Why Bad Systems Persist

All political, social, and interpersonal systems convey and reinforce the appearance of accomplishing a good purpose.

Bad systems are rarely created maliciously with a highly distorted image. More often, they start good and turn bad. At least, they start as good as human nature can make it.

By “bad”, something has been purposed or repurposed to the point that it doesn’t add legitimate value, foster growth, or inspire moral behavior. The causes are from evil or incompetence and don’t have to be intentional. But, evil people can (and eventually do if when they amass enough power) direct a group’s purpose to a malicious end. This begins when the entity starts acting toward the best interests of the leadership instead of the group (“realpolitik”).

Tragically, the worst bad systems were once serving a highly necessary (and often virtuous) purpose. Many times, they’ll outlive their original goals (e.g., “awareness” of a disease or fighting an injustice) and will incessantly recycle a trend into obsolescence.

A bad system has clear indicators:

  • Individuals who want to advance self-interested purposes must frequently do very specific, unusual things they wouldn’t have done otherwise.
  • The most creative or productive members loyal to the group can’t work as hard as they want or create better solutions.
  • Any safety measures either don’t work or aren’t honored.
  • Measurements to judge merit in the system are easy to cheat at, and most members do.
  • Leaders have no motivation to value merit, so they promote people who fit their preferences. Over time, all the leadership will look eerily similar because they’ve all been close friends for a long time.
  • People are unsafe or dying, but the leaders either don’t acknowledge it or shift blame.
  • The image of the organization as seen from outside is vastly different from the reality inside it.
  • The documentation and communication is vague or difficult to understand, and often obsolete.
  • Any processes or systems have a slow response time or are utterly insufficient for what they’re supposed to do.
  • The leadership is unusually young, unusually related to the rest of the leadership, or all share membership of a smaller and unrelated special interest group.

One of the most frequent behaviors of bad systems is to suppress better solutions to problems they may not provide themselves. That way, they can continue benefiting from a less sufficient service:

  • Big ice worked very hard to prevent refrigerators, including deceptive advertising campaigns that implied children would get trapped inside and die.
  • A simple cure for cancer, if it exists, would never be as profitable as all the treatments.
  • Tax filing services in the USA presently work to prevent free tax filing services through the government.

Magnification

In any group, everyone’s understanding and ability increases over time, but also their foolishness and incompetence.

Bad systems arise from relatively unimportant details at first:

  • The members don’t respect their leadership.
  • Someone is promoted to leadership who isn’t the best fit for the role. This can come from that person having poor boundaries with others, no skill, or evil intent.
  • Some of the organization’s rules are irrelevant and nobody updated it.
  • The organization must respond to other outside groups for many of their decisions.

As the organization scales and everyone specializes, the members have informal conversations with one another about the group’s issues. Once multiple people agree on how the group’s culture doesn’t address practical things, they feel confident that the thing is reality and not merely an improbable event.

Once people know they’re not delusional, they’re more willing to break the group’s rules. Eventually, the entire organization suffers collective decay as motivations toward self-interest override the motivation for any collective good.

The moral decay among individuals comes through several key motivators:

Bad Appointment

Members can contribute to a dysfunctional system, but the leaders’ decisions have a far more profound effect on the group. They will promote values that endorse or, at the very least, permit activities that harm the group at large.

One person with malicious or selfish intent in a key position of influence in a system can often destroy that system’s effectiveness. Even in a large group, it can reduce their productivity by upwards of 40%.

Often, bad leaders can quickly emerge in a good system:

The most tragic part of bad leaders is that their efforts are often well-intended, but they either have a defective philosophy of humanity or simply don’t have the personality to lead.

Any system can fall apart into a bad system, since the most reliable way to gain power is to skim just a little off each entity instead of exploiting one of them severely. This can mean payment processors, fee collectors, and others are most likely to become the bad system, but it can be anyone who is willing to harm many people only a little bit.

Bad Management

Many specific, bad leadership decisions can create a bad system:

