Many people in positions of authority seems to make perverse and arbitrary decisions these days.
I think Dominic Cummings substack focuses on our establishment bureaucracy's deliberately managed decline quite well. It starts off thus:
We’ve been fundamentally overestimating the extent to which even very high IQ people actually have beliefs… The level of just
outright trend following dominates everything.
(Overheard Washington/DOGE/Silicon Valley discussion)
So little trouble do men take in the search after truth, so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand.
Thucydides 1.20
Yes, all the papers say the same thing, that’s true. So much the same that they are just like frogs before a storm! You can’t hear anything for their croaking.
The old prince, Anna Karenina
The nature of the breakdown of civilisations can be summed up in three points: a failure of
creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of
mimesis (imitation) on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social
unity in the society as a whole.
Toynbee
Bureaucracy is a bad European system of government, created by the use of
permanent public officials, a system that does not, should not, and cannot exist in England.
Palmerston to Queen Victoria, 1837