Bureaucratic Deja-Vu
Deja-Vu (French déjà vu – “already seen”) is when a person feels that he has already been in a similar situation. The theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) is based on revealing repeating cases that follow specific patterns. When studying bureaucracy, we focus on verifiable repetitions of situations at different times and in different places; we then use them to recognize and document patterns, solve problems, and predict possible future alternatives. The foundation of TRIZ is a massive collection of uncovered patterns of various events ready for use.
In 1985, after a sequence of deaths among Kremlin overmature rulers, the leadership in the USSR was taken by Mikhail Gorbachev, the disciple and henchman of KGB head Andropov. His awkward attempts to continue along the “party lines” under “Acceleration” led to the collapse of the remnants of the Soviet economy. At the same time, the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 finished off the power of communists thanks to the forced abatement of censorship. In 1987, an unexpected breakthrough in the country life took place. Perestroika!
For a moment, even we, professional skeptics, believed in the liberation from the damned power of communist bureaucracy. We established our own business – the Progress company. This was the first private engineering company in the USSR after the 1920s, the first commercial company offering TRIZ-based innovation and problem-solving services worldwide. Among our customers were the four largest aviation plants, a manufacturer of military tanks, the largest mining and metallurgical plant, commodity exchange, a bunch of smaller companies, several universities... We developed and were successfully selling the Manager’s Toolbox software for solving inventive problems in business and management, which brought us some good money; hurray!
Just a couple of years were enough to realize that the power of bureaucrats didn’t go anywhere and that Perestroika was just a battle of jackals for power and money, which fell out of the hands of the Kremlin morons... Instead of “communism,” they were worshiping “democracy.” The “democrats” turned out to be just as thievish and even meaner than the old “partocrats.”
We still had the opportunity to continue with our business, albeit under the tight control of the bureaucracy on the corrupt principle “everyone must share.” We could hardly become oligarchs; rather, join the muddy flock of “little new Russians.” However, it was too disgusting to return to the bureaucratic swamp. We left everything and moved to the USA, where together with American partners established an innovation company Ideation International Inc. The business started growing as our knowledge and capabilities were in demand.
But the more we learned about America, the more we experienced the scary deja-vu. Take the free-market company Ford Motor... The bureaucracy there was much worse than at the soviet “Electrosila” company and even the entire Ministry of Electrical Engineering of the USSR... The bureaucracy at Boeing was heavier than at four Russian military aviation plants (for which we once solved various problems) combined.
In the mid-90s, the peak of the “dot-com boom,” when new companies were emerging every day, we h
launched new inventive TRIZ-based software with great enthusiasm and high hopes... And gradually, we realized that, just as it was in USSR and Russia, ideas, the ingenuity of entrepreneurs, or even the market approval weren’t enough; the last word in being declared “great” like Bloomberg, Perrot, Bill Gates, Bezos, Brin, Page, etc. belonged to bureaucracy. These “Great Businessmen” were simply servants to the bureaucracy, no different from “Great Oligarchs” or even “mafia bosses.”
Our vast experience in dealing with communists allowed us to quickly understand the almost parodical analogy between “Boris [Yeltsin] with the glass [of vodka]” and “Bill with a saxophone,” who also was hogging the cover in favor of bureaucracy suffocating the remnants of the free market left after Reagan and Bush Sr.[1]
Social Vultures[2]
We had a chance to be pleased with the brilliant beginning of Bush Jr.’s Presidency. . From day one, he started cleaning the Augean stables of bureaucracy; it led to a series of corruption scandals, including Enron in 2001, WorldCom and Tyco in 2002, and others not as significant. The infractions these scandals were based upon started during the presidency of Clinton and his corrupted administration. We were delighted with the new growth of businesses’ excitement about innovation and were preparing for the wide spread of learning how to be creative in the country and the entire world...
And then, a sudden and terrible collapse of all expectations – the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, that produced a much more severe impact than the terrorists could have imagined...
We are not into conspiracy theories and do not believe that the World Trade Center attack was deliberately organized by the American bureaucracy. But for many years, we have studied the organization of society, and we know the meanest feature of the bureaucracy – they are a flock of vultures who prosper on disasters, misfortunes, and deaths. Any social catastrophe, whether a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic crisis, a pandemic, etc. – for the bureaucracy is a simple way to strengthen its power, grow personnel, “extract” additional money, subdue resistance, rob[3]…
Nor do we believe that the bureaucracy (ours or Chinese) deliberately infected us with COVID. But how these bastards took advantage of the pandemic! With no resistance, they could institute anything they wanted, give out any orders they pleased, seize power and grab the money, more, more, and more... Everyone obeys, hurray, long live COVID and the lockdowns, forever and ever.
Multiple federal institutions, the bureaucracies of the states, cities, and corporate monopolies, the mass disinformation industry (known as mass media), and others went haywire. Every clerk, division, and department tried to use the “freebies,” each in their way, with no coordination with anything, no inspections or doubts... Many pseudo-experts totally lacking information were not ready to let go of their luck and tried their best to take advantage of the situation to:
- Cause as much harm as possible to President Trump they hated
- Capture as many resources as possible, advance in the hierarchy, increase their personnel, overpower businesses, make a few fast corruption bucks and hide them offshore...
