Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye...

Goodbye my blogosphere friends. The All-Seeing Eye Dog is going into indefinite retirement. Don't worry: this is not an admission of defeat by any stretch. I'm not giving up on telling the truth, as I see it. I just won't be doing it via this medium anymore until the current administration is held fully accountable for its crimes. Until then, good luck and Godspeed.

Where Red Tape Really Comes From

That pernicious, sticky substance known as red tape: According to some, there’s almost no collective human failure that can’t be blamed on its meddlesome ubiquity. When disaster strikes a third-world country and international humanitarian efforts fall short, you can be sure a think-tank report faulting “red tape” for the failures can’t be far behind.

And in many quarters it almost goes without saying that whenever the economy starts to tank, the real culprit isn’t rampant fraud, industry collusion, or the increasing prevalence of business practices that violate fundamental principles of a competitive marketplace (that’s too obvious and simple-minded to be the problem, a chorus of ivy league economists and capitol hill policy experts can be heard to intone in an eerily mellifluous castrato voce): It’s all that damn red tape.

And who’s to blame for releasing into the world this nasty, freedom-hating weed that creeps in like kudzu to choke the life out of everything that decent Americans hold good and sacred?

Conventional wisdom holds the culprit to be Big Government, in all its malignant forms. Big Government, so one version of the story goes, is full of bureaucrats who, for lack of work of their own to do, spend their days scheming up new ways to stifle the potentially limitless innovation and economic growth that only large corporations with their perpetually shifting conceptions of fiscal and personal responsibility can provide.

Oh yeah: and red tape also helps Big Government bureaucrats in their ceaseless efforts to soak the rich.

“Just let us work,” the beleaguered captains of industry can almost be heard to opine from under the crushing weight of all that red tape, unintentionally paraphrasing Carl Sandburg.

It’s a nice theory for how red tape accumulates and why, but as the title of this article suggests, I’d like to suggest an alternative view. But first, let’s step back and talk a little more about just what we mean by “red tape.”

In its typical usages, “red tape” seems to refer generally to almost any formal body of rules and penalties. So, to the extent that a government is by definition a body that imposes rules restricting personal freedom (never mind that said rules may in a certain sense also protect personal freedom), all forms of government are de facto made of the stuff. We might usefully speculate at this point that the term “red tape” is meant to conjure up images of government authority run amok, ala the excesses of communism—“red” tape perhaps being the communist’s favorite material for binding and torturing hapless capitalists.

Red tape can take many forms, from the paperwork a would-be entrepreneur has to file at the local courthouse to the surprise health inspections that commercial kitchens and meat factories periodically undergo. But what we really mean when we talk about red tape seems to be something even more fundamental.

The quaint picture we looked at earlier—in which red tape is largely a product of the arbitrary exercise of government regulatory power—begins to look like a view through a fish-eye lens when we consider the following: Red tape also occurs spontaneously in the private sector and in the world at large, without Big Government intrusions of any kind.

Consider recent developments in the on-line world. Security on the web has become such a concern that many on-line retailers have been forced to implement absurd, even bizarre, customer registration and logon processes to achieve only a modicum of security for the conduct of on-line business. Because legislation regarding Internet commerce has been slow in coming, much of the red tape on the Internet came about not as a result of government intrusion but as a result of simple necessity. On-line retailers have been forced to create their own red tape in order to guard their customers against privacy intrusion and identity theft.

And as anyone who’s held a job for any length of time knows, medium to large companies--privately-held and publicly-traded alike--seldom have trouble generating copious amounts of red tape freely on their own, to meet various personnel and financial management needs (especially after a company has reached that point late in its life-cycle when “middle-management spread” starts creeping in).

Indeed, once we start looking, it seems we can find evidence of naturally occurring red tape just about everywhere: Aren’t all the commandments in the Bible (all those shalts and shalt-nots) really just a kind of red tape? What about the myriad rules and penalties found in professional sports like football and basketball? I don’t mean the rules that govern the business of professional sports but the rules and penalties imposed by the games themselves? What Big Government bureaucrat created all those rules?

How do we reconcile such seemingly spontaneous outcroppings of red tape with the conventional theories in the absence of Big Government’s unwieldy regulatory influence?

I’d like to propose the controversial notion that red tape is not imposed by Big Government at all, but that it is a naturally occurring phenomenon, prone to thrive in any environment wherein there is a substantial likelihood of fraud, egregious uses of power, or simple human error.

Red tape is what the human race, in its more reflective moments, uses to try to regulate and perfect its own conduct. If history has taught us anything, it’s that there will always be some people who will lie, cheat, and steal if left to their own devices. In fact, a certain percentage of the population seems to have a unique talent for lying (see my parting thoughts below for more on this topic). Unfortunately, there’s nothing to prevent this segment of the population from being entrusted with leadership roles; therefore, we’ve adopted various strategies over time for curbing abuses of power (at all levels of society).

Put simply, red tape is just a general term for the various rules and penalties we impose on ourselves to keep ourselves honest. Keeping meticulous records, requiring each other to fill out reams of paperwork, etc., such activities are ultimately geared toward ensuring that everybody plays fair. So it stands to reason that the less honest we are as a society, the more red tape we’ll have to wade through in our daily lives.

