Bureaucracy

The will to entropy. It is axiomatic that no bureaucrat does what she does for personal vainglory, but purely out of a full-blooded and plausibly deniable commitment to the rigorous, orderly and fully auditable machination of human activity, and in the service of the vanquishment of mortal caprice. The bureaucrat’s art, like that of the graffito, is of the spheres — a pure, ego-less submission to craft; a resounding cheer at the victory of form over substance.

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There is a school of thought, of course, that governance is not the answer to the problem, but — as articulated — it is the problem. The bureaucrat’s art is to construct Rube Goldberg machines of four-dimensional policy and process within whose swim-lanes the meatware is expected to ply its trade as faultlessly as it is able. Any emerging faults must be those of the employee. The bureaucrat’s disposition is to restrain and control the subject matter expert’s autonomy, distrust her mastery and deny her purpose the the extent possible.

See also

• Bureaucracy hall of fame
• Boredom heat death of the universe
• Human error
• The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations