I imagine an ancient Pharaoh, perhaps Tut-in-common, perusing around his court-yard, whilst the ladies are forming those perfect eyebrows and the men are braiding their hair. He looks out across his vast empire filled with agriculture and livestock and wine and servants and statues dotting the country-side. And on one of these statues, of his likeness, near his residence he finds, carved into the back, the Egyptian words (whatever those are) for “Kick Me.” And thus was born the first bureaucracy. Motivated by anger and humiliation, the Pharaoh appoints a taskforce in charge of inspecting all statues, daily, to ensure that they are in perfect condition and suitable to the kingdom. These people will be paid in goats from the servant class. The process works out so smoothly in the beginning, no more defaced statues are found throughout the land. Therefore, it only makes sense to create more groups, paid for with more servant goats, and so on and so forth.
The purpose behind this extremely accurate historical portrayal is to highlight the single biggest issue with bureaucracies (that’s right, there’s only one).
They are all designed toward exceptions to the rules, not the rules themselves.
What is not mentioned in this rendition of the life of Tut-in-common, but can be inferred, is that this carving in the back of his statue was not commonplace. Most residents of his kingdom held a great deal of fear and respect for Mr. In-Common. Only a fool dare do something so… foolish? And likely, it was his brother that slept 4 huts down whom did it as a joke, or the village idiot that sleeps in the goat stalls and talks to the scarecrows. Disciplining him does no good other than to remind everyone that the need to sign-up for Soup Kitchen duty next week. And it is this characteristic that describes bureaucracies today.
A society that agrees on a set of rules will largely follow those rules. And the consequences of not following those rules come from the, previously-mentioned, society. Not from a rules inspector with a badge. And the futility of it is that if enough people disagree with the rules being set, the badge won’t actually hold any power anyway, which is not a foreign concept. How many rules do we have that society has neither wholly agreed upon nor, in many cases, are even aware of? We pay the bureaucracy our goats (cuz you better believe that rule will be enforced) and nothing is done.
–I can remember on the Disney channel, as a kid, they would flash crazy laws across the screen during commercial breaks. 2 that stuck out were “No ice cream on Cherry pie in Kansas” and “No spitting on the sidewalk in Oklahoma” (talk about a 180 by Disney. Anything less than the most pro-government sentiment expressed today would get you fired)–
Try to outlaw Yoga pants or Kale in this country. See how many inspectors raise their hands for that job (It would take a lot of goats). But would we all truly result to the Purge if some whacko were to legalize rape and murder? No. Because society has agreed that those are unacceptable. And when a person understands that to kill someone will result in being ‘killed back’, the only ones left to break these rules are those with unique issues; the exceptions. And that’s who the badges are for.
Police, as a concept, are treated quite poorly in our country by both sides of the political divide; picked up and used a weapon to make their point, only to be discarded and used as a whipping post in the same breath. Truth is, their job is to gather up all the exceptions that fail to follow our agreed-upon set of rules, and remove them from society. That is their only job and, for the most part, that’s what they do. The issues arise when a small group of “rule-makers” decide that they need to stack up a whole bunch of rules that many don’t agree with and very few even know about. One would think it would take some girthy juevos to step up and impose this type of egotistical will on a society, but it’s really quite simple. All the servants are looking around and they see that things are pretty good. There aren’t any ‘Kick Me’ signs on the statues and they have 3 goats. This little group of “administrators” have told the people that they, themselves, are responsible for all of this prosperity, so they figure they better just keep giving them goats so they can keep it up.
They completely ignore the fact that there was only 1 Kick Me sign ever reported on a statue and they used to have more goats than they had wives. Heck, they never even saw the sign in the first place, and neither did anybody they knew. For all they know, it may have just been scarred by a dragon tail as it flew by (I’m not sure if those time periods match up). Regardless, the point is that the bureaucracy was a knee jerk reaction to police an exception to the rule, not the rule. This makes the costs far exceed the benefits, by design.
Many try, and politics is really all about, assigning lofty moral weight to certain issues in order to accomplish their personal agendas. This is a way to say, “Well yes, it’s not that common, but it’s important!” And this is a very effective tool. But, again, it is only effective if people forget everything they knew before the issue was brought up. Fear works. For a news company and a bureaucracy. It, along with grievance, is the currency of the realm today. There are less and less additional rules that we can all agree on yet the bureaucracy must do something, so fear and grievance must be used to force-feed us these rules in order to keep the bureaucracy alive. Because it is no longer the clean-up crew tasked with taking society’s temperature and implementing their wishes, it is a living, breathing entity that’s taken it upon itself to dictate societal norms.
So Where’s Good?
So what is a person to think of this fact? How much of the way things are can be changed, will be changed, or need to be changed? That is an important question that people don’t often ask. To step outside of an issue, observe the nature of the conflict, and then decide what a realistic response to the issue might be. And what a person concludes with that type of introspection depends, in my opinion, mostly on their faith. Whether or not there is an all-knowing, all-powerful entity lording over us is going to determine whether a person has hope, or slips into nihilism.
Suffice it to say that, if each of us had our own way, we would each perform our own overhaul of the entire system. So the answer to the last question, for each person, is likely “all of it”(although we’d be wise to recognize how nice things are and how hard it is to create something). But what is a realistic approach to the issues of inefficient bureaucracy for a Christian who believes in helping others, as well individual liberty?
It’s easy to be cynical here. After all, the wise King Solomon tells us in Ecclesiastes “If you see the poor oppressed in a district, and justice and rights denied, do not be surprised at such things; for one official is eyed by a higher one, and over them both are others higher still.” This, paired with the verse in John when Jesus mentions how we “will always have the poor among us,” suggests that getting overly worked up about this issue may not be the best course of action(of course this doesn’t mean to abandon the cause of justice, it merely helps put it in perspective). But I believe the best course of action is to maintain hope, and shrink your world.
One needn’t have an opinion on every single national bureaucrat. The things that affect us most are the things closest to us. And while they may give us heart burn when we think of the foolishness that is voted into existence, it would be wise to maintain perspective and to know that there are several bad things in this world. All deserve to be fought. But there is no 1 thing that, if fixed, will relieve ALL that ails us. Simply look at Solomon. All the wisdom in the world didn’t solve all his problems. So we can celebrate the victories and mourn the losses. And, perhaps, if we’re involved in local politics we may get to share our piece, but spending too much time fretting about the expansion or retraction of government, or fantasizing about a world with no seatbelts (because, really, what’s the use?), is not a valuable use of our time.
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