Every four years we vote. The parties change, the coalitions shift, the faces on the posters are new. And yet much of what is dysfunctional stays dysfunctional. What is slow stays slow. What is hostile to innovation stays hostile to innovation.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a structural observation — and it leads straight to the heart of the Megamachine.
I. The Asymmetry of Power
A minister stays in office for three to four years on average. He arrives new in a department he often knows only superficially. He depends on briefing papers, assessments, recommendations — written by people who have worked in this apparatus for decades.
These people are not elected. They are appointed, made civil servants with tenure, impossible to dismiss. They were there before the minister. They will still be there after him. And they know it.
The minister signs what is put in front of him. Sometimes he understands it. Often not completely. Then he is gone. The civil servants stay. The continuity of power does not lie with the elected. It lies with the appointed.
In 2003 Dahrendorf described how political decisions are made in spaces that have become more diffuse — where you cannot point the finger at anyone. The bureaucracy is one of these spaces. It is not undemocratic in the formal sense — it is part of the democratic system. But it is the part that de facto determines continuity and direction while democracy produces surface phenomena: new faces, new coalition agreements, new promises.
II. The Perfect Bulwark
Bureaucrats work according to rules. These rules are laid down in laws and ordinances. Many of these laws and ordinances were drafted by bureaucrats — or at least decisively influenced by them. Parliamentarians vote. The drafts come from the ministries.
That means: to a considerable extent the bureaucracy writes the rules by which it itself works and is judged. When something goes wrong, the individual official can entrench himself behind these rules. He acted correctly — by the book. That the rule is absurd is not his responsibility. That is the legislator's business. The legislator, in turn, only signed what was put in front of him.
The system is not corrupt in the classical sense. It is something subtler: it is self-referential. This is the Megamachine in its bureaucratic form — a system that secures its own reproduction without anyone having decided it should be so.
III. The Economics of Complexity
Every authority has a vital interest in its tasks remaining complex. For complexity is its reason for existing. The more impenetrable the body of rules, the more indispensable the expert who can navigate it.
↓ Problems require regulations
↓ Regulations create complexity
↓ Complexity requires bureaucrats
↓ Bureaucrats identify new problems
↻ positive feedback without negative feedback
This cycle is not malicious. It is emergent. Nobody planned it this way. It works nonetheless — or precisely for that reason. This is the pattern we find everywhere in the Megamachine: positive feedback that reinforces itself without any subject steering it or being answerable for it.
IV. SPRIND — A Cautionary Tale
In 2019 the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation was founded — SPRIND. The idea: an authority that works radically differently. Fast, willing to take risks, unbureaucratic. A German DARPA.
The reality: SPRIND was designed by ministerial officials, embedded in existing budget rules, audited by courts of auditors, staffed according to the usual procedures. The agency for disruptive innovation works according to the rules that structurally prevent disruptive innovation.
That is not an individual failure. It is systemic logic — and the most precise example of one of the central theses of these working papers: the apparatus cannot bring forth anything that contradicts its own nature. Whoever wants to reform the Megamachine with the means of the Megamachine produces a new department of the Megamachine.
V. What Politicians Can Actually Do
Politicians can set symbols. They can shift priorities — marginally. They can replace personnel — at the top. They can redistribute money — within the existing structures.
What they cannot do: change the structure itself. For that they would need the cooperation of precisely those who profit from the existing structure. And that cooperation does not exist. There is delay. There are reservations. There are legal objections. There is the reference to EU law, to precedents, to budget rules.
In the end the minister signs what is put in front of him.
The parties are surface phenomena. Beneath them lies the great constant: an apparatus that is accountable to no one but itself. That is why it doesn't matter who governs. Seeing this is not resignation. It is the precondition for any realistic strategy. Whoever wants change must know where it is possible — and where it is not.
VI. No Indictment
This text is not an indictment of civil servants. Most of them do their work conscientiously. Many are frustrated by the very dysfunctions they themselves produce. They are stuck in the same system as everyone else.
The point is a different one: the system reproduces itself. It has developed a logic of its own that is stronger than the intentions of those who inhabit it — whether elected or appointed. That is the Megamachine. No subject, no plan, no villain. Only structures that preserve themselves — and in doing so enclose everything they touch.