Bureaucracy vs. Zombies

A few months ago I wandered through a room in which my teenage children were watching a "documentary" about life after the zombie apocalypse. Some self-proclaimed expert was saying that after the apocalypse only practical skills would matter, like medicine and being able to maintain all the machinery made in the civilized era. It suddenly hit me why zombies are the perfect villains for our time: they are completely disorganized, even atomized, and in movies the people who confront them are always equally atomized. Consider all the professions missing from this fantasy of post-apocalypse life: politicians, judges, army officers, business executives, managers, in fact anyone at all whose job is organizing people to work together. In the popular culture of the twenty-first century, the government is either ineffectual or evil, and therefore we could never count on it in a crisis. Zombies are villains for the libertarian age.

Consider this, from a little piece by science fiction writer Doug Turnbull about colonizing Mars:

Who will be these Mars settlers, these people who are willing to make a one-way trip to a distant planet? Just the sort of people who make up the most qualified volunteers for the Mars One project: scientists to do research and get the grants to do that work; pilots to fly the spacecraft, engineers to discover and create solutions to the inevitable physical problems that will arise; and technicians to improvise and keep the machinery of the settlement running smoothly.

Again, who is missing? Administrators. Who will coordinate the efforts of all these technicians, engineers, pilots and scientists? Libertarians like to imagine that if all the busybodies just got out of the way, people would organize themselves. This is how the Cato Institute puts it:

… (O)rder in society arises spontaneously, out of the actions of thousands or millions of individuals who coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes.

To which I can only say, dream on. The model here is obviously the "free market," which I agree does work well for some purposes. But it absolutely does not work for many others, including building cars, battling zombies or sending people to another planet.

What is special about our species? Why do we exterminate fearsome animals like cave bears or North American lions instead of the other way around? Because we work together. We are smart, sure, but your unaided intelligence won't do you much good in a world of tigers and grizzly bears. You with a spear against a tiger -- my money is on the tiger. But we don't have to fight tigers alone. We can take them on ten against one, and using the superpower we call language we can coordinate our efforts with a level of detail no other species can match. What's more, using the same power we can share experience, drawing on all the tiger hunts staged not just by the people we know, but by their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. This accumulated knowledge informs everything we do. (Well, except for teenagers in love, who refuse to listen.) One of the pieces of knowledge we have learned is that hunts and wars go better if somebody is put in charge.

Zombies are scary to flustered suburbanites, but for a disciplined military team they would be target practice. Against a government that behaved like the major states of World War II, mobilizing resources on a massive scale, sacrificing areas that could not be saved, forming a coherent plan and following through on it, they would not even be interesting enemies. They are only a threat to people whose social protection has been stripped away.

The culture of our time resists this fundamental fact about humanity. We have a thing for lone wolves, and despise nothing more than bureaucrats. We are profoundly suspicious of huge organizations, unless they are led by charismatic entrepreneurs. I suppose there is nothing new about this; from Achilles to Galahad to Rambo, we have always found the lone hero better story material than a well organized state. But in our time this preference for individual action has become more than a literary device. It has become a political crusade based on convincing people that they are fundamentally alone and cannot depend on the government or anyone else to help them. This is pernicious nonsense. It is a denial, not just of several thousand years of experience, but of our fundamental natures. We are social animals. We live in groups. We coordinate our actions. We form bands, tribes, and states, with recognized leaders. We help each other.

When we work together, we are unstoppable. We have been to the moon and will some day get to Mars. But think for a moment about the Apollo program. What was the ratio of managers to astronauts? Fifty to one? A hundred to one? I accept that NASA was a highly bureaucratic organization, perhaps much more so than it had to be. But it worked. Its cumbersome, unwieldy, wasteful (or whatever other insult you care to use) bureaucracy did things that no voluntary association of technical experts could possibly have done.

When I was younger I used to think that administration was an absolute waste of time and money, all the layers between the top and the bottom should just be swept away. I now recognize that this is nonsense on stilts. Nothing matters more than proper administration. No doubt it is true that many organizations, from government bureaus to engineering firms, have more management than they need. But the function management performs is the most important one. Rerun any zombie movie in your head, giving the living humans an effective organization, and you'll understand what I mean.