But I want to share something I ran across at Intellectual Takeout today. This is a think piece, and it’s just a possibility that somebody is applying to this after having read some philosophy by a noted philosopher by the name of Hannah Arendt, A-r-e-n-d-t. She lived from 1906 to 1975. She was a German American political theorist. She wrote extensively on totalitarianism, and she predicted before she died that modern society would see a surge of domestic violence and social unrest for a specific reason.
So
I thought that it would be interesting to go back and find out what she
predicted. Or, better stated, why she predicted it. Again, she was an
expert on totalitarianism. She predicted that modern American society
would see a surge of domestic violence and social unrest. She is highly
reputed, Hannah Arendt. Some people pronounce it Arendt. But she was
noted for understanding the power and psychology of violence. She was
considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.She escaped Germany during the Holocaust and found refuge in America where she became a visiting scholar at some of America’s finest academic institutions. She was the first female lecturer at Princeton. So here is her theory that she espoused years ago in predicting things like this.
I am quoting Hannah Arendt: “The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”
Let me explain this. As a democracy bureaucratizes, which we have. Another name for bureaucracy would be called the deep state. The bureaucracy is cabinet level administration, every government agency you can think of. And believe me, there are more government agencies than any single one person could name from memory. They are many, and they are redundant. And what do bureaucracies do? They’re like plugging the drain on a bathtub.
When you have to deal with a bureaucracy, if you have a grievance, you’re not gonna get a solution because you get passed up to the next department, to the next supervisor. You never get an answer, you never get a solution, because nobody is empowered to make one. A fully fleshed out bureaucracy, the total bureaucratization of a democracy, of a country, leads to average, ordinary Americans having no power whatsoever to address grievance, particularly grievance that have its origins within the state.
If Health and Human Services has some stupid rule that penalizes you or your business, there’s nowhere you can go to fix it. You can’t even go to Health and Human Services. You try it, and it is like everything is the DMV where you never get your license updated. And she theorizes this is gonna lead to mounting frustration with unstable people being unable to deal with the lack of action, the lack of solution, the lack of movement, and they’re gonna go nuts. And she theorized the attraction to violence from frustration will increase because there is nobody in a fully developed bureaucracy, there is nobody with whom you can argue. There’s plenty of people to argue with.
What she means by that is, you get passed on to the next supervisor. There’s never a solution your first phone call, whatever, very rarely. You get passed up to the next supervisor. Then that supervisor doesn’t know why you’re calling, you have to brief that supervisor. By the time you do that, “Well, it’s not my department,” you get passed on to somebody else.
Bureaucratization occurs outside of government untrue. Bureaucratization can occur in any business, small or large. In this guy’s case he had a lot of gambling debts. I’ve never had large gambling debts to a casino or to anybody else. I don’t know what would happen if you can’t pay them and if you try to establish some way of dealing with it and you’re turned down or refused. I could only speculate and guess, and I really don’t like doing that. But I understand the point that Ms. Arendt made here.
The failing in this point is it’s still going to require already mentally unstable people to resort to mass murder at the end of their trail of frustration and dealing with the bureaucracy. And, by the way, I don’t want to get caught in defining bureaucracy narrowly to actually mean a government bureaucracy.
What is meant here by the bureaucratization is that in a bureaucracy — how many of you run into this? — nobody seems to have the authority to make a decision without talking to somebody else. And then you go to that somebody else, and it’s the same thing. They don’t have the authority to make a decision ’til they talk to somebody else.
And that’s what she means by nobody has power. You, as the aggrieved, don’t have power. And I’m not talking about left-wing grievance politics here. I’m talking about legitimate beefs that you might have that you need solutions to, that you can’t find because nobody has the authority to deal with you. You get passed on and everywhere you get passed on, still no authority, until you reach the end of the line where you’re told, “Sorry, there’s nothing we can do.”
Because bureaucracies really don’t exist to solve problems. Bureaucracies exist to sustain themselves. The worst thing that can happen to a bureaucratic department is for what it’s dealing with to be solved. There’d be no reason for the department to exist anymore. Take a brief time-out and we will continue. Throwing that in the hopper as a possible explanation.
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