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This made me reflect that I hadn't actually thought critically about the phrase (at least, commensurate to how often it's used). For fun, if you think the purpose of a system is what it does, write what you think that means, before reading Scott's critique, then write if you've updated your opinion. For example:
(Spoilers go between two sets of "||")
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Notes -
No, I think you discount inertia here. Plenty of people maintain systems they don’t really believe in, support or care for because it’s just what they do, it’s what they’ve always done, and changing a routine (even if you have the power to do so) requires effort.
Then, of course, you respond by saying that in this case, even if the system’s output is ideologically unattractive to those who feed it, they still consider it acceptable, and therefore TPOSIWID is still true, because the purpose itself is a kind of inertia machine, or to be a sinecure, or to perpetuate itself in some grand sense. But then the whole phrase is kind of meaningless.
Or, to put it another way, TPOSIWID is a common catchphrase on right wing twitter to criticize mainstream or progressive institutions. But it works equally well in reverse, because it explains to us that a lot of rightist grand ideological plans will end up establishing (and arguably already have) institutions that fail, are corrupt, are sinecures, exist to perpetuate themselves and have highly deleterious outcomes for society.
So the phrase just becomes a warning about where ideology leads, and thus just another dull argument for the kind of technocratic mediocrity that TPOSIWID advocates hate.
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