Melting the Iron Law

Science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle once concocted a bit of wisdom which I've come to endorse quite heavily, which he called the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.  Loosely paraphrased, this dictates that "any organization, regardless of its original purpose, will inevitably be taken over by individuals who care nothing for that purpose, but only for the perpetuation of the organization itself".  So, if you start a charity called The Feed-The-Hungry-Babies Foundation or something, then no matter how much you care about feeding the hungry babies, the people that you hire to fulfill the Foundation's organizational needs (lawyers, accountants, PR specialists, and above all the people who solicit donations on your behalf, who are essentially salesmen, only the product is "feeling good about yourself because you helped this great charity fulfill its mission"), while they might care about the baby-feeding somewhat, care more about keeping their jobs.  Thusly, they will work to turn the Foundation into a more self-sustaining corporate monolith, and their work will result in the Foundation growing and bloating into a more and more bureaucratic, inefficient institution, whose baby-feeding activities are now distinctly secondary compared to the things it does simply to keep itself alive.  All the employees of this giant social machine are now collaboratively working to ensure that they keep their nice stable careers, and very few hungry babies are actually getting fed.  The babies are no longer the point, The FTHB Foundation Incorporated, LLC is the point, and it will only be a matter of time before it ends up buying some Monsanto subsidiary to expand its profit margins, and the new Strategic Vision Manager will "reclassify" the original baby-feeding department as being contrary to their new food-industry platform, which is projected to produce more sustainable earnings over the next six quarters, so fuck those babies really, we all have 410Ks and vacation plans to think about, and that's obviously what's really important.  That's what corporations do, that's their entire nature and purpose - they convince those within the Company stockade to disregard the welfare of anything that isn't part of the Company.  And thus, the Iron Law rules with an iron fist over the behavior of all such organizations; even if they're founded as charities or the like, they still have all the trappings of a corporate entity, and people who have worked for Berkshire Hathaway or Sam's Club Incorporated or the like will end up working for them too, any time they think it better suits their own selfish interests to insinuate themselves into that company instead.

I for one intend to see a day arrive when the Iron Law is provably false.  I'm very interested in figuring out what that would take.  Is it possible to incorporate a charitable trust or the like, and put bylaws into place which no amount of human selfishness and greed is capable of changing?  I don't know if there's any way to do this - what one person builds, another can pretty much always unbuild - but if some way of at least getting close could be found, then I'd like to see an institution founded under a charter which mandates its own dissolution, the exact moment that Job #1 is so much as rivaled in importance by the self-interest of its own workers.  Indeed, I'd go further - while every organization needs to grow and recruit new people in order to remain vital, this one would actively seek to avoid incentivizing anyone to join it, because it would not be interested in having anyone working for it who is even the slightest bit selfish.  If you need to be bribed into taking a job, then that job is not the right job for you; my hypothetical foundation would not want employees who desperately cling to their positions, but ones who are confident that they will land on their feet if and when I shutter the company's doors, rather than sacrifice one inch of its raison d'etre upon the altar of someone's personal avarice.

As one of those desperate, unconfident employees myself, I'm definitely guilty of perpetuating the Iron Law, which is one of the reasons I'm not really pursuing work in the nonprofit sector - I would be too likely to become the kind of parasite I despise.  I prefer to work in the corporate world, even though I hate corporations, because there I at least feel that I have a right to vampirically drain my salary out of their financial lifeblood, while contributing as little as I can get away with in exchange; such economies are the entire reason capitalism exists, the CEO is doing it too, so he can hardly fault me for it.  (Well, he can, but it won't sting me to realize it's true, as it would if I were working for a charity and realized that I cared more for my job than for its cause.)  Nevertheless, as an idealistic and deeply hypocritical zealot for the principles of justice and honesty, I continue to crusade in search of a purpose which can defy the Iron Law's bars, and remain pure enough in its devotion to deserve my allegiance.  Such an agency would never seduce people into its service with false promises of prosperity; it would tell them right to their face that the work is low-paying, frustrating, and capable of disappearing at a moment's notice.  And I, at least in theory, would gladly sign on regardless, because I would be one of the tiny handful of people who want to work there, in particular, not just for the sake of a paycheck, but so that I can feel good about what I'm doing with my life.