Institutional self-preservation

This is a remarkably cogent passage:

Institutions, like organisms, seek survival for themselves and their descendants. One of the conceits at the heart of most theories of government, which has perhaps reached its apogee in this age of technocratic, managerial liberalism, is the idea that institutions are fundamentally instrumental. To an anarchist, this is a flatly silly proposition. (An analogue might be a Christian trying to get an atheist to concede that life has a “purpose.”) Institutions aren’t simple tools. Organizations aren’t implements. And when a sufficient number of institutions coexist, they function like an ecosystem. They neither work nor do not work. They survive, reproduce, replace, predate, evolve, alter, consume, and grow. They are no more responsive to the individuals contained within than a person is to a single cell.

IOZ focuses on the CIA in this post, noting that the CIA is an organization which seeks to protect its own existence first, and serves to gather intelligence second. A couple years ago I read The Secret History of the CIA which was a fascinating book and a really startling look at this very concept of institutional self-preservation. From its beginning the CIA existed to keep a select group of people working in intelligence. In fact, the CIA was founded as a private company by former members of the OSS after World War II. They essentially forced the government’s hand by getting into the intelligence business whether Uncle Sam approved or not. Since then, the CIA has been one of the most opaque institutions in Washington, and has done whatever it could in order to survive. In many ways the CIA and the presidency have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. The CIA has been the secret arm of the president for decades – from the Kennedy brothers who used it as an assassination racket, to the last president’s secret prisons and back full circle to assassination under the Obama administration.

But the CIA is hardly alone when it comes to institutional self-preservation. All government institutions operate this way. Indeed all institutions whether private or public seek their own self-preservation. The problem with government institutions is that they persist because of politics rather than any rational decision-making process. The big public unions exist and grow in strength because they are so important electorally. The big federal departments exist because politicians must always do something to survive the next election cycle (read: spend more!). Cutting the Department of Education may not have much of an effect on the educational outcomes of most American children, but the act of cutting it is pretty much heretical nonetheless, even though those dollars might be better spent at the local level than on the inflated salaries of a bunch of Washington bureaucrats.