  • Redundant policies that add extra work but don’t add value to the organization’s knowledge or power. This can come from double-entering information or cross-referencing two systems that draw from the same source.
  • Security policies that don’t adapt to trends and technology. They won’t protect much from anyone with enough desire and a little creativity, but will stifle members from creating legitimately useful things for the organization. The clearest indicator is when members only have partial information to do the task, but no idea of the consequences of their task.
  • It’s much easier to make new rules than amend old ones, especially long-standing rules. Most members trust there’s a good reason for the rules and build habits around them. Leaders often fear short-term changes that may affect members’ productivity or erode their trust in the group, even if it’s an incredibly beneficial long-term decision.
  • Low-rank members rarely care about their organization as much as the leaders. However, they often appear to be loyal to please their leaders. A leader unaware of this will make catastrophically stupid decisions based on all the members’ attitude being the same as the leaders’.
  • If leaders inherit a system, they may not know what the previous leader had been doing or why. They’ll often keep existing rules to maintain routines, but add more. This makes tasks excessively complicated and more time-consuming, which the individuals will eventually learn to streamline by ignoring at least some rules.
  • Tests may appear to verify aptitude or understanding, so leaders will sharply define roles with them, but they can be manipulated through influencing the test proctors, memorizing the answers in advance, or studying only portions of the curriculum that will be on the test.
  • Leaders will often disregard relevant trends and technologies that would change the system’s role or importance to members and outside groups. This often comes from complacency or forgetting how power can shift at the speed of changed beliefs.
  • Some leaders focus solely on image over substance by creatively manipulating numbers and distorting image. This can often mislead other powerful people/groups and give undeserved credibility or shame.
  • Many leaders will take the group’s power for granted, then make decisions that fulfill their personal desires instead of the best interests of the group.
  • If the predictions of the leaders become inaccurate enough, they’ll blow vast amounts of power on useless projects with an unclear or ineffective purpose.

Often, since the leadership won’t particularly care about the unspoken masses of people outside their group, their mismanagement will be magnified by the other people they listen to. Instead of paying attention to the most thought-provoking criticism, they’ll usually pay more attention to the majority (who are often biased toward political fashions or simply acting on their first-impulse emotions) or their superiors (who are often biased toward more power).

Usually, the worst systems are made of multiple bad leadership decisions that feed into each other, and often across multiple leaders who didn’t know what the previous leader had been doing or how to run an organization wisely.

Frequently, bad systems are legally forbidden or have too much to lose to say “no”, so they find methods to make people give up without them having to say it:

  • Creating a bureaucratic system of different departments that can redirect people endlessly until they give up.
  • Creating internal organizational rules vague enough or unenforceable enough that organization members can flout at any time, but permits the member to say “company policy” for an undisclosed purpose.
  • Making scheduled events absurdly difficult for individuals to accomplish specific purposes (e.g., a technician will be at a residence in a few weeks sometime during that day).
  • Finding alternative stated purposes for not performing an action (e.g., a sexist/racist saying someone “isn’t a good fit for the organization”).

Of course, evil intent can lead to horrible management as well. However, their purposes will be more focused on unfairly destroying specific members who adhere to ideas the leadership doesn’t agree with or threatens their power:

If everyone in a group is sufficiently educated, the leadership can’t maintain its power. However, education requires work, so the leadership will skew the truth:

  • It’s human nature that nobody likes to be blamed, and people will often tweak their image to sidestep it. However, bad leadership constantly tries to redirect blame. Usually, they’ll be unfairly punitive or gracious to the subject of their blame. They’re simply taking advantage of the opportunity, and tend not to sincerely believe anything they say.
  • Frequently, the leadership of a bad system can find other unaffiliated groups to act as a third party (e.g., consultant, outside group). If anything wrong happens, they can always shift blame to that third party and sever ties with them to maintain their image. Then, they can simply travel to one of that third party’s competitors (who don’t communicate the risks of working with them). If the victim group’s specialization is in enough of a cycle, there will be a never-ending supply of blame-shifting until all new entrants to that market are exhausted.
  • Often, when the system is older than the leader, they’ll find ways to blend in by saying and doing what other leaders in other bad systems are doing. By conforming to existing standards, the premise is that they can’t be blamed because they were simply honoring the standard.
  • Create a relatively small spectrum of what is deemed as acceptable opinion, then foster fierce debates within that smaller domain to redirect from the larger spectrum of ideas.

Other times, the leaders of a good system will try to seize more power beyond the group’s specialty. This shift will transition the group’s priorities and identity, often leaving it far-removed from its original mission.

Occasionally, a leader will forget the values that gave them power and will decide against those values. This will result in the group breaking from that leader’s purposes. Then, another leader will arise to replace the void, which can trigger the necessary changes to fix the dysfunction.

However, leadership shifts will very rarely fix anything. The people who have the means to assume power tend to reinforce the culture of the existing system, and will therefore reinforce most of the bad decisions of the predecessor. The only changes will be relatively minor, but they may simply swap out extremes (e.g., harshness replaced by indolence).

If the organization persists to a successor, the new leadership will often consist of a unique class of several groups of people:

  1. Friends and family of the present leaders (i.e., nepotism).
  2. Members enslaved to the organization who have proven their loyalty to the leaders’ values (i.e., a puppet).
  3. Individuals who haven’t proven their loyalty, but show enough power that they can (and might) overpower the leadership (i.e., a populist).