It’s often noted that the Nazis were an intensely bureaucratic lot, keeping highly detailed records even of atrocities that many of us would have left undocumented out of a sense of moral shame. In fact, pretty much anywhere we find strong authoritarian governments, we also find an excess of red tape. This is probably why we’ve come to take for granted the existence of a causal link between Big Government and red tape, but perhaps the real reason that so many of history’s authoritarian regimes have tended toward excesses of bureaucracy is that such regimes also tend to be shot through with corruption. Evil regimes, presumably, are the creations of evil people. And evil people, presumably, know a thing or two about humanity’s innate capacity for evil, and are therefore more likely to be hyper-vigilant, red tape wielding bureaucrats in order to maintain their hold on power.

Of course, that’s not to say that red tape isn’t also sometimes abused as an instrument of governmental power. The FCC has become notorious in recent years for threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of broadcasters whose political views (as expressed through program content) are deemed controversial. Regulatory abuses can easily occur as a result of poorly designed regulatory mechanisms and/or political corruption. Red tape (in the form of the Jim Crow laws enacted in the post-slavery South, for example) has even been used to curtail the social and political power of specific groups of American citizens.

Even so, I propose that the biggest producer of red tape in the world is not Big Government at all (although Big Government’s authority can go a long way in facilitating its promulgation). Red tape is actually a product of human moral weakness, as society as a whole attempts to manage its weaknesses. It’s a simple formula: The more dishonest we are in our daily lives, the less we trust each other. The less we trust each other, the more we’re forced to play the 'Cover Your Ass' game, in which we spend more and more of our time documenting our financial activities and personal histories in order to reduce the likelihood that we’ll cheat or be cheated.

So to conclude, the horrifying secret of red tape is just this: Red tape, my friends, is made of people.

Parting Thoughts
Do leaders make better liars? And if natural leaders are also natural liars, is it reasonable to impeach a sitting President for perjury (ala Clinton)? Or should we have applauded the strength of his leadership? Maybe what we really need is a little more sanity in our lives. Or, in taking comfort in sanity, would we just be deluding ourselves to forestall the inevitable descent into madness?

The 'Conspiracy Theory' Conspiracy

On the web and just about anywhere else one cares to look these days, there’s an awful lot of loose talk about paranoia, about people 'seeing conspiracies everywhere,' and the like, and all of it just keeps bringing my mind back to one nagging question: In theory, is it possible for someone to hold a paranoid belief that coincidentally happens to be true? Or should 'truth' even factor into it when we evaluate someone’s beliefs as 'reasonable' or 'paranoid'?

Let me put the question another way with a hypothetical case: Suppose there’s this guy who believes that God is personally out to get him. For the sake of argument, let’s say the guy is right, and God actually is out to get him (never mind all the perfectly reasonable but irrelevant arguments we might get into about whether God even exists, and/or whether He would have better things to do with His time than waging personal vendettas against His creations, etc.).

Now, suppose the paranoid guy is pretty sure he’s got good reasons for his suspicions about God, but as imaginary observers, we’re in a better position to evaluate the guy’s reasons objectively, and we find them lacking in many respects. Some of his reasons are valid (God really did arrange it so the guy’s high school sweetheart would leave the prom with his best friend), but others are completely invalid (it’s purely a coincidence that it always rains when he leaves his umbrella home). In any event, his conclusion—that God is out to get him—can’t be derived inexorably from the reasons he cites, and yet, we know independently that his conclusion is correct.

Now, in the scenario I’m suggesting, is it fair to regard the guy’s belief that God is out to get him as paranoid or not? How we choose to answer this question reveals a lot about the implicit connections we make between perception and reality, as well as how we evaluate the reasonableness of others’ beliefs.

Suppose we decide to say that this guy’s belief does qualify as paranoid (even though it coincidentally happens to be accurate) on the grounds that any belief that casts God as engaging in personal vendettas is inherently paranoid (not to mention potentially blasphemous). In other words, suppose we say one would have to be paranoid to believe such a thing were possible even if it turned out to be true, because on its surface the belief is so glaringly improbable that no reasonable person would consider it.

If we follow the line of reasoning proposed above, we implicitly assume that the veracity of a claim or belief has no bearing on its reasonableness. What, then, should we use instead as our criteria for determining if a belief is reasonable or not? The temptation is to say we can evaluate a belief as reasonable or not based on the soundness of the reasoning that supports it (which is, after all, literally what we mean when we say a belief is ‘reasonable’). The problem with this approach, however, is that in most cases there isn’t a necessary relationship between a particular conclusion and the reasons that support it. We could easily imagine more than one valid argument for a particular conclusion, and there are no hard and fast standards for evaluating the relative rigor of competing arguments (nor any objective methods for determining the soundness of an argument’s premises). Without going too far afield into a discussion of all the epistemological questions involved, determining that a particular argument is invalid doesn’t necessarily invalidate the argument’s conclusion, if the same conclusion could potentially be reached by other means.

