In parts One, Two, and Three I toyed with an idea to make bureaucratic institutions more effective in emergencies, by incentivizing and indemnifying such rule-breaking as would be likely to serve the public. I then identified a couple of things that went wrong with CDC/FDA’s response to China’s Filthy Wet Market Lung Attack of 2019. I showed how those things might have gone right if the incentives I suggest were in place.

Obviously I write from a privileged point of view: hindsight. It’s cheap and easy to armchair-quarterback tough decisions taken by others in the past.

This idea of mine isn’t some brilliant flash of higher-order insight. Populations, institutions, and industries have been put on a war footing from the dawn of time. Generally, it means a more regimented command structure with centralized control, but at the same time a relaxation or adjustment of rules and customs that happen to interfere with war aims.

CDC, FDA etc. failed in both those roles. They were not perceived as authoritative, and failed to achieve any semblance of control. They confused and misled the public. At the same time, they kept in place rules which defeated the purposes of many who were able and more than willing to help.

The problems at CDC, FDA etc. can’t be fixed by some obscure blogger’s idea. Instead, these problems illustrate key facts about the way in which institutions degenerate.

Pournelle’s Law goes something like this: “In an institution, there are two types of people: those who support the mission of the institution and those who support the institution itself. The latter kind always gain control, set hiring practices and general policy.”

American institutions have been the envy of the world. Our mode of government, our schools, our industries, have attracted admiration and emulation. But many of our vital institutions are worse than worthless now. They have no mission to serve the public; they serve themselves, when they are not serving corrupt paymasters, often foreign.

Sometimes human institutions improve over time, but all senesce in the end. NASA in the Mercury and Apollo days is perhaps the finest example of mission-focussed institution in history. That latter kind of person, the kind who works for the institution and not the mission, didn’t stand a chance at NASA in those days. They were effortlessly sloughed off, routed around, made irrelevant, even fired from their jobs. Despite this experience, NASA succumbed to Pournelle’s Law in the fulness of time.

Could we establish a new institution with a similar unfailing mission focus, to respond to future pandemics? It might help to define its mission solely as emergency response, only to ever act in the public service under emergency conditions and incentives. War footing, “breaking the glass”, or whatever you want to call it, would be this institution’s only possible reality in action, and its latent reality in preparation. Its daily mindset could be “An outbreak is not a possibility. It is a reality whose time may already have come.”

That mindset is very tough to maintain in the face of Pournelle’s Law. But in America today, that mindset may be unattainable even in the short term, forever.

In the old days, we sometimes said, “It is better to ask forgiveness than permission.” This thinking applied when you had a really good idea and/or a really bad situation on your hands and there was no time to explain to your superiors so you just did whatever you needed to and asked for forgiveness later. Generally, if the results were anything other than a disaster, you’d be forgiven.

That culture is gone, probably for good. The schools have fostered a culture where forgiveness, for anything, is considered a crime. And liability, for anything from drunken sex to expressing a contrarian opinion, is absolute and without appeal. In this climate, it is not possible to breed the kind of humans who can staff an effective institution with the core responsibilities of the CDC. A guy whose eye is always on the liabilities is a guy who can’t look straight at the emergency.

Buy ammunition, I guess.