These leaders will likely have no aptitude or ethics in comparison to their predecessors. Unlike the group’s founders, the people who take over will only have one social class to draw experience from, so they’ll be outmatched by most of the competition inside their organization, as well as any outside competitor.

Adapting Members

Most of the time a bad system has culturally normalized bad boundaries, and often punishes people who don’t honor those bad boundaries.

Most people in a bad system are at least somewhat creative, even if strictly from boredom. If they’re low-conscientiousness enough to not rise into leadership or get ejected from the group, they’ll conform to their environment:

  • Working slower or less efficiently to pad out time.
  • Creating tons of documentation to appear productive or embellish their importance.
  • Furthering their personal education or career with the organization’s resources, with the full intent to abandon that organization later.
  • Using the organization’s resources for personal use, but hiding it or lying about it.

Many of the members will be entitled, but won’t add any value to the organization or what the organization does.

Most leaders, when confronted with this issue, should evict or discipline those members to benefit the group. However, if a system is bad enough, the leadership would have to get rid of half the people in their group to have any accountability, and the best people for the roles would be gone. Instead, the leaders tend to create measurements and numerical reports to keep people productive, which leaves them in the same place, but with the illusion of things happening.

With any measured report, Goodhart’s Law will typically come into full effect. People will quickly abuse a measurement to gain from it, so any measurement will become a bad indicator of success when it becomes the goal. Either the leader must keep shifting around the measurement or trust the sub-leaders’ intuitions. More often, the leaders simply settle on measuring money.

Just because a system has become awful doesn’t mean it’s useless. The group can still recruit and retain high-quality membership:

  • People will still often join a group without any passion for that group’s vision. They’ll only transition through the group as long as the leadership expects they’ll satisfy their purposes (such as gaining money or influence beyond that group), and the high-quality people will tend to operate closer to the fringe of the group.
  • If the leader is particularly savvy, they’ll hire the smartest people they can find for a task. This will ensure that the person is working for them instead of the risk of working against them.
  • Many people see large groups, of any type, as safer than small groups, and they’ll join from that appearance if they’re averse to social risk.
  • Since their experiences can’t guide them, young people and fools are susceptible to following the impressions they felt from the group, even if those ideals are impossible to attain.
  • Evil people may see the group as an excellent opportunity to control and gain power. If the group persists with these people in it, they eventually become leadership and make the system even worse.

For whatever reason, the members don’t have confidence in the group. They’re using it for an ulterior purpose.

Growth

Many of the activities that define a bad system are variations of wise investment concepts. Most of these can create tremendous growth over time:

  • Make advantageous agreements by influencing people to sacrifice key aspects of their power in exchange for power the system may not need as much (e.g., giving publicity for money).
  • Get a significant discount from another group selling something, then sell it for a smaller discount to someone else. If possible, keep the agreements quiet and away from public criticism.
  • Instead of outright selling something, rent it out.
  • Collect royalties on what other people create.
  • Absorb risk by charging flat prices for things with a varying cost structure (e.g., it costs $40-110 to ship something, so charge $100 to do it).
  • Re-invest everything to prevent making any taxable organizational profit.

Further, as a system grows larger, it can take advantage of favorable situations much faster and more effectively than smaller groups:

  • Use tax shelters to move the money into a tax-free arrangement, often with added publicity (e.g., owned not-for-profit organizations).
  • Hire people from foreign regions where the work may be more affordable or advantageous to costs.

Very frequently, a bad system has the means to continue growing through questionably ethical approaches:

  • Issuing loans to people who don’t have the financial position (or investing savvy) to pay them back, then taking the collateral for themselves once they miss a few payments.
  • Falsely advertising in a way that’s difficult to prove is insincere.
  • Charge rent and royalties at unfairly high rates, often permitting the parent organization to profit under a contract while the subsidiary organizations or individuals will get nearly nothing by comparison.
  • Disregarding any ethical considerations and taking advantage of the lettering of vaguely worded or poorly considered laws to perform activities that are not in the spirit of its design.
  • Underpaying the people in the group, often by implying the roles are tremendous career-starting opportunities or that the person can “grow with the company”.
  • Distorting the truth about a product in a way that either hides the harm it may cause or advertises a feature the product in no way can remedy. This can include coining the term for a new disease (e.g., halitosis) or bribing/deterring scientists to prevent research.

As they defeat progressively more competitors and gain more power, a large system can operate at enormous scale, meaning they can act more efficiently than their competitors:

  • Add a tiny fee to many, many small transactions (e.g., $2 isn’t much, but becomes $2,000,000 across 100,000 people).
  • Collect a small commission on many, many small transactions (e.g., 1% for 40,000 people spending $5 each is $2,000).
  • Saving 15 seconds on a procedure to sabotage quality doesn’t mean much, but can save 15,000,000 seconds across a million tasks.

