Democratic stability and wealth inevitably produce bureaucracy, oligarchy, and stagnation.

Evidence

Drawing on the German sociologist Max Weber, Woodly identifies a central risk that perpetually haunts modern democracies as they stabilize the basic architecture of administrative governance and gain wealth. For Weber, each aspect of that evolution, permitted to run its natural course, inexorably compromises the core of democratic self-governance: Administrative structures gradually harden into the iron cage of Kafkaesque bureaucracy; and the sweet emoluments of increasing wealth inevitably install, eventually, a more or less depraved oligarchy. The result of letting democracy just rumble on? What you will get, sooner or later, is, as Woodly puts it, “dehumanization, expropriation, and stagnation.” — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 224

Categorization

• XREF: Weber’s iron cage echoes the ‘bias of communication’ reading and the trade-law merchant work on institutions. Also connects to We (Zamyatin) and its bureaucratic dystopia. — connects to: Democracy is undermined by both oligarchy and intersecting supremacies. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 53
• DEFINE: Establishes the Weberian mechanism the manifesto builds its diagnosis on.