The Deep Bureaucracy
Our obsession with control and the Platonic Mindframe
Usually, I get a bit nervous when preparing to describe the way abstract structures affect the concrete ways we lead our lives. Not this time. And I have Andy Crouch to thank for it. In his book The Life We're Looking For (you can read my review here), he gives us an excellent example of how our interaction with the external world and our sense of orientation within it have changed dramatically. Driving from A to B has increasingly become an abstract experience, at least in some (our) parts of the world. For argument’s sake, imagine going hiking, when you walk from the valley to the mountain top, or from the country store where you stock up on the final items, to the refuge to spend the night. Or imagine a different timeframe. Maybe - if you were so lucky - you would travel by horseback, following road or path from settlement to settlement, landmarks helping you along the way. Or maybe you embarked somewhere on a pier or embankment and sailed off to a distant destination, with only sun, moon, and stars to point you in the right direction. The highway has changed this experience for us, connecting the dots by a completely internal logic. Not only is there no need to orient yourself in any traditional sense, doing it can actually frustrate the functioning of the system. And this system has been completed by the introduction of the navigator, which responds to any remnant in you still seeking to orient yourself by providing the prompts at the simplest level imaginable. You just need to remember not to ask any questions, and not to look too far ahead.
Maybe I am particularly fit to appreciate Crouch's rendition as a resistant adopter of the navigator. Unwilling to let go of my faculty of choice and my autonomy, I remember very well my first try to use it, when a thick mist made situating myself, and therefore my predicament, that much more painful. I had to surrender and follow the machine, in one of the countless acts inverting the original hierarchy between creator and contraption that we are all massively practicing in. Because we use a similar breakdown of reality in other systems that we have developed over time to organize the world, to manage problems, and to exercise control over the unexpected. And machinery is not always involved.
Take bureaucracy. You can visualize it - as artists have done - as a huge building with endless rooms and hallways. You can only traverse the labyrinth (and accomplish the mission you are there for) by following the internal rules that are jealously guarded somewhere in the basement, inaccessible to mortal souls. There are no sliding doors, shortcuts, or common-sense solutions which follow the logic you would apply on the outside. If you think this is an outlandish or hyperbolic description, you have never battled any representative of a sizable organization. In any event, at some point - and still, in certain circles - the system was devised and honed to help us manage real-world problems. But for some reason, such a system starts competing with reality, in the sense that its operators - if not its users - mistake the categories created to reflect reality for reality itself, even as the truer representation thereof. This is why it is such a challenge to talk to many customer-service representatives: they will always believe what is on their screen over your actual experience. If we hadn’t all been there, we wouldn’t believe it: the victory of the virtual over the objects at our feet, truly a Platonic wet dream.
As bad as a bureaucratic mindframe seems to deal with reality, I believe the way we have implemented the internet and especially 'social' media shows telling similarities with both the aspirations and the shortcomings of this applied Platonism. On a decentralized world wide web, this would not have been so obvious - or maybe not even true. If what we can relate about our own experience on our own terms and in the way we choose, we may well be confused, wrong, false, or insincere, but the referents people can absorb and react to are real. Once the network follows rules that lie somewhere in the basement, inaccessible to, well, mere mortals, we find ourselves once more in the situation where it is the Platonic fiction assuming the role of being more real than our own observations. Being seen, heard, and 'liked' stop being real-life experience, and become part of the schizophrenic lifestyle of the latest iteration of the totalitarian way of life. Who is responsible? It's on the web. What is right and wrong? It's on the web. Who am I? It's on the web. Where is my conscience? It's on the web.
It is attractive to blame anything that goes wrong on specific actors. It appeals to our moral sense, because it allows us to dream of justice and retribution. But underneath, it appeals even more to our sense of metaphysics: the idea, of at least half our brain, that as we command our hand to grasp and rule the world, so the world is ruled. But perhaps our worst instinct is to seek control. This is obvious where people use force to subject others to their own wishes. It is less obvious where we create a mental framework which only allows us to think within a set framework. I am not denying the role played by malevolent actors who have manipulated the world Platonic web - or the Deep Bureaucracy, Obama (as you can read in the piece referenced below) - to control the conversation and censor unwelcome voices. But we are missing the fundamental problem when we counter this mental regime by complaining (and perhaps waxing mysteriously and self-contentedly) about ‘the Overton Window’. Such complaining, by own admission, is also a declaration of fealty to the structure one is willing to mold one’s thinking into. It suggests the speaker himself believes the virtual world is more real than what he can feel in front of him. “It’s a psy-op! They are running a spy-op against me!” And it is by virtue of his supposed challenge that you realize he is enslaved and enamored of his own estrangement. The evil of bureaucracy and the bureaucracy of evil aren’t exactly novel themes. Arendt showed us the inhumanity of the bureaucrat, who has relinquished himself to a process of inevitabilities. Now that we have set up a similar structure in the grid of copper, glass fiber, and satellites which is supposed to bring us closer together, it is high time we take her insight seriously.
Two pieces I would suggest reading in this context:
- How Barack Obama Built an Omnipotent Thought-Machine, and How it was Destroyed, by David Samuels. Samuels shows how the world Platonic web can be - and was, indeed - used to forget who we thought we were.
and
- My review of Iain McGilchrist's masterpiece The Master and his Emissary, which suggests that our left-brain infatuation with the power of our right hand is getting out of control.