27/10/2024
The Tyranny of Bureaucracy
Bureaucrat (noun): humanoid with limited options, self-relegated to impede the flow of energy rather than advance it. Bureaucrats follow a schedule adhering to geological shifts in time. They reckon strategy by the movement of tectonic plates. Their creativity is limited to how a punishment should be administered. Do you know a bureaucrat? Have you ever seen one up close? These poor souls are trapped in a never-ending adherence to inane rules they had no part in drafting- but damned if they’re not going to defend them to their death in the pursuit of justice. They attempt to convince you of your errant delusions. They point to numbers on a pie chart and tell you “statistics don’t lie.” They castigate you for not carrying the six in basic arithmetic. You are made to be foolish in the eyes of their peers with your obvious inadequacies. They linger on a plane of atrophied existence, rife with the insufferable confidence of an uninspired mind and doltish point of view. You could be forgiven for thinking they are merely stupid. They are not. They are simply lacking in purpose, in the same way stillborn butterfly eggs remain attached to a leaf: They once had to potential to be beautiful and free, but are now stuck on a frigging bush. You can only have pity upon them. They move not with alacrity. They are smug and smarmy, displaying their resentment, like a prayer shawl, against an unjust system that has wronged them. Their complaints fall woefully short of any rebellion against fixing anything. They wander in a never-ending slow motion Star Trek episode where the aliens move too fast to be perceived by the ship’s crew. The enforcement of rules is to be emphasized but not the effect of those rules. These are not results-oriented people. They are simply put in place to achieve some nebulous purpose, agreed-upon by committee, intended to achieve the undefined greater good but clearly not a rational good. Very often, the summations are not only inefficient, but they’re downright evil. The little petty tyrannies we experience every day become entwined in our every day life and soon we forget to question mindless authority. We become programmed and desensitized to obedience. That’s simply the way it is.
But in fact, bureaucracy is only a method that we have chosen as a society to smooth out our differences and anomalies. By their very nature, exceptions are exceptions. How often do you have situation that is outside the purview of an established protocol? How many times have you felt there was no good option speaking to a robotic telephone customer service voice? Press one if you need assistance, press two if you need a call back, press three if you’re a moron, press four to kiss my ass, press five if you need to hear these options again.
I was recently at local, county building and zoning department trying to close an open permit for a client. Surprisingly, there was no one in line. Apparently, the residents of the community knew something I didn’t. I approached the bulletproof, plexiglass window. There were four narrow holes with which to communicate through. I smiled at the clerk who looked at me as to say “what new horror is this?” I asked if I was in the right area to close a permit. She silently indicated that I needed to bend over to speak through the holes. I reluctantly obliged, bowing before her to aim my voice through a quarter inch hole in the glass. Addressing her more or less sideways, I repeated my question. She asked me “did you sign in?” I looked around the room, there was no one there. No, I said. She gestured to her left where a complex computer keypad about 3 feet to my right awaited me. I nodded in understanding and shuffled slowly to my right, smiling at stoneface as I moved. Her eyes followed me like the haunted portrait in every Scooby Doo episode. The screen said touch any button to begin, so I did. It said, sign in. I typed in my name, pressed enter and immediately a digit counter on the wall read “serving #1.” She encouraged me to continue as I was officially in existence now. The screen coughed up two prompts: “open a permit” and “revise a permit”. I looked back up at her.
“There doesn’t seem to be a option to close a permit,” I said sheepishly. She released a slow, guttural sigh of frustration like Methuselah being forced to teach kindergarten.
“Just press any key.” There was a hint of gravel with the menace in her voice. She was forced to speak much louder than normal to make it through the bulletproof glass holes and she clearly resented the extra exertion. I was taken aback, not by the volume of her instructions, but by the forfeiture of procedure. I didn’t question it. Maybe, I thought, this was a harbinger of a new era of common sense. A pang of optimism shot through me, like licking a battery. I went back to the screen and pressed the open permit key. I was immediately thrust into a wormhole of confusion I didn’t want to be in. Intrusive, irrelevant questions popped up like whack-a-moles: How many kids do I have? What’s your mother‘s maiden name? What’s your social security number? Which hand do you ma******te with? I panicked, realizing I was force-beamed into a sub-human universe I might not be able to extricate myself from. I was Captain Kirk and Landru had found me. I looked back up at the desiccated gargoyle, still pondering me: was I going to be a problem? She extended her raptor-like talons, indicating I should scroll down. She mouthed the words “scroll down” just in case I didn’t get the Nosferatu gesture. Feeling her eyes dissecting me like laser beams, I started scrolling in desperation, trying to find a way out of my predicament. She shook her head and muttered what appeared to be the word, “motherf**ker, and started quick walking around the back of her glass enclosure. A steel bolt snapped and the door opened up next to me and out popped Rasputin in a rainstorm. By the looks of her she could’ve been sleeping with Pennywise 30 seconds ago.
“Sometimes it acts up” she glared.
