The Higher You Climb, the Less Free You Are

We have an intuition about organisations that runs roughly like this: power accumulates upward, so the people at the top are the free ones and the people at the bottom are constrained. Rank buys latitude.

The opposite is closer to the truth, and understanding why explains something important about why organisations cannot be democratic.

The Inversion

The higher a person climbs within an organisation, the more he becomes a captive of it. As he rises, his decisions are increasingly determined by the organisation rather than by him; the range of positions he can take narrows; and his freedom to detach from the institution's interests shrinks toward nothing.

Meanwhile the people at the bottom retain something the executives have lost. They have relatively little invested, relatively little to protect, and correspondingly greater freedom to express their own interests — and the interests they hold as members of the wider society the organisation operates in. A junior employee can think a policy is wrong and say so at dinner. A vice-president cannot, and a chief executive certainly cannot.

This is worth stating carefully, because it sounds like a complaint about cowardice and it is not. It is a description of a position.

The Selection Effect

Now the part that makes it structural rather than incidental.

The loss of freedom is not a side effect of promotion. It is the qualification for promotion.

At every rung, advancement goes to people who have demonstrated that they will not use their remaining latitude against the organisation. That is what is being tested. Not competence alone — competence is necessary but nowhere near sufficient — but reliability in the specific sense of preferring the institution's interest when it conflicts with the interests of those below, or with the interests of the wider public.

You are not promoted for costing the organisation money on behalf of outsiders. You are promoted for having shown, repeatedly, that you will not.

And repeatedly is the operative word. If an organisation has seven levels, the person at the top has passed that test seven times. Repeated testing sharply increases confidence in a result: a single blood test with a ten per cent error rate gives one-in-ten confidence, two independent tests give one-in-a-hundred, three give one-in-a-thousand. By the seventh rung, the organisation is very confident indeed about what it has selected for.

So the people running large institutions are not a random draw from the population. They are the subset that has iteratively demonstrated a willingness to subordinate outside interests — including the public's — to institutional ones. That is not a claim about their moral character. It is a claim about a filter.

Why Organisations Cannot Be Democratic

Put the two halves together and you have the answer to a question people often ask sincerely: why can we not simply make large organisations more democratic internally, more responsive to their own members and to the public?

Because the people with the authority to make that change are precisely the people the organisation selected for being unwilling to make it. The freedom to reform the institution has been filtered out at every level on the way up. The people who retain that freedom — the ones near the bottom — have no authority to exercise it.

That is not a coordination problem, which better process might fix. It is a structural feature of hierarchy, and it will reproduce itself in any hierarchy that promotes from within on the basis of demonstrated loyalty. Which is to say: in all of them.