Small adaptations can convert into a diminished relationship between quality and price.

Bad systems can only subsist and grow on goods and services treated as a commodity. If the objects are observed as new or special, skimming quality is a dramatic problem. However, once an object becomes part of everyone’s habitual background, they have no reason to pay attention to quality. As much as people will condemn a bad system, they’ll still use the products until they find a suitable alternative.

Typically, the leader of a large group is not aware they’re inspiring a gigantic force of individuals that portray that leadership as an antagonist. Often, they have a sincere and misguided belief that they’re establishing a new level of order, but either fail to incorporate how humanity works (especially their range of personalities) or overstep their boundaries. They’ll often perform their tasks in secret, and it will often backfire later.

Merging

A large group’s expansion typically comes through taking over and absorbing other smaller groups, with a few tactics:

  • Selling people on the inspirational idea itself, often with certain religious implications. This can be a legitimately sincere desire if the person is receiving company stock as compensation without any strange arrangements involved.
  • Using charm to convince smaller groups that their security is far better than their freedom, often with a contract that provides much more benefit to the larger group.
  • Using fear to coerce them to give up, often through threats of the unknown, which can be accomplished effectively with anything that represents legitimate risk to the smaller group (e.g., a pre-existing story of their previous conquests, legal environment changing).

If a large business has been expanding their operations for a long time, they’ll often create subsidiary organizations that do nothing but seek smaller groups to absorb (“roll-ups”):

  1. Buy out numerous small organizations in many regions and combine them together.
  2. Fire all the back-office staff that the larger organization can do better (e.g., accounting, management).
  3. The collective organization is now capable of operating as one unit across many regions, with many added logistics benefits.

Often, a bad system will give incredibly generous incentives to the smaller groups’ leaders for them to step down from their leadership role (“golden parachutes”).

In a merger or acquisition, a significantly larger group will merge and absorb the smaller group’s culture and names, but the smaller group will only exist as a name after that point. The original spirit of the group will be gone unless the larger group treats that smaller group as its own autonomous unit.

At some point, it’ll make tremendous marketing sense to present a component of the organization with a separate public image. Often, they can have such effective marketers that the public won’t even realize it’s the same organization!

In the political domain of a free society, it takes many resources to win an election, proportionally to the size of the electorate. For that reason, every politician requires funding from a large system, which distorts the interests of the public at large.

Government bureaus work similarly to business units in merging, but without the economic motivation and with a motivation for control, and typically through a top-down consolidation of departments through a government order instead of any agreement.

Monopoly

At some point, without a large conflict to keep a bad system beholden to results, it becomes unstoppable by any competitors. Their sheer size in an industry will make them impossible to defeat through any conventional means. In other words, success for a large group eventually becomes monopolization, at least toward a niche.

It’s worth noting that monopolies are relatively successful. It means there was a void that someone was waiting to seize, and especially when there’s a commodity which nobody cares where it came from (a product of technological innovation).

When large systems have control of vast portions of entire specializations, they can dictate what people must choose to build by redefining the consequences to reward/punish activities in line with the group’s interests. It’s our nature to dislike competition, so it’s an inevitability.

Gaining power usually takes far more effort than maintaining it. Instead of fighting many competitors while focusing on much more powerful people, the fight is against other competitors in other groups and a few lower-ranking competitors who may become a future threat if not swiftly dealt with.

Thus, once someone has command of a large system in a comparatively small domain, they’ll often focus all their efforts on stifling competition. They’ll usually become complacent and forget the organization’s purposes they were originally trying to advance.

Each type of monopoly creates limits on members’ decision-making:

  1. Horizontal control monopolies can make their services absolutely necessary or “too big to fail” if they control an entire phase of a technology’s method.
  2. Vertical control monopolies control every stage of the process of a creation. This permits them to make things more affordably or higher quality, and is much harder to measure.
  3. Government monopolies are also called “dictatorships”. While every government technically has a regional monopoly on killing people, they abuse their power when they don’t permit people to freely move out from under the influence of their government.
  4. Idea monopolies control a facet of society that doesn’t create, but is a forum for ideas. This one is far more abstract, but is the most severe monopoly because ideas begin all creations. It’s difficult to spot, but watch out when university educators are run by intellectuals instead of trade masters or social media is run by censoring committees.

While a monopoly may not be corrupt in its inception, the most apparent indicator of corruption comes through the organization quietly decreasing the value of their created goods and services:

  • Raising fees beyond natural economic trends like inflation, but without adding quality to the offering.
  • Decreasing the quality of the organization’s offerings, but without lowering their costs.
  • Devoting more effort toward advertising to draw in people than to improving overall quality.
  • Advancing a conflict or fear of that conflict, then justifying a substandard situation with it (often by raising the price inappropriately).
  • Under-producing the available product to create scarcity, then supplying plenty of the product later once the demand for it goes up.
  • Giving varying regional prices for the same goods and services in relationship to much smaller competitors in that area (“price fixing”).
  • Prevent over-producing, since it’ll flood the market and drive down demand in relation to supply, and find ways to maintain it with everyone else in that domain.

