What you are describing as performative I would describe as bureaucratic.
The Iron Law or Bureaucracy:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)
Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever.
Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.
Assigning single purpose to things is not necessary. "Systems are what they do" is a quote for a reason.
I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs.
If you think the only value add to a business is the business output, you are taking admin work for granted.
In a way the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own. I think it’s only external pressures that’ll keep the bureaucracy in check, as in if the organization is at risk of dying the interests are aligned so that a more symbiotic relationship is necessary. When organizations are not at risk, either through massive initial success or state intervention (ZIRP) then feedback loop is cut and the bureaucracy will run rampant.
And that's why command economies fail. They fail in the same way that firms do, except that because the whole economy is one giant firm, you can't get the you need to remove entrenched bureaucrats until the situation gets so bad that you have a revolution or lose a war.
The whole economy is always one giant firm.
Makes me think of this timeless and excellent quote by Oscar Wilde:
“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”
Great sounding quotes of unclear origin are usually attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill, or a few others.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Misquotations
*Commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde. There doesn't appear to be any definitive source for it.
The quote actually reads like a summary of Parkinson's Law, that bureaucracies inherently tend to grow because officials create work for each other another and seek to increase their numbers. But the exact quote doesn't appear in Parkinson's original essay. Quote from that essay:
"Factor 1: An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and
Factor 2: Officials make work for each other."
-- https://archive.org/details/parkinsons-law-the-economist
I suggest reading the book if you can get your hands on a copy. It's a short and highly entertaining read:
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/parkinsons-law_c-northcote-par...
In cybernetics, the first kind of people are devoted to System 1, and the others are devoted to Systems 2-5. Any functioning organization has all 5 systems.
Imagine a school with only teachers and no administration. Who hires the teachers, who collects tuition, who schedules classes? Even if the teachers could do those things, now the teachers have to do the administration, which takes away from teaching--and the teachers quickly find (like any new business owner) that most of their time is spent on 'overhead' and very little on teaching itself.
The Iron Law is generally viewed as undesirable, because the 'doers' don't want the 'managers' to control the organization--this is how everything becomes enshittified. At best you have benevolent managers who are extremely sympathetic to the doers and act accordingly, but this is generally short-lived and depends on the organization hiring those benevolent managers. So the big question is, how can we ensure that the values of the organization (System 5) remain aligned with the values of the doers?
The doers can fire the system 5 people.
Unfortunately, real-world bureaucratic orgs of any meaningful size or age always include a third type of person - dedicated neither to the org's goals, nor to the org itself.
In general, one should speak more circumspectly about that third type.
> There was a point of equilibrium in any organization’s middle management, a fulcrum of responsibility that remained still while the upper and lower ranks of the bureaucracy moved around it. Tyren knew from experience that a shrewd official could find this pivot-point within the org chart and, once entrenched, enjoy near-complete autonomy with almost no responsibility.
From "Son of a Liche", by J. Zachary Pike.