Every organisation with more than twenty people begins to rot from the inside. It starts innocently enough—with office chatter, whispered alliances, and the faint stirrings of factionalism. Not yet full-blown politics, just the embryonic form of it, a precursor virus waiting to bloom. Leave it unattended, and even a small team will descend into petty intrigue. You know the old saying: if there are three people, two will gang up against the third.
Once the headcount reaches fifty, the infection becomes systemic. The organisation goes fully political. The corridors fill with smiling assassins and careerist moralists. The bandits and the idiots begin their climb, hand over hand, towards the top—where they inevitably meet and merge into a single, gelatinous entity of incompetence and greed. Backstabbing becomes a reflex, virtue signalling a survival mechanism.
Within such a system, camouflage becomes the only viable skill. Anyone with a shred of honesty learns to hide it quickly, because the price of transparency is often expulsion—also known as losing your job. The smarter ones learn to wear masks, to parrot slogans, to blend seamlessly into the grey paste of consensus.In very large organisations—NASA, for instance—and especially in publicly funded institutions, this sickness metastasizes completely. By then, only bandits and idiots remain in upper and middle management, sometimes even lower. Their true purpose is no longer the mission, nor innovation, nor service. It’s simply to protect their access to money. Everything else is theatre. I’ll let you imagine where that leads.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/11/02/information-weaponization-at-nasa-part-1-foia/