In describing the methods of theoretical science, Einstein once offered an analogy that might be instructive here: Imagine the universe is like a pocket watch, and the theorist has been tasked with describing in detail the inner workings of that pocket watch based only on observations of the hands and face of the watch (that is, without being allowed to remove the back cover of the watch to observe the inner workings directly). Obviously, there are many different ways to configure and assemble the mechanical components of a watch to achieve results consistent with observation of the watch-face. To some extent, all beliefs and arguments operate according to the same principles. Whatever reasons we might supply for our beliefs, the likely underlying reason we hold onto any particular belief is because we consider it useful for some purpose (in the case of theoretical science, we hold onto beliefs that are useful for making predictions and we reject beliefs that are not; in the case of religious faith, we hold onto beliefs that provide us spiritual comfort and reject those that do not).

Which brings me back to a modified version of my original question: Is it possible that certain beliefs, true or not, are inherently unhealthy because they can only be reached via unhealthy processes of reasoning? It’s hard to imagine anyone explicitly arguing for this position, and yet, it’s a position we seem to routinely assume in our day-to-day discussions—for example, when we dismiss a disagreeable comment with a glib sentiment like ‘you’d have to be crazy to believe that’ or ‘that’s just too absurd on the face of it.’ The implication is that some ideas are too dangerous or pointless even to consider, which comes uncomfortably close to the logic of totalitarianism.

An even more disturbing aspect of all the recent anti-‘conspiracy theory’ talk is that its effect has been to marginalize and/or politicize the very concept of a conspiracy. The term ‘conspiracy theory’ is now commonly used to dismiss any theory deemed as implausibly sinister or over-elaborate. Diluting the meaning of the term ‘conspiracy’ in this way is extremely dangerous, because it deprives us of meaningful terminology for describing a very real phenomenon: Remember, despite all the comforting suggestions to the contrary, criminal conspiracies actually do happen. That’s why we have laws against conspiracy. There’s nothing de facto ‘paranoid’ about entertaining the possibility of a conspiracy. The term ‘conspiracy’ signifies nothing more sinister or implausible than the possibility that multiple people were involved in the commission of a crime or unethical act.

Consider the following example from a NY Times article about recent revelations regarding Enron’s manipulation of energy supplies during the so-called “California Energy Crisis” (which just happened to coincide with Bush’s appeal to the public to support his administration’s controversial and extremely industry-friendly energy policies):

‘Company officials had long denied that they illegally shut down plants to create artificial shortages. In March 2001—two months after the recording showed how the Nevada plant was shut down—Mr. Lay called any claims of market manipulation "conspiracy theories."’

The NY Times’ article from which this quote derives discusses the discovery of yet another audio recording confirming that, indeed, Enron employees did engage in a conspiracy to manipulate energy prices (see original article here for details: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/national/04energy.html).

At the time, the fact that President Bush and Vice President Cheney both had close ties to Ken Lay and Enron, combined with the timing of the California energy shortages (and the fact that Bush and his ideological comrades make no secret of their irrational contempt for California, which they derisively call the “left-coast”), led many critics of the Bush administration to allege that the administration was actively conspiring with the energy industry to manufacture a crisis to bolster up the case for its new energy policies. Now that substantial parts of these claims are being borne out, it’s likely only a matter of time before further information emerges to implicate the Bush administration directly in the Enron conspiracy (and it’s a good bet that the smoking gun will be found somewhere among the confidential energy policy papers that Cheney still refuses to grant public access to).

So far, there’s been a lot of resistance to accusations that the Bush administration may have played some role in the Enron conspiracy. And here again is where it becomes important to think seriously about how we evaluate the reasonableness of our beliefs. Is it inherently paranoid to think that a sitting President of the United States could be involved in criminal conspiracy? Obviously, it’s not, since there’s ample historical precedent for such beliefs. History, however, doesn’t provide many previous examples of the situation America finds itself in today, in which a sitting President who may be involved in serious criminal activity has managed to concentrate enough power in the office of the Presidency to become all but unassailable.

Which leads me to a final thought: Maybe the reason we’re so quick to accept the casual dismissal of ‘conspiracy theories’ isn’t because we regard all these theories as unreasonable at all. Maybe our willingness to dismiss legitimate questions concerning the conduct of our leaders is motivated by a deep psychological need to be able to trust our authority figures in light of the profound cultural anxiety left in the after-math of the 9/11 attacks.

Maybe accepting the possibility that our leaders could be capable of the wholesale opportunism and moral bankruptcy some have suggested would cause far too much damage to our national psyche, and we’re better off living under the comforting illusion that our leaders couldn’t possibly sink to such depths of deceit and greed.

Or maybe, like responsible adults, we could try facing up to the less convenient realities of democratic citizenship, and recommit ourselves to the difficult but vital responsibilities of carefully examining our political beliefs based on all available information, and working together to arrive at solutions to the real problems confronting our nation, instead of looking at politics as a high-stakes sporting event or an opportunity to present ourselves as morally superior to others.

For now, the choice may still be ours to make; but if we wait much longer, the choice could be out of our hands completely.