Bruce Charlton on bureaucracy:

We can feel the life being squeezed out of us, our humanity filtered or crystallised. Weber termed bureaucracy the ‘iron cage’ – that is true, but the worst of the cage is that we know it as a cage yet have chosen to inhabit it, and that we disbelieve in the possibility of a life outside of the cage.   

I was lucky enough to be born & raised before bureaucracy had an iron hold on my homeland, a homeland which is now a semi-Orwellian state of mass surveillance and mass proscription, where almost everything is illegal unless you are a Muslim (in which case everything is permitted). I was therefore greatly affronted by the bureaucracy in my Alma Mater, a decade or so after Charlton, and one of the first lessons of my tedious office jobs was “don’t try to debate the rules, especially when they make no sense.”

Like most relatively sane people, I detest bureaucracy. I felt it strangled all that was human & good in the university I attended, and in my office jobs it seemed an either pointless expenditure of time & energy, or actively contrary to its alleged purpose, e.g. Equality Officers who ensure that any white straight male or Christian is discriminated against.

It is worth noting that the religion chosen by our rulers is one of detailed regulation; for all its crudity and neolithic savagery it is an essentially bureaucratic religion.

There is, in bureaucracy, a ratcheting effect whereby even when we feel the bureaucracy to be needless and dispiriting, we shrink from a reduction thereof. I experienced this myself in one of my many tedious jobs, in a hospital, where medical students called to ask if they could borrow a textbook for an exam – their library having lost theirs. My initial reaction was a 50-50 of “why not?” and “that’s probably against the rules”. I thought about it for 2 or 3 seconds and said “that might be okay, but I need to check.” My manager said they could come and make notes but couldn’t take the books out of the teamroom or photocopy anything, since of course that could leave the hospital open to a lawsuit.

Later, I wondered why I had initially shrunk from granting a perfectly reasonable request – for a couple of medical students, based just across the road, to use our textbooks. But this is the constantly ratcheting effect of bureaucracy, to diminish not merely freedom but the desire & instinct for freedom. It is most likely a natural psychological reaction, that provided a man has structure & stability, he will shrink from any diminution thereof – even if there are clear justifications, the structure cripplingly inhuman.

The human mind requires structure & stability, the Germanic peoples being the most extreme examples in this regard, since Ordnung muß sein. Just as the Bosche would rather live with a destructive, inhuman order than with freedom, so the human mind will very quickly adapt to structure, and resist its removal. This leads to one natural conclusion: the Tower of Babel.

Destruction:

and lest you think this mere mythopoetic speculation, it is good to ponder the EU Parliament and reflect that They certainly built it with this in mind:

Bureaucracy waxes as a sense of the religious/spiritual wanes. When Man denies the gods, all that is left is the manmade, and what could be more tritely manmade than bureaucracy and ugly architecture? The European Union is a project for the utterly manmade world, divorced from that which created Man – it is, like all advanced bureaucracy, Satanic.

The modern Satanic idea, “you are god” says “there is nothing to which you are not subject.” But since every human being is therefore god, that means other human beings can create their own senseless order, and force you to submit to it. Hence, the semi-religious fervour of the true believers in bureaucracy – in Europe, those who regard the European Union as the saviour of mankind, because, well, a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians and bankers, and their bought academics & “journalists” said so, and if you don’t like it you’re a Nazi and should be locked up and your children given to the Religion of Peace.

The Tower card seems extremely negative. Destruction, calamity, loss. We resist the degradation of an accustomed structure, however horrific. And yet, as Chigurh says in No Country For Old Men: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”