SCHOLAR ISLAND

BUREAUCRACY

 

"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of a little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures."

            Cicero 50 B.C.

 

 

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."

    Marry McCarthy

 

 

"IT IS difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

-Upton Sinclair

 

 

"No tyranny is more unendurable than that of an all-powerful bureaucracy which interferes with all the activities of men and leaves its stamp on them....State capitalism, the most dangerous antithesis of real socialism, demands the surrender of all social activities to the state. it is the triumph of the machine over the spirit, the rationalization of all thought, action, and feeling according to the fixed norms of authority, and consequently the end of all intellectual culture."

-Rudolf Rocker Nationalism and Culture, 1932

 

 

 

"As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state."

-Adam Smith (1776)

 

 

 

"planning may be good etc-but nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity-and until they do and find the cure all ideal plans will fall into quicksand."

-Richard Feynman

 

 

 

"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies."

-Honore De Balzac

 

 

 

"People who claw their way to the top are not likely to find very much wrong with the system that enabled them to rise."

-Arthur Schlesinger,Jr.

 

 

 

"Now, the world’s decisions were made by smaller men; by gray, faceless bureaucrats without vision or wit; committeemen who spoke committeespeak and though committeethought, men who know more of dogma than destiny, men who know more of dogma than destiny, men who understood production but were ignorant of pleasure, men more comfortable with a file full of papers than a fistful of gems; unsmiling men, unmannered men, undreaming men, men who believed they could guide humanity when they could not seduce a countess nor ride a horse."

            Tom Robbins
            Still Life With Woodpecker

 

 

 

"Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy."

-Brooks Atkinson

 

 

 

"The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness, and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought."

-George Santayana

 

 

 

"The Western-inspired and Western-financed Chinese revolution, following hard on the heels of the last desperate attempt by China to prevent the British government market in narcotic drugs there, placed that ancient province in a favorable state of anarchy for laboratory tests of mind-alteration technology. Out of this period rose a Chinese universal tracking procedure called the "Dangan", a continuous lifelong personnel file exposing every student's intimate life history from birth through school and onward. The Dangan constituted the ultimate overthrow of privacy. Today, nobody works in China without a Dangan.

   By the mid-1960s preliminary work on an American Dangan was underway as information reservoirs attached to the school institution began to store personal information. A new class of expert, like Ralph Tyler of the Carnegie endowments, quietly began to urge collection of personal data from students and its unification in computer code to enhance cross-referencing. Surreptitious data gathering was justified by Tyler as "the moral right of institutions."

John Taylor Gatto

 

 

 

   "Alan Greenspan is the most famous bureaucrat since Pontius Pilate. Like Pilate, he hesitated, but ultimately gave the mob what it wanted. Not blood, but bubbles. Greenspan's role in the empire is more than that of a Consul or a Proconsul. He is the Prefect. He is the quarter-master who makes sure empire has the financial resources it needs to ruin itself."

-Bill Bonner

Empire of Debt

 

 

 

   "In dealing with government bureaucrats, one must be aware of the fact that their perspective is limited and self-serving. They will generally provide explanations for their actions that attest to their good intentions and apparent logic. For example, when I inquired at the Federal Reserve about their open market operations in relation to interest rates, they tried to impress upon me their sole focus was on the federal funs rate-the interest banks pay for funds they borrow from other banks, usually for one business day. If the Federal Reserve wants the federal funds rate to go down, it purchases government securities in the open market and pays for them with newly created fiat money, thus adding to bank reserves. The bureaucrats conveniently overlook the fact that this procedure affects all interest rates, not just federal funds rates. Moreover, the record clearly shows that the overall impact of Federal Reserve open market operations over the past four decades has been an enormous increase in fiat funds, chronic inflation, and an artificial lowering of all interest rates. The biblical injunction "by their fruits ye shall know them" is good advice to all those seeking the truth about government activities."

Ernest J. Oppenheimer, Ph.D.

The Inflation Swindle

 

 

 

   "There is no more pitiful sight than a bureaucrat who can't find a way to step aside when a hot potato comes flying. Sometimes the inevitable happens, however, and a bureaucrat is given an actual task involving a deadline or, worst of all, a decision.

   Making a decision is a dangerous endeavor. Any bureaucrat making a decision runs the very real risk of violating one of the UN's many nonsensical regulations, or offending some country's political sensitivities, and screwing up his career. as servants of the UN security council, we had not one boss but fifteen. any person wishing to gain access to a high-level post in the future needed to keep these fifteen ambassadors with radically opposed world-view happy. Consequently, the safest decision for a bureaucrat to make was no decision at all. "

-Michael Soussan

Backstabbing For Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy

  

 

 

  "Cindy took a dragon drag and looked up at the plume of smoke, almost pensive.

   "You're a smart kid, Michael. but you're too young. You don't understand what it's like to be stabbed in the back. From one day to the next, you're crushed, you're nothing. You think you're popular, Michael? You think you've got friends? Wait till you're down. you'll see how many of those cowards come to your aid. There's only one way to deal with these spineless bureaucrats...." She made a fist, as if squeezing a ball sac, "it's about control."

Ibid

 

   "In retrospect, I'd say nobody played stupid better than Pasha. he had elevated it to an art form. His outbursts of anger, irrational as they seemed, were never improvised. Even his incomprehensible elocution often worked in his favor. he could sound clear when he wanted to. But occasionally his blurry words allowed him to remain noncommittal when it suited him, to be evasive when necessary, and to bait his interlocutors. he would sometimes say just one word, without bothering to make a sentence, just to see one's reaction...."

Ibid

 

 

 

"Let us think of an example: The industrial method of production as it has developed in the last decades is based on the existence of large centralized enterprises which are controlled by a managerial elite, and in which hundreds of thousands of workers and clerks work together, smoothly and without friction. This bureaucratic industrial system shapes the character of the bureaucrats as well as that of the workers. it also shapes their thoughts. The bureaucrat is conservative and adverse to taking risks. His main desire is to advance, and he can best do so by avoiding risky decisions and by allowing himself to be led by the interest in the proper functioning of the organization as his guiding principle. The workers and clerks, on their side, tend to feel satisfied in being a part of the Organization provided their material and psychological rewards are sufficient to justify this. Their own trade union organizations resemble in many ways that of their industry; large-scale organizations, bureaucratic and well-paid leadership, little active participation of the individual member. The development of large-scale centralized government and armed services, both of which follow the same principles which guide the industrial corporations. This type of social organization leads to the formation of elites, the business, government, and military elites and, to a degree, to the trade union elites. The business, government, and military elites are closely interwoven in personnel, in attitudes, and in ways of thinking. In spite of the political and social differences between the "capitalist" countries and the "communist" Soviet Union, the way of feeling and thinking among their respective elites is similar, precisely because the basic mode of production is similar."

-Erich Fromm

Beyond the Chains of Illusion

 

 

 

   "Bureaucracy is the enemy of preparedness, because bureaucracy survives not by solving problems but by managing and, hence, perpetuating-them. bureaucracy thrives by defining its mission broadly enough to acquire turf but narrowly enough to diffuse blame, should anything go wrong. It will outlast any temporary steward, and it knows that. It is any administration's greatest challenge..."

John farmer

The Ground Truth: the Untold story of America Under attack on 9/11

 

Book: "Dossier: The Secret Files They Keep on You." by Aryeh Neier

Book: 'Backstabbing For Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy" by Michael Soussan

 

 

Back to Chrestomathy           Next Page