To stifle new trends that may unseat their power, most monopolies try to shut down anyone taking the necessary risks to build a competitive alternative that gives the public more choices (“anti-competitive practices”):

  • Lowering prices beyond the lowest-possible cost of the item (i.e., taking a severe financial loss) to make it completely impossible for smaller competitors to have a reasonably comparable price.
  • Giving an “open forum” for discussion, but preventing dissenters from saying what they want.
  • Observing any new trends, then buying out all the ideas or their creators as they arise.
  • Publicly shaming anyone building a technology (or the technology itself) that could render their most profitable endeavors obsolete.
  • Attacking any intellectual property that vaguely resembles the group’s symbols or techniques (e.g., patent trolls).
  • Driving down the monetary value of a competitor’s organization via smear campaign or sabotage, then buying them out when they’re just about to go out of business.
  • Stalling and delaying reliable delivery of products to inhibit the image of a competitor.
  • Blacklist anyone who performs business with a competitor, as well as forbidding business with anyone else who does business with that competitor.
  • Buy out all key things the competitor may need (e.g., real estate, logistics, factories).
  • Continuing to create situations that generate problems the system was originally designed to solve.

One of the most significant features of a persistent monopoly is when people outside the group entirely (e.g., producers, consumers) have very little power compared to various middle individuals and groups with obscured purposes.

Free societies come with unique problems, and political parties can do an election-based version of the same thing:

  • Influence people to hate the opposition party with a portrayed event approximately 1–3 months before election day. This can include a manufactured crisis.
  • Have an electoral system that only has limited regulation of the voting, then add in votes from another source. This can work if the vote is declared as justice only without the regulation.
  • Disqualify votes through rules that are difficult to define, but serve to benefit one political party more than the other.
  • Maintain power with new legal directives after the public has voted the leader out, but before that leader must change roles with the next one.

With a government-funded institution (e.g., public education), the source of that organization’s power and lack of competition gives them much more means to control, and it demonstrates itself through more bureaucracy and micromanagement than would otherwise exist.

Often, a bad system’s leadership will ally with other large groups to suppress shared threats:

  • Giving power to other groups’ leaders to influence them to steer clear of conflicting purposes.
  • Creating proxy organizations or appointing people who appear unrelated. Those people can then “verify” and “authorize” that group. They’ll also sometimes discredit their source group’s rivals with those organizations, who can often act without the rules or formalized leadership of their host group.
  • Conspiring with other large groups to create government rules that prevent other smaller groups from fairly competing (“crony capitalism”).
  • Conspiring with other large groups to prevent smaller groups from establishing themselves in a domain (“cartels”).
  • Creating rules that prevent people from competing with other organizations in the same domain for a certain amount of time after leaving that organization (“non-compete agreements”).
  • Using publicized awards shows to demonstrate “insider” influence to signal affiliated groups.
  • Delaying law enforcement which may harm them for as long as possible, with the expectation that their opponents will run out of hope and no longer want to keep sacrificing resources for the conflict.
  • Using protesters to “take action” through the appearance of being forced to act.

Small Opponents

Some people who witness these groups make it their personal agenda to destroy those systems. They’ll publish mass condemnation of the group, gain political power to defeat them, and call attention to possible conspiracies.

A conspiracy is when two people or groups secretly try to do evil against a third. In that sense, all bad systems with any intent to destroy anyone are conspiring, and those people are often correct to draw attention to it.

Though it’s not as common as the indirect approach, there are several ways an entity will destroy their opposition directly:

  1. Take away their power, in-system, often by demonetizing or penalties
  2. Eject them from the group entirely
  3. attack them if they can successfully create another group

Leaders can also adapt language to represent the people paranoid about conspiracies as fringe believers, then destroy their credibility in the process. In response, many of those people will often feed into their fears and reinforce unhealthy bias in their stories, further destroying their credibility.

Often, they’ll be portrayed as the martyrs of the trend. This doesn’t mean those people were necessarily noble, though. Those people were often fairly outmaneuvered by someone who out-succeeded them. Other times, they simply had a very confrontational personality against any authority figure.

Smaller groups do have options to fight back, but require creative and unconventional risks that often carry unknown dangers, which typically can only succeed outside that large group’s influence. And, even without direct control, large enough monopolies can usually find a way to make almost any activity profit them or prevent smaller opponents from succeeding.

