Dysfunctional Decision-making

[Ryan Carboni]

Every society is run by an increasingly small number of cynical
decision-makers. Barring a change of circumstance where cynicism is
discouraged, their actions and plans are ultimately rewarded, and more
power is accrued to them. Success begets success.

Secrecy and immorality is incompatible with a free society, a free
press is necessary to provide the necessary information for which
society's members can decide the direction society may go. However if
the response to a given event is to claim that it isn't happening,
this constrains the freedom of action by which society's leaders can
devote resources to an issue.

Furthermore, it is the interests of cynical decision-makers in the
accrual of power to alter society so that various leaders are cowardly
and so unlikely to take an unprecedented action. Organizations that
operate in accordance to inertia can be easily predicted and
deviations from a course can be noticed and responded to accordingly.

This is paradoxically incompatible with long-term stability, the
people who desire access to the levers of power do not disappear, and
if they did, cynical decision-makers do not make up a majority of
society's members, they themselves are constrained from making public
decisions or actions that would in it self be threatening and lead to
a reaction by society's leaders to effect their removal out of a
desire for self-preservation (unless it was sufficiently clear that
ambition was not synonymous with hazard).

Thus even the response to threats to a political order is constrained
by perceptions, and this in turn constrains the allocation of
resources to respond. The press, if dedicated to preserving the
current political order, cannot describe a threat to the political
order in terms that would allow for the threat to expand in support
beyond society itself is willing to provide in responding to it.

Every lock has play. The only lock that cannot be picked is one that
cannot be opened.