As if the entire country somehow fell into the hands of spoiled rotten children...
War is Good for Business
Bureaucracy was born from tribal wars. These wars have been forever remaining the bureaucrats’ favorite games. If there are problems in the economy, hungry and suppressed people are ready to revolt, if bureaucrats are not being obeyed and their ideas are laughed at, then all that is needed is a little war, and not necessarily a victorious one. Declare martial law and ensure that the most dangerous troublemakers are conscripted or imprisoned as “enemy agents”; manipulate public opinion and election processes, etc. This recipe worked flawlessly for thousands of years.
Moreover, the 20th century opened new excellent opportunities and ways to squander countless taxpayers’ money! Isn’t it charming – to order all kinds of military equipment and machinery at crazy prices, then sacrifice a few of “our” and numerous “their” lives and use pompous media to turn this equipment into war losses and write it all off? And who is going to check in whose pockets and on which offshore bank accounts the lion’s share of this money has settled?
The 9/11 attack was used by the American bureaucracy against the disobedient President. The actions went far beyond the incredible growth of agencies and departments and the distraction of attention from corrupt officials. Bureaucrats went for the jackpot and implemented the Grand Dream of bureaucracy – a “little war,” even two. Again, the terrible deja-vu – in the 21st century, the USA started the war against Iraq and Afghanistan using pathetic scenarios of the 20th century USSR-Afghan war that the bureaucrats from the KGB instigated.
There is no need for victories in these wars (extra casualties are not desirable either). Still, they open the opportunity for endless negotiations and spending, unlimited prospects for career advancement, corruption, and money laundering, going unpunished for embezzling hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars.
From the Warsaw Pact countries to Iraq, Afghanistan, and various African, Asian, and South American countries, bureaucrats used this so-called “bureaucracy occupation zone” to pump the public money into their pockets. Legally, to some extent – for various departments, salaries, paperwork, meetings, negotiations, etc. And to a much greater extent, illegally – for corruption, fabricating records, money laundering, etc. The crucial point of the regular bureaucracy practice is that nobody is “clean” – someone who could later accuse the rest. Everyone, starting at a certain level (majors and sergeants in the army), must be stained, at least to some degree, with participation in corruption.
The feast of American bureaucracy in Afghanistan lasted for 20 years. Trump decided to cut this “bureaucratic banquet,” and bureaucracy sensed this terrible danger – the inspector was coming! But now that Biden is in charge, why worry?
Individual bureaucrats, even high-ranking ones, can be idiots or incompetent – this was never a problem for the career, neither in Russia nor America. But as a whole, bureaucracy is smart and has collected extensive experience over numerous generations. It knows well that successful scams must be paused from time to time, as the risk of exposure keeps growing. What if Biden as president is succeeded by Trump or someone similar? Do Republicans win Congress and the Senate in 2022? With Trump’s departure, the danger weakened but did not disappear. On the other hand, now could be an excellent time to cash in on profitable business smartly.
The bureaucratic “smart way” looks just the opposite – incredibly dumb for most people. The press goes wild – why is everything done so stupidly? Why was it necessary to flee from well protected Bagram military base at night, with no warning to allies, abandoning expensive equipment? Stupidity or accident? Not even close! Deja-vu, yet again! In the same way America fled from Vietnam in 1975, leaving everything behind and betraying its supporters. This is how the Russian army left East Germany and other soviet time satellites where nobody threatened them, by the way. All these cases are not accidents; there was a good reason to withdraw in such a hurry.
Everything is quite simple. There were billions of dollars invested in Afghanistan. A well-ordered withdrawal of troops done right with checking documents, counting equipment and the cost of performed work, etc., as any real businessman, such as Trump, would do (who, according to his words, wanted to get everything out, up to the last tent), would inevitably uncover multi-billion fraud for the past 20 years... Half of the Pentagon and an even more significant number of civil bureaucrats and military contractors could end up in prison...
This is why they needed such a seemingly stupid, instant, one-night withdrawal of troops, disregarding all the abandoned goods, under the principle “the war will write everything off.” Hard to imagine how much equipment and ammunition, food products and drugs, etc. will now be written off, how many accounts will be closed... And no one will be the wiser. Who will check now, how much was stolen, and by whom?
And the dirtiest part of all – while fleeing secretly, like criminals, from the country, Americans did not even make the military equipment inoperative. Helicopters, armored vehicles, tanks, drones, and unbelievable amounts of armament and ammunition partially went to Iran carried by “pro-American” forces. The rest fell in the hands of Taliban militants and will be used in civil wars and aggression against neighbors – the former Soviet republics, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and others. Undoubtedly, the military struck their own good deal – if all of this was given to someone undamaged, someone else got well paid for it[4].
End of the second part – to be continued
[1] Suddenly, we discovered a major indicator of bureaucracy power increase – it is the drop of the companies’ interest in creativity.
[2] Vulture is a bird that feeds on carrion and, often, feces.
[3] Perhaps, nobody described this phenomenon better than Rahm Emanuel, the former head of President Obama’s administration: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.”
[4] Well, Afghanistan war finally ended in 2021. Is anybody surprised that bureaucrats needed Ukraine badly as a new cash cow?
