While unpleasant to thank someone for providing a terrible service, it’s worse to allow said service to continue. It’ll take some swallowing of pride to retire them in comfort, to fund lives of nothingness as a “thank you” for what they have wrought, but no other viable alternative appears to exist.

Speaking of course of the bureaucrats who’ve entrenched themselves behind desks and screens for years, dictating the worst of government policy, staying put as administrations have turned over.

No longer can they be allowed to persist, their machinations, the destruction they deploy. This desired elimination, however, will not come through combatting them nor through replacement (they should not be replaced). Fighting back results in doubling-down, expansion even.

Instead, they must be offered comfort, a severance package that cannot be turn down—mattering not that what is offered is not done so out of benevolence but out a desire for complete removal; transparency here is fine—because they don’t know what to do with it, foreign as it is to them. They lack a soul, hold no self-respect, and therefore regard openness with not just repulsion but also confusion.

“Take this money until death, and it’s because you must go,” will be more effective and incisive an attack than any other that’s been tried. Reason doesn’t work because they lack it. Debate doesn’t work because not only are they not listening to you, many also do not even hear you. Emotional appeals hold no sway because their hearts were hardened long ago.

Only the offer of comfort—really, it’s an illusion they cannot discern—leads to their defeat, when along with this comfort is the perpetual acknowledgement of power they once possessed.

Allowing them the ability to claim having once been somebody while existing as only body, no soul, might be the best way to paralyze a former destructionist. Though it stings to feign gratitude toward them, remember that this is a game—and that blatant transparency trumps fruitless combat every time.