Rada­gast has com­piled a list of offers of aid turned away by those with respon­si­bil­ity and power in man­ag­ing home­land secu­rity, emer­gen­cies, and the like. You should scroll through it and read, I think.

I’ve won­dered for some time how insti­tu­tions make deci­sions. On the one hand, there is almost always some­body in charge in most mod­ern insti­tu­tions: a leader with a plan, or a com­mit­tee empow­ered with over­sight, and the vast major­ity of the decision-​​making power of the insti­tu­tion rests ulti­mately with those few. By the other argu­ment, any insti­tu­tion of suf­fi­cient com­plex­ity must be e col­lec­tive, and as such can be thought of as pos­sess­ing a kind of unique and sep­a­rate con­scious­ness from that of any nom­i­nal lead­ers, and of “doing” things autonomously that are not explicit parts of any com­po­nent person’s plans.

So on the one hand, a CEO or chief of some other sort sets the course of the insti­tu­tion and directs it, dri­ving it towards explicit goals which are defined by com­mit­tees and boards and con­stituents, but which in gen­eral that Big Boss per­son keeps in mind and uses to fla­vor every deci­sion. In this sense, even very com­plex insti­tu­tions are directed by indi­vid­ual will and choice, and while not dri­ven as explic­itly as a more straight­for­ward and sim­ple machine might be, an insti­tu­tion is nonethe­less much like a com­pli­cated machine with a very dif­fi­cult set of con­trols, with one respon­si­ble (a thought­ful plan­ner) sit­ting before them twid­dling the knobs.

On the other hand, insti­tu­tions are real col­lec­tives of many peo­ple and over­lap­ping com­po­nent groups, under­tak­ing projects and address­ing con­cerns locally as each indi­vid­ual par­tic­i­pant does some bal­anced com­bi­na­tion of what they’re told and what their expe­ri­ence says is best to get their part of the work done. In this con­text, what we see as a col­lec­tive “con­scious­ness” of the insti­tu­tion emerges from the aggre­gate behav­ior of the peo­ple involved, and in a truly com­plex orga­ni­za­tion can be said to dif­fer from and exceed the under­stand­ing of any one person’s actual vision or plan — includ­ing the nom­i­nal direc­tor or an out­side observer. Orga­ni­za­tions mod­eled in this way can present us with purposive-​​seeming behav­ior that does not sound like any part of the explicit plans of the indi­vid­u­als nom­i­nally in charge, but which rather sound like part of the “plan” of the insti­tu­tion itself. In this frame­work, insti­tu­tions have inten­tions of their own, as well as desires and beliefs and all those other attrib­utes of agents proper.

And you know what? Seen in either frame­work, FEMA and the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion in the larger sense scare the hell out of me. There are three choices, I think: (1) They have planned or are now plan­ning to act and respond in exactly this way, and so far every­thing is going accord­ing to plan or is a response to cor­rect the plan of some cen­tral per­son in charge; (2) there is nobody in charge in any real sense, and this bureau­cratic night­mare gov­ern­ment that increas­ingly smacks of fas­cism is in fact dri­ving itself, with us in its clutches, some­where it wants to go; or (3) the insti­tu­tion is dead or som­no­lent, bro­ken into pieces by neglect or inten­tion, hav­ing been cut up or loose into to less-​​effectual inde­pen­dent com­po­nents who do what they can with what they have, but are unco­or­di­nated on all sides and levels.

Did I miss one?