Who governs?

I’ve been thinking about posting along these lines for a while, and then today I read this post (requires subscription) that covered some of the ground I wanted to. He quoted Thomas Jefferson and Robert Heinlein about how there are basically two kinds of people when it comes to politics. Here’s the Heinlein quote:

“Political tags–such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth–are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”

The Constitution of the United States of America was written primarily by people who had no desire for people to be controlled. This was a very rare case of people of this sort actually gaining political power; the norm in human history is for governments to be constituted for and by those believing in control. For the past over one hundred years the pretext of those desiring control has been Science: since the development of the physical sciences and engineering has led to incredible advancements in material wealth and benefit to society, surely the development of social sciences followed by rule by experts would have similar benefits. Slowly but surely, the original constitutional system of government has been replaced by an ever-expanding set of government agencies populated by these experts, and questioning them or suggesting they shouldn’t govern is now considered a threat to “Our Democracy.”

Personally, as a “surly curmudgeon, suspicious and lacking in altruism,” I would prefer to return to constitutional government.

A myth of competence

Julia gets Imprimis, a newsletter from Hillsdale College. Today she got an issue with an essay by Charles S. Faddis entitled Why the CIA No Longer Works—and How to Fix It. I’m not sure that the CIA ever really “worked”, though, and I doubt it can be fixed.

He identifies two problems with the current CIA: bureaucratization and politicization, and those are certainly big problems. The CIA suffers from more fundamental issues, though.

The biggest one is right in the first letter, “C”, of the initials. As the “Central Intelligence Agency”, the CIA is supposed to be the intelligence organization of the nation. Instead of each branch of the military and the State Department each gathering its own intelligence, the CIA is supposed to gather all the intelligence and organize it into a coherent narrative to inform policy decisions. But in many cases, especially with something as potentially ambiguous and uncertain as intelligence, policy makers would be better served by receiving multiple analyses from differing viewpoints.

Exacerbating this uniformity is the fact that, going back to the CIA’s predecessor the OSS, it has recruited primarily from upper and upper middle class upper-tier college educated people. A CIA analysis is unlikely to contradict the interests and preconceptions of this group. They have a distinct tendency to overestimate their understanding and competence. Also, given that this demographic is probably the most politicized and bureaucratized group in America, this recruitment pattern must contribute to the issues that Faddis identifies.

America would be better served by two or more competing intelligence agencies, that broadened their recruiting to include people educated in the “school of hard knocks” or with deeper experience and understanding of the cultures of the places they are analyzing.