🪴 A Garden Essay from Jasay’s Garden 🕰️ Series: Institutions that Grow – or Break
In free societies, learning is a decentral process. It emerges from feedback—sometimes painful, often slow, but ultimately productive. Individuals experiment, adapt, fail, and succeed. Markets punish inefficiency. Civil society generates norms. Courts correct missteps. The system breathes.
States and their bureaucracies, however, do not breathe. They issue commands. And when they fail, they rarely know it—and even more rarely admit it.
🧱 The Structural Immunity of Bureaucracies
Bureaucracies are not merely inefficient. They are structurally resistant to learning. Feedback, if it comes at all, is filtered through layers of hierarchy. Each level insulates the next. Those who make the decisions rarely feel the consequences.
A business that ignores customers goes bankrupt. A student who performs poorly fails. Even politicians, at least in functioning democracies, can be voted out. But state agencies persist. Their existence is not conditioned by performance, but by mandates. They do not rely on value creation, but on budget negotiations.
In this world, what matters is not whether something works—but whether the right forms have been filled out, whether the superior is satisfied, whether the agency’s mission statement has been honored in the annual report.
This is the empire of non-learning.
👑 The Throne-Sitters
Worse than the absence of feedback is the institutionalized belief in top-down wisdom. In hierarchical systems, deference replaces deliberation. Subordinates ask: What does the boss want? Superiors believe they must always decide. They are surrounded by courtiers, not critics.
The result is what we might call the Throne-Sitter Syndrome: a belief that the person at the top is not only entitled to command, but also competent to judge matters far beyond their knowledge. From climate policy to educational reform, from regulation to digitalization—decisions are made with little regard for those who must live with the results.
It is not malice. It is the logic of hierarchy.
🔁 Feedback Loops and the Liberal Alternative
Liberal institutions flourish not because they are perfect, but because they learn. Their feedback loops are tight and unforgiving. Prices, votes, contracts, competition, consent—these are signals that correct, redirect, and reveal.
Jasay understood this deeply. In his view, the state tends to monopolize responsibility, and in doing so, it crowds out the very mechanisms that make learning possible. What is not allowed to fail, cannot improve. What is not allowed to emerge, cannot adapt.
Liberal societies do not need omniscient designers. They need space—space for feedback to flow, for knowledge to be tested, for reform to come not from above, but from below.
🌱 A Culture That Learns
The real crisis is not that the state fails. It is that it does not learn. It expands. It doubles down. It deflects criticism by moralizing its mission or redefining success.
A free society, by contrast, embraces modesty. It does not pretend to solve everything. It allows people to try. And fail. And try again.
That is how real learning happens.
And perhaps, how real liberty grows.