A select few individuals can take a large-scale social risk against the bad system’s purposes. By answering one of the bad system’s stated purposes more effectively using recently developed technology or cross-cultural understanding, that person can start a trend that can unseat the current leaders’ power:

  • North American colonists fought and won against the British Empire by using Native Americans’ guerilla warfare tactics.
  • Microsoft sold a non-exclusive license to IBM, meaning other hardware companies could sell Microsoft software on cheaper hardware.
  • Military tactics always shift when a new technology makes transporting things quicker or safer.

It’s worth noting that the likelihood of any one of the smaller groups succeeding is infinitesimal. However, with enough of the hundreds or thousands of efforts, someone will succeed at their risk-taking.

Deconstruction

The only cure to avoid bad systems starting is a completely free market combined with tons of focused public attention on those systems. By permitting the public to freely decide, every organization must devote all their effort to improving the group’s quality or image to stay competitive. Without that external pressure, the organizations will instead redirect their effort to funneling and consolidating power upward.

At a certain point, though, a bad system will eventually emerge if they can amass enough alliances with other organizations, especially through pervasive media presence that redirects the truth.

Several situations can, however, prolong or enhance a monopoly’s presence:

  1. A government can legally establish a monopoly for itself (i.e., make it illegal for private businesses to sell something).
  2. A government can authorize only specific organizations to perform an activity (e.g., patents, permits).
  3. An organization funnels its control from a relatively unrelated domain to gain power in an otherwise under-served marketplace.
  4. An organization can grow large enough where they can act beyond the scope of any government’s control (e.g., multinational corporation, flouting government rules while politicizing that they’re “too big to fail”).
  5. Sometimes, they can get public opinion on their side through groups they privately control that advance their agenda (e.g., conveying an image that a group must be “free of political influence” to stop the big system).

The only solution to fixing a bad system from the inside is revolutionary change on every level:

  • New management that throws out convention and large portions of the organization’s established culture. They’ll introduce a new culture by promoting a few easily distinguishable and influential values.
  • Massive reorganization of members and roles, with a significant portion of the group getting promoted or removed from the group.
  • Adoption of a key trend or idea that gives everyone more reason to be legitimately virtuous. This, however, can backfire if it’s only feigned virtue (e.g., leftism).
  • Complete destruction of the group, often by removing the massive central authority and dividing the group into smaller components.

People don’t typically like change, so the only way to make all the necessary changes is when the system is already disrupting everyone’s habits. A crisis is the best trigger for this, but a manufactured crisis can work just as well if people will buy it.

The more likely scenario, though, for most bad systems, is decay through tribalism:

  1. Within a group, the selection for members’ promotions will be defined intuitively by aptitude, at least at first.
  2. Eventually, the leadership will introduce a bias, often presented as enforcing fairness. This bias (often leftism, but doesn’t have to be) will over-emphasize a people group, typically racial or ethnic, and will naturally pick a “losing” subgroup.
  3. The individuals, in individually-defined acts of self-preservation, will identify (at least publicly) as anything but the scapegoat group.
  4. The group’s and leadership’s judgments will slowly base on secondary characteristics to aptitude, which may include racial or ethnic domains, or may branch into another division (e.g., ideology).
  5. By the time any of the above expresses explicitly, the group is mostly beyond restoration, and its success will follow its most effective factions.

Ironically, the middle-class people in a group become that organization’s hope. The upper-class are too concerned with power (and will do whatever it takes to get more of it) and the lower-class are too concerned with survival (and will take short-term promises without considering their viability or long-term benefit). In particular, the lower-class opinion will become “tyranny of the majority”.

Of course, this will often be met by dramatic conflict from members who had more power, as well as risks from outside groups who may influence the new leadership. However, they won’t have the means to build the skills necessary for a critical trend that comes from what they can’t know. For that reason, every large group leader always persists only for a season, even when they can extend it with many more rules and restrictions.

Fixing a bad system is unlikely, and the better solution is to tear it down and start again entirely. Generally, they can only be defeated by implosion through their incompetence (and thereby motivating people to do anything else) or through defeat by something stronger than it. In the event of an attack, they’ll fight desperately to maintain their power, so the implosion from inside is preferable for everyone else.

The destruction of a bad system is very near when more effort is spent on things that don’t add value to the organization’s purpose, and there is a public image that that is the case.

Trended Destruction

On the way down, every bad system will at least partially destroy its legacy through corruption.

A bad system can become permanently hampered, which opens the path for other groups to intervene:

  • Unionized workers who require higher pay but with no incentive to work harder (since unions are based strictly on length of time existing in the group).
  • Government laws that prohibit expansion into new related territories (e.g., AT&T’s lack of expansion permitted computers to exist separately from AT&T).
  • People who die using their service or product, or die while trying to publicize the organization’s failings. If the deaths are advertised severely enough (which means the system didn’t bribe media outlets enough), the organization can incur a long-term mark on its reputation. This can be extra effective if the story is interesting or symbolic.

