How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bureaucracy
Tim speaks at the Digital State conference and reflects on the beauty of government
by Tim Leberecht
I was invited to give a dinner speech last week at the Digital State conference in Berlin, a gathering for digital government workers in Germany. In the before times, I wouldn’t have thought this the most exciting venue to address, but we’re in the present, and in light of Musk’s chainsaw massacre on government, it was an opportunity to question the reigning article of faith: a more efficient government is a better, more desirable government.
But is it?
For starters, it is important to note that efficiency per se is not a valuable goal. What matters is the goal that efficiency serves.
Bureaucracy is often (and rightly) regarded as overbearing and dehumanizing—just ask Kafka’s Josef K. One can gasp at the dismal customer experiences associated with bloated structures and inert mindsets, the abundance of good intentions that have been muffled by administrative grind, and the countless deaths by a thousand cuts.
And this is not to mention how bureaucratic thinking has pervaded so many other—some would argue all—aspects of our lives, including even our feelings. Referring to the work of the late David Graeber, João Sevilhano calls this “emotional bureaucracy,” and observes that “the emotional bureaucrat lives not just in organizations but within ourselves.” This leads him to conclude that “bureaucracy isn’t merely an organizational problem—it’s an existential one.”
Yes—except, bureaucracy is not an existential problem. It is existential.
And the antidote to the bureaucratization of emotions is not to abolish bureaucracy; it is to emotionalize bureaucracy and make bureaucrats and citizens fall in love with it.
To do that, we must start by distinguishing bureaucracy from a purely mechanistic mindset, appreciating that “rule by the desk” (bureaucracy), if serving democratic goals, is far superior to the crude mix of “rule by one” (autocracy) and “rule by tech” (technocracy).
Bureaucracy is designed to apply rules and processes to facilitate certain legal outcomes. It is not meant to have any discretion or mercy. It is not supposed to care. But what if it did? What if it took the freedom to deviate from perfectionism? What if it cultivated what psychologists call “tolerance for ambiguity”?
A perfect, unambiguous bureaucracy is indistinguishable from the merciless, AI-based total surveillance machine of the kind Musk & Co. dream. Bureaucracy that can afford to be imperfect, ambiguous, and useless, however, is bureaucracy that can be humane.
When the last line of defense against dictatorship is a “lazy bureaucrat,” as Charlie Tyson writes in The New Yorker, when red tape is the last red light on the way to tyranny, then bureaucracy, with all its flaws and shortcomings, is something we must learn to cherish.
In fact, government bureaucracy is precisely the arena where the battle against the myopic efficiency regime can be fought. If we can beat it there, we can beat it anywhere.
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