Authoritarianism and American politics

[TnT]

(01-20-2017, 02:02 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-20-2017, 10:48 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(01-20-2017, 10:02 AM)Odin Wrote:

(01-20-2017, 09:44 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(01-20-2017, 09:00 AM)Odin Wrote: Bureaucracy is a necessary evil of civilization, you can't have one without the other. Anyone with any historical knowledge knows that the first bureaucracies emerged with the first civilizations. The oldest bits of writing we have from Sumeria are bureaucratic documents.

There were civilizations before Sumeria.  They just didn't write things down.  Possibly they weren't bureaucratic and didn't need to write things down.

Bronze age civilizations like Sumeria were particularly bureaucratic, because bronze technology promoted bureaucratic empires.  The level of bureaucracy actually fell during the iron age.

Huh? Sumeria WAS the first civilization.

I suppose it depends on what your definition of "civilization" is.  There is plenty of evidence of permanent settlements, stone buildings, and agriculture that predate Sumer by an extended period of time:  Jericho, Tel Qaramel, Chengtoushan, etc.  If you are looking for something more substantial the growth of Mesopotamia as a network of cities is largely contemporaneous with similar development in Egypt, Elam, the Indus River Valley, etc.

It's also not outside the realm of possibility that something older will eventually emerge.

This is all true, but it avoids the question: can a larger, more complex human society exist without a bureaucracy to organize and manage it?  If yes, can it manage that over an extended period of time?  A 'no' to either question answers the mail.

This could come as a shock to some of our anti-MBA crowd here, but in my MBA studies in the area of Organization Management, the notion of "bureaucracy" came up.  Even in that environment, it was not judged "good" or "evil".  It was pointed out that if one has an organization doing something, and that something needs to be stable and relatively unchanging, a bureaucracy is an excellent way to set it up.

Even in bureaucracy there need to be ways for changes to be introduced, but only painstakingly and for good reason.

Organization structure is very, very much a contexual thing.  It depends.  Even authoritarian structures have their uses, as do structures for situations in which almost no organization is best.