There’s no easy way to replace a bad system, either:

  1. Present, chronic issues use specific resources that bad systems capitalize on. The only way to resolve the problem requires creative, new solutions with resources that aren’t technically useful yet.
  2. In civilized society, people are typically habituated to the present system by the time they’re aware it needs fixing. The entire culture around a specific purpose often becomes a toxic, incompetent, or evil culture.
  3. Frequently, fear of the unknown keeps people tethered to a bad system, a bit like an abusive family relationship.

A bad system will often be replaced by a much more efficient, newer system that doesn’t have quite as much bureaucracy or corruption. However, the personalities of that system’s leaders may be more ruthless or extreme.

One of the most significant ways a bad system loses public favor is when they completely fail the trust of the public who had placed faith in them:

  • Violate private individuals’ rights, usually in a way that people die. This gets worse if they try to bury or destroy the evidence of their actions, and can be much worse if it’s a new technology (since it’ll magnify everyone’s fears of the unknown).
  • Suffer a logistical failure that creates a supply chain disruption, often in a way that people are permanently injured or die.
  • Create something and advertise it as a dramatic new trend, but it’s poorly designed to make them the object of ridicule or the trend is absolutely taboo.

In fact, most large-scale bad systems are an existing optimization of a previous bad system (e.g., more efficient, affordable, economical, fair, et al.). However, this came at the expense of sacrificing very intimate human needs in the process. The deals were more ruthless, everyone became more specialized, collectively more powerful, systems became more standardized, and each person became less individually important compared to the organization.

However, between stopping the old system and starting the new one, even basic tasks can be spectacularly troublesome for a short time.

Depending on their scope of power, both governments and corporations have differing competitive elements that could erode a bad system’s influence:

  • A gigantic corporation can be subdued or divided on the outside by a government, often by labeling them as a “common carrier” and requiring they stay autonomously separate.
  • In the absence of government intervention, a corporation must be starved by another corporation that serves members’ interests better.
  • A government or political party can only be stopped by another government/party with more power or in another country, assuming they haven’t oppressed the people enough to make them revolt or break the rules.
  • Any terrible government or corporation, however, will fall apart quickly if the public finds a reliable way to live without it, though governments may overstep their power to keep their control.

Generally, large private organizations fall apart through public resentment that fosters a trend that empowers the risk-averse people in power to act (who tends to work within a government). Then, the void created by that government entity gives enough power for risk-taking private individuals to fill that void.

Government divisions of corporations never work well, though. The barriers to growing larger tend to create corporatocracy in that domain, and legal definitions can be massaged over time by many lawyers to permit subversive tactics.

Often, our human nature makes every system bad in some way, so it’s not always wise to trust the enemy of an enemy.

Bad systems will always decay until they’re brought down or rebuilt into something else through the inevitable deterioration and rebalancing of trust by its members. However, people are happy to permit a slightly evil leader if that leader still serves the individuals’ self-interests, and long-term leadership will create enough precedent that everyone will feel safe with the existing order, even if the leadership starts killing people.

Over time, if a bad system is left unmaintained, but stays connected to the social networks around it, the traits of that bad system will represent onto the larger system. Over time, that entity will become a more disturbing reproduction of the first one.

The Solution

One of the most powerful forms of destroying a bad system comes through mandatory transparency. It’s impossible for bad systems to present the openness that more effective organizations could provide. If enough competing entities give that openness, the older systems will be required to divulge more information, which makes corruption harder to perform.

Transparency is technically impossible to completely attain, since some information must be private to avoid harming reputation. However, transparency is an absolute concept in comparison with other entities’ openness of information. There are many creative ways to state the blatant truth without using names.

It takes years to develop a cultural expectation of transparency, but it guarantees all future systems will be better for it.

Application

If anyone deems an organization as “too big to fail”, the more accurate description is “so big it’ll inevitably fail”.

A political revolution is often a bad system, especially when run by extremist groups. This is because most political systems are bad systems. They tend to blame the opposition more than getting things done, and this will likely never change.

Scandals are common because leaders have to enforce an image of values, but they’re human and fallible.

Most large systems are at least partly bad systems. Before destroying them, carefully consider what will replace it.

Don’t publicly shame a large system with hearsay or lies. Stay as close to the truth as you possibly can (and make sure you know other people to advance the cause if they shut you down) or they’ll repudiate you faster than you can respond.

The more specific and odd a system’s mandatory activities for success are, the worse the system is.

