Conquest's three laws

Yesterday, I was looking for something else on the Internet and I stumbled across something called "The Three Laws of Politics," from Robert Conquest. They go like this:

1. Everyone is reactionary about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. (Also called O'Sullivan's First Law.)
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. (Also called Conquest's Second Law.)

OK, they are funny. But why am I writing about them? My aim is to see whether I can give rational explanations for each one. I think I can.

Everyone is reactionary about what he knows best.

The Wikipedia article about Robert Conquest gives an example to illustrate this law:

In his 1991 Memoirs, Kingsley Amis wrote of Conquest that "he was to point out that, while very 'progressive' on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience. From my own and others' example he formulated his famous First Law, which runs, 'Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.'

Fair enough, but why should it be true?

I think the reason goes something like this. To begin, "reactionary" is a term that contrasts with "progressive." People are "progressive" on a topic when they favor new methods; they are "reactionary" when they prefer old ones. 

Now, when you really grapple with a topic—carpentry, say, or music, or teaching—you learn from experience what works and what doesn't. And over time you learn where there are seductive-looking shortcuts that actually make the work worse rather than better. For the most part, the methods that work will be the same ones that successful practitioners have used in the past, because the discipline itself isn't going to change in a few paltry years, or even in a generation. The nature of the material will remain the same (the wood, say, or your instrument, or your students), and so will the successful methods. Consequently, when you really know a topic, you are likely to respect the wisdom of the traditional ways of handling it; and you will see the folly lurking behind attractive new methods, because you yourself probably tried something similar years ago and saw first-hand how it failed.

Therefore, by knowing the topic well, you will be reactionary about it.

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

Again, the Wikipedia article gives examples: the Church of England, Amnesty International, the ACLU, and the Ford Foundation. But why should it be true?

The point of this principle seems to be that the natural tendency of any organization is to drift leftwards; therefore unless the organization is defined from the outset to be right-wing it will end up left-wing. (Presumably if an organization is defined from the outset to be right-wing, that might be enough to slow or even halt its natural drift.) So we can rephrase the question to ask: Why is it in the nature of organizations as such to drift to the left-wing?

You can find here the article (by John O'Sullivan) that originally proposed this law, but it doesn't give a very good explanation. All it says it that the "people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world"—but it doesn't say why that should be.

So let's start by understanding the terms left-wing and right-wing. These terms originated from the seating patterns in the French National Assembly, during the early days of the French Revolution. Those members of the Assembly who cared more passionately for social equality sat to the left of the President of the Assembly, while their opponents sat to the right. But in any society, the party which cares most about equality are always the Weak. The Strong are sure of their place and therefore are less likely to spend time thinking about equality; but the Weak fear being trampled by the Strong, and therefore cling to the ideal of Equality in self-defense.

In today's world, people who are sure of their own strength most often want to use that strength to make money. They are the ones who light out on their own to start businesses, or who rise quickly to the top to lead them. The people who do like "private profit, business, making money" are the Strong. 

The Weak, by contrast … well, of course there are gradations. The weakest simply fall through the cracks of society and end up on the bottom, no matter what. But there are others who are able to make a living for themselves, but who feel nonetheless far more kinship with the Weak than with the Strong. Perhaps we can call them the middling-Weak. These people become employees (almost never employers), because employment means a kind of security with only a narrow scope of responsibility. (The Owner or the Boss, by contrast, is responsible for everything.) And the best employer from the perspective of the middling-Weak is a large organization or institution. Organizations are force-multipliers. Organizations are like walled cities for the middling-Weak; and as long as they do their jobs faithfully, their organizations will protect them.

Therefore organizations (especially large ones) attract the middling-Weak; at the same time they tend to repel the Strong, because the Strong find them constraining. So over time, organizations (especially large ones) are staffed and managed predominantly by the middling-Weak. They may have been founded by strong men—John D. Rockefeller, say, or Henry Ford—but the strong men die after a time and a management team takes over. The management team contains a number who are middling-Weak, and every decade there are a few more. Consequently, over time the management team comes to feel more and more sympathy with the Weak in society at large. Over time, they throw the organization's weight behind causes that support or favor the Weak. And this is to say that over time they drift to the left-wing. 

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.    

For this law, the Wikipedia article quotes one remark to the effect that "a bureaucracy sometimes actually IS controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar British secret service." Even when such overt subversion is not literally at issue, though, the point is that bureaucratic organizations often behave in ways which are baffling if you consider their stated goals. I think that—again, leaving out overt subversion—I can identify two reasons.

First, the directors of the bureaucracy have their own private interests, which are bound to differ (in at least some respects) from the interests of the organization itself. So when they make choices, those choices are likely to be at some kind of angle from the organization's own interests. I don't mean that the directors simply exploit the organization cynically as a cover for their own actions. Doubtless that happens from time to time; but I think far more common is the case where the final decision is some kind of weird vector-sum of the interests of all the important directors individually, plus the interests of the organization simply. Trying to unravel the logic afterwards is likely to be very difficult. Hence the note of despair implicit in this law.

Second, the directors of a bureaucracy are often not as enlightened and perspicacious as we think they ought to be given their exalted position. Even the ones at the very top are human beings like you and me: and they are just as capable of being short-sighted, muddled, and confused as we are. When they make decisions that look gobsmackingly wrong-headed, of course it is possible that they are trying to subvert the organization from within (as per Conquest's Third law); and it is also possible that they are playing four-dimensional chess, so that things will all turn out fine for reasons we can't even imagine; but it is just as likely that they made a simple mistake.

Robert J. Hanlon summarized this last possibility in Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

So much for Conquest's Three Laws.