#order #truth Reducing the messiness of reality to a limited number of fixed drawers helps bureaucrats keep order, but it comes at the expense of truth. Instead of focusing on understanding the world as it is, bureaucracy is often busy imposing a new and artificial order on the world. By inventing a new order and imposing it on the world, bureaucracy distorted people’s understanding of the world in unique ways. The urge to divide reality into rigid drawers also leads bureaucrats to pursue narrow goals irrespective of the wider impact of their actions. > A bureaucrat tasked with increasing industrial production is likely to ignore environmental considerations that fall outside her purview, and perhaps dump toxic waste into a nearby river, leading to an ecological disaster downstream. If the government then establishes a new department to combat pollution, its bureaucrats are likely to push for ever more stringent regulations, even if this results in economic ruin for communities upstream. Ideally, someone should be able to take into account all the different considerations and aspects, but such a holistic approach requires transcending or abolishing the bureaucratic division. -- the need for [[Thinking in Systems -- A Primer|system thinking]] academics: academic bureaucracy doesn’t encourage such a holistic approach. As you climb the academic ladder, the pressure to specialize only increases. --- in defense of bureaucracy -- that while it sometimes sacrifices truth and distorts our understanding of the world, it often does so for the sake of order, without which it would be hard to maintain any large-scale human network. e.g. hospital, sewage system, schools