The distinction between evil and incompetent leaders comes through intent. We can’t see intent directly, but we can see who suffers in the system. Generally, very specific people suffering unfairly comes from evil, while everyone suffering is generally from incompetence.

Very frequently, leaders of bad systems will congregate among each other in a subgroup of unhealthy relationships. They’ll often do disturbing things together, and being part of the leadership requires sharing in those activities.

The most conspicuous sign of a bad system first forming comes through a leader with a moral conviction that may not be as moral as they think, but the not-so-moral partners and friends they trust advance that idea forward.

Bad leaders are concerned about money, mostly because they’re not thinking about members’ purposes or considering the well-being of the organization.

One way a system becomes bad is when outside parties like specialized trade groups and unions have more power than the leadership to make decisions. They may serve the interests of individuals, but the leadership will be forced to be harsher to everyone to create the same results as before.

In a large organization that’s become a bad system, all the leadership is partially responsible. It’s difficult to tell how much for each, though, since most committee-based leadership decisions are opaque, and they’ll each blame everyone and everything but themselves. The only solution to reliably tell is to remove the leaders, one by one, put them in another situation, then closely watch the changes to both the system they were removed from and the system they were placed in.

Don’t trust an organization as “bad” or “good” simply by their size. Sometimes, smear campaigns come from people who are bitter at their opponents’ success. The only way to discover the truth is to judge between the opposing viewpoints.

All systems become bad eventually, at some point. They must then be rebuilt through a change in leadership or will be replaced by another system. Thus, all systems run through a relatively predictable cycle:

  1. Establish themselves as a new trend.
  2. Members question their leaders’ wisdom.
  3. The leaders start abusing the group’s power to maintain control.
  4. Strong leaders are appointed more than wise or good leaders.
  5. The group becomes a bad system, ready for restructuring or another system to take its power away.

Society will never work its issues out without massive, large-scale transformation of human purpose and motivation. We’ll always have a “deep state” inside every large system waiting to abuse their power until another system of a new generation takes its place.

Research every company you buy things from. You’ll often find that the company is simply one of the many faces of a gigantic bad system.

The only reason people use Verizon, Google, Facebook, Ford, and Coca-Cola right now is because they’re familiar with it or don’t see much to choose instead. However, assuming they didn’t exist, their present quality probably isn’t enough to start a new trend if people hadn’t been familiar with it in the first place.

Monopolies are inevitable as long as people desire power. Antitrust laws only work when they’re too simple to abuse and enforced by governments, which is another potentially bad system that checks the first bad system. Typically, technology’s complexity makes regulating vertical control absolutely impossible. And, because of how we understand reality, we can’t easily regulate ideas (e.g., misinformation, “fake news”).

Underused resources are just as critical to fixing a bad system as unused ones. Often, people need creativity that only comes from leaving their culture to find things purposed for one thing that can accomplish another.

We don’t like oppressive dictators, but there are always worse alternatives. Consider who’s dethroning someone from power before endorsing it, especially with extreme groups like hard leftism.

Government elections are corrupt proportionally to the amount of work it takes to even run a campaign. Therefore, corruption in government scales with population.

As a weaker member of a group, the best bad systems to join are too busy fighting an external conflict to pay attention to you. If they ever defeat the external force, they’ll come for you. If every system in an industry is bad, the best decision is to passively keep them fighting between each other and stay out of sight.

There is one certain way to destroy a bad system, or at least injure it:

  1. Sell your product as a superior quality, and make sure it really is (likely through a superior technology).
  2. Engage in complete information transparency and advertise that fact as well, including of that technology.
  3. Others will imitate and steal ideas, but the horde of improved products with extra transparency will make that bad system irrelevant by comparison.
  4. You won’t get a reputation for it among the public, but will amass tremendous power through the influence with the people who took your ideas, which you can summon later from their gratitude.

Many of the large-scale conspiracies are probably somewhat true. There’s also not much an average person can do about it individually, but if they stand up for themselves they can frequently start a trend across various media, since most people do see it but are afraid to speak up about it.

Every large, bad system will eventually collapse. They will be replaced by another one of comparable effectiveness. We must find meaning despite these perpetual, looming threats, which may or may not include directly confronting those systems, and might occasionally mean risking dying from it.

People slowly permit tyranny into their lives when they accept what the leadership does. Since power-hungry people don’t tend to demarcate a stopping point, that slow consent will eventually go too far, but often at the cost of many lives and many destroyed aspects of civilization.

The greatness of a nation is its own trend, but eventually they try to make everyone around them adopt that trend. When that happens, they imagine they’re migrating their culture across a vast domain, but they’re also importing the cultures they’re trying to influence at the same time. The byproduct of this is that the quality that made them great becomes inferior relative to what it once was. Eventually, the entire culture becomes such a bad system that another culture will adopt the best parts and supersede it.