“Really?” I whimpered, sounding like a wounded muppet. I thought my life might be in danger. She pushed me aside and started pressing buttons on the screen. Lights started flashing. After two minutes, she whipped out a walkie-talkie she carried at her hip holster and called for back up. An overweight, sweaty gentleman, covered in a violent cologne, named Jose popped out of the secret panel in the wall like an estranged Oompa Loompa. I knew his name was Jose because he was wearing an official looking name tag on his pocket protector that said so. It simply said, Jose. No last name. Didn’t seem necessary. Jose and the gorgon started working on the screen together, conferring over theories like John Nash talking to absolutely no one in the Pentagon. A line started to form behind me. It seemed as if the county had shut down because of a glitch in the matrix. I was waiting for Agent Smith in black sunglasses to whisk me away to an antiseptic, white room: “You’re an interesting character, Mr. Marks, apparently by day you are a simple real estate broker trying to make a living using basic human understanding, but by night you are attempting to infiltrate an overly dispassionate membrane of municipal insanity of which you know nothing.” Apparently, I had asked a question, a perfectly normal question to some, which was so loathsome, so abhorrent, that its anomalous and untested nature no one in the asylum had considered before. It was hard to believe that the concept of closing something after it had been opened had not yet been considered. I had committed the supreme sin of defying their carefully considered categories. Finally, after several minutes of frustration…no, not frustration. That’s the wrong word. They both simultaneously collapsed into indifference at the inability to solve the problem. It was as if failure itself was so common in their world that an apathy-crash was the inevitable result of such things. They had run out of options, reached the end of their education reservation and…it was time for lunch. A supervisor wearing a Gryffindor tie with salsa stains on it was summoned in and I was ushered into a hidden, chamber of secrets in the back. It was, in fact, the board room where grievances were heard and systematically dismantled by thought vultures. It had a series of plush, leather seats for the cryptic overlords that were elevated above the public seating. The unwashed public got to sit at a lower level, in a penitent, church-like style, more uncomfortable, in folding, movie-theater seats. Mine had gum on the bottom. This was clearly where the public hearings took place. The difference between the officiator and the officiated was clear. This was where the priests of the Temples of Syrinx presided, and we, the uneducated plebeians, who grovel out our petitions, were simply uninvited distractions.
I was asked to sit in one of the public folding seats and the supervisor pulled up a folding chair in front of me so we were at similar height. It was a clumsy attempt at social parity. His way of ameliorating the situation. Apparently, this wasn’t the time for intimidation. They had screwed up and they knew it BUT they were not allowed to own it. This is a key concept in bureaucracy. The monster exists to feed not to be fed off of. The very existence of a bureaucracy depends upon their inability to be wrong under any circumstances. If they are found to be wrong, which is often, it is simply a “systemic problem” that will be sorted out in due course. In this manner, they win by attrition, not through any logical means. Whereas in a normal, healthy relationship between two strangers who disagree, one could easily use common sense, empathy and rational thinking to see how they wronged the other and simply apologize to make amends. It is not so in the tyranny of bureaucracy where the rules self-perpetuate, regardless of the consequences, in order to justify its own existence. The goal is to continue, not to evolve. An important distinction.
The supervisor smiled in a sickly, sympathetic attempt to placate me. It was time for quiet reflection. He was bringing me to church.
St. Paul spoke to the heathen in soothing tones, “I’m sorry you’re having trouble with the system. How can I help you?”
(“I’M having trouble?” I thought.)
“I’d like to close a permit.”
“Well, that’s problematic on this particular property because it was never opened correctly.”
I thought about this for a moment.
“If it wasn’t opened correctly, could it really be opened?”
“Yes, it was technically ‘opened’ (he made air quotes), but we can’t close it until the violations are satisfied.”
I said “how can I satisfy the violations?”
He said, “you need to close the permit.”
I blinked at him like Einstein was discussing black hole physics. I thought of Joseph Heller‘s book. I decided to try using the universal language of Thurston Howell III:
“The owner would be happy to pay for the violations.”
“Well, unfortunately she can’t do that while the permit still open.”
“So, can she close the permit and pay for the violations?”
“No, as I said, it wasn’t opened correctly.”
“So, we can’t pay to close it, we can’t fix it and we can’t open a new one, but we’re accumulating daily fines while it’s open?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
I realized at that point I was free-falling in a whirling vortex of insanity. I started grasping for lifelines. The person I was talking to was completely untethered from any semblance of reality that I know.
“Is there anything that you can do to help me resolve the issue?”
“Well, I can refer you to the director of planning and zoning but she’s out of town at the moment. You could make an appointment with her, here’s her number.”
Here we have another major tenant of bureaucracy: referral, transfer and obfuscation.
“When will she be back?”
“Next year, I believe.“
Her business card had no name on it and was simply a QR code which sent you to a scheduling system.
“What’s her name?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” he said, “but she’ll tell you.”
St. Paul was very friendly as he evangelized the gospel and asked me to call him if he could do anything else. The implication being that he had already done something. As if my problem had been solved and he was instrumental and leading me in the right direction. This is another fallacy of bureaucracy: the presupposition that a well-oiled system works for everyone even when it clearly doesn’t. There is no society so deluded as one which believes their own lies and traffics them as objective truth like snake-oil salesmen. The goal of all regulations should be to restrict infringement upon the rights of others not to inhibit or re**rd the progress of legitimate concerns through a mindless maze of authoritarian anonymity. This means that a modicum, and sometimes more than a modicum, of judgment and common sense must be implicit, intermingled and applied in every governmental decision right down to the most menial clerical worker. This requires allowing for nuanced thinking and judgment calls, which can be terrifying to in**ed automatons, without big brother programming to guide them.
As I was escorted from the building, security trailing me like I was Dostoyevsky, I pondered how procedure can be so conflated with problem-solving. And why the exercise of one’s mind and the rational pursuit of an obvious, just outcome is happily substituted for the entrenched quagmire of dogma.
She clicked “serving #2.”
