Doers and Bureaucrats II
Please don’t accuse me of believing that humanity divides cleanly into doers and bureaucrats. It is that choose-your-team way of thinking I most detest. We are all both, sequentially and simultaneously. And it isn’t only the brick walls you hit in all bureaucratic structures, but the bureaucrat within your own mind, that thwarts you. The only healthy thing about that little executive in your cranium is that in trying not to identify with it, you have to come up with something else to be. But I will say, I think it’s better when the something else you come up with originates outside the system rather than within it. “Within it” awakens the image of “movements.” Movements in a complex society are as inevitable as the tides, and can be constructive, but they come with a lot of collateral damage. People will sell their souls to be part of something, and often look like lemmings in retrospect, and the movements they so passionately followed contrived and doomed.
Bureaucrats keep the house in order, yes, but they are also dangerous. Since they can’t do anything original they feel it is their right to tell other people what to do, and the way they end up with the money reminds you of a black hole. Even God warned about them:
The word of the Lord came to me: 2 “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? 3 You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. 4 You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. 5 So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals. 6 My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them.
Ezekiel 34: 1-6
Ancient Israel, modern America—what has changed?
The higher on the food chain you go, the less you see what is below you, and the easier it is to dismiss its suffering. Bureaucrats make it too easy to prefer an abstraction over real human feeling, too easy to justify cruelty with a creed—as in the slaughter of innocents followed by “God is great!” Or hiding from the evil around you in air-conditioned churches. And if left to evolve unimpeded, like a rotting fish on the beach bureaucrats grow too easily into fascists.
A million examples—but for brevity, consider Jesus and the Scribes and the Pharisees, not to mention the Romans.
Or the Spanish Inquisition.
The Crusades.
Franco’s falangists and Garcia Lorca.
Hitler.
Or—
October 4, 2018