to expand and to trigger further parasitic bureaucracies is now rendered de facto un-stoppable
by the power of interacting bureaucracies to frame and construct
perceived reality in bureaucratic terms. Since bureaucratic failure
is eliminated by continual re-denition of success, and the since
any threats of to bureaucratic expansion are eliminated by exclusion or lethal attack; the scope of bureaucratic takeover from
now can be limited only by collapse of the social system as a
whole.

965

So, if the above analysis is correct, there can be only two outcomes. Either that the cancer of modern bureaucracy will be extirpated: destroyed utterly. In other words, the host immune system
will evolve the ability to destroy the parasite. Maybe, all majority
voting committees will coercively be replaced by individuals who
have the authority to make decisions and responsibility for those
decisions.
Or that the cancer of bureaucracy will kill the host. In other
words, the parasite will continue to elude the immune system.
Modernizing societies will sooner-or-later be destroyed by a combination of resource starvation plus accumulative damage from delayed and wrong decisions based on the exclusions and distortions
of bureaucratic reality.
Then the most complex rapidly-growing modernizing Western
societies will be replaced by, or will regress into, zero-growth societies with a lower level of complexity - probably about the level of
the agrarian societies of the European or Asian Middle Ages.
My prediction is that outcome two societal collapse is at
present the more probable, on the basis that parasites can evolve
more rapidly than host immune systems. Although as individuals
we can observe the reality of approaching disaster, to modern parasitic bureaucracies the relevant data is either trivial or simply
invisible.
Further reading
Although I do not mention it specically above, the stimulus to
writing this essay came from Mark A Notturnos Science and the
open society: the future of Karl Poppers philosophy (Central European University Press: Budapest, 2000) in particular the account
of Poppers views on induction. It struck me that committee decision-making by majority vote is a form of inductive reasoning,
hence non-valid; and that inductive reasoning is in practice no
more than a form of authoritarianism (as Notturno terms it). In
the event, I decided to exclude this line of argument from the essay
because I found it too hard to make the point interesting and accessible. Nonetheless, I am very grateful to have had it explained to
me.
I should also mention that various analyses of the pseudonymous blogger Mencius Moldbug, who writes at Unqualied Reservations, likely had a signicant role in developing the above ideas.
This argument builds upon several previous pieces of mine
including: Conicts of interest in medical science: peer usage, peer
review and CoI consultancy (Medical Hypotheses 2004; 63: 181
6); Charlton BG, Andras P. What is management and what do managers do? A systems theory account. (Philosophy of Management.
2004; 3: 315); Peer usage versus peer review (BMJ 2007; 335:
451); Charlton BG, Andras P. Medical research funding may have
over-expanded and be due for collapse (QJM 2005; 98: 535); Figureheads, ghost-writers and pseudonymous quant bloggers: the
recent evolution of authorship in science publishing (Medical
Hypotheses. 2008; 71: 47580); Zombie science (Medical Hypotheses 2008; 71: 3279); The vital role of transcendental truth in science (Medical Hypotheses. 2009; 72: 3736); Are you an honest
scientist? Truthfulness in science should be an iron law, not a vague aspiration (Medical Hypotheses. 2009; 73: 6335); and, After
science: has the tradition been broken? Medical Hypotheses; in
press.
Bruce G. Charlton
Editor-in-Chief Medical Hypotheses
Professor of Theoretical Medicine,
University of Buckingham,
United Kingdom
E-mail address: bruce.charlton@buckingham.ac.uk