Personnel is Policy

In the moment, policy is always and only personnel. Who you choose to do a thing determines what gets done. Effectively no other choice matters. Training, prior knowledge, even experience in many cases are little blips that you can easily rectify. (Universities lol.) The only choice that matters is the person you're training.

In the long term, the ideological environment matters. We can approximate humanity as a set of 100-1000 distinct phenotypes. The personalities manifested by these phenotypes are what determine policy, because it determines which ideology they adopt, or how they tweak the adopted ideology for their own purposes. 

In other words saying "The Masons" were an evil conspiracy is almost completely misleading. Rather, there were evil conspiring phenotypes, who adopted a certain worse-than-Christianity anti-Christianity due to their phenotypes, and as it happened they (probably, I haven't checked) accumulated in the Masons. More or less for exactly the reasons they now accumulate in universities and in 3-letter agencies. Masons used to be roughly equivalent to what chip fab engineers are like now. Stone is expensive. If your hand slips, you often lose the whole block and have to start over. Result: very strong selection for trustworthiness. Unlike silicon which is largely occult and hidden, stonework is extremely obvious, and as a result of these two factors, Masons accumulated cachet, and thus accumulated parasites. 

Had "The Masons" not had their cachet, the parasitic phenotypes would have picked the organization that did have cachet. Once these phenotypes escaped slavery, jail, or execution, the fall was inevitable; the details were entirely incidental. 

We can also perturb what gets done by choice of institution. If you have a sadist, they will cause harm regardless of what institution you put them in, but if you put them in the EPA they will cause environmental harm, while if you put them in the DOE they will cause economic harm, and if you put them in DHS they cause harm to individuals. The only way to limit their harm is to cut off their hands and tongue. 

Naturally, this is essentially the ur-conviction of the opposite-of-a-Fascist, who instead believes policy is personnel, in the sense that policy determines phenotype. 

In a sense, this is even sort of true. Once an institution has a preponderance of a particular phenotype, it will tend to repel almost all other phenotypes and purify itself. Once the EPA has a preponderance of vandals and sadists, they will make it extraordinarily uncomfortable for any non-criminal to work there. They will change the policies to be overtly sadistic and destructive, so even should a non-criminal resist the selection pressure, they will also have to pervert the inertia of the bureaucracy itself to do any good. Yes, the non-criminal will attempt this exact thing, because their phenotype gives them no choice, but they are distinctly unlikely to succeed. 

In the long term, a government makes its country hostile to non-slaves and non-criminals, reducing the reproductive prospects of any phenotypes that might compete with its rapaciousness. In other words, purifying its country of virtue. Government policy is always a policy of slow-motion suicide. Fascism is only special because it's more like fast-motion suicide.