The Bureaucrat, the Machine and the Banality of Evil
+video in Romanian
Dear reader,
below: another chapter from American Insanity, at the end of which I have a video book review in Romanian: De-a Dacii si Romanii de Dan Alexe (apologies for the bad sound—I had technical problems). Prima mea cronica in limba romana.
The Bureaucrat, the Machine and the Banality of Evil
In 2023 the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ranked Harvard University last of 254 universities when it came to free speech climate. Its score had been consistently very low for the previous four years, culminating in an abysmal ranking in 2023. Could there be a link between this climate of intolerance and the fact that Harvard has more administrators than any other university, more administrators than undergraduate students? Thousands of bureaucrats with cushy jobs in cozy offices, often paid more than the teachers to protect the students from the violence inflicted on them by knowledge, bureaucrats who are there to create “safe spaces” for the cuddled minds whose parents pay 80,000 dollars per year so that said minds learn to build fences around themselves, which the bureaucrats deem necessary for their safety because a bureaucrat is like a hammer and the student’s mind a nail—bring a student to a bureaucrat and the bureaucrat will hammer it into safety. A bureaucrat is like a social media algorithm—give him an idea, and he will sharpen it until it reaches its most extreme form.
Do you know what bureaucrats were called in Communism? Apparatchiks. Do you know where the word comes from? Apparatus, i.e., machinery. The “apparatus” was the Party (the Communist Party), but the word was also synonym with “system.” When one thought of the “apparatus,” one had in mind an immense, octopus-like network that gave directions the rest of us were supposed to follow. Although its official ideology was somewhat different than the ideology of American bureaucracy, they shared a similar ethos, which was expressed in the language of the Machine. The “system” has the soul of a Machine, and in America, this is visible more than anywhere else in the list of “non-offensive” words the bureaucrats from the country’s top schools issue periodically for our own good. Similarly, the Communist apparatchiks had replaced words like “ladies and gentlemen”—deemed “bourgeois”—with “comrades.” The American version of “comrade” is “person”: a woman becomes “person with a vagina, “person with a cervix,” etc. Even “disabled” is now being deemed offensive by Stanford bureaucrats, who have replaced it with … “person with a disability.” (Note: the bureaucrat, whether communist or capitalist, always fights for the neutralization—i.e, dehumanization—of language).
The bureaucrats spend their lives in offices, doing mostly harmless things—they move papers from a shelf onto another shelf, chat about their daily lives, occasionally mocking their political enemies, and—you may find this hard to believe!—sometimes they even badmouth the “system” itself. After all, no one can stand to be a bureaucrat 24h a day. But what a bureaucrat—whether from Communist Romania or capitalist America—can never accept is for an outsider to criticize the system that she serves. For the bureaucrat in academia, the “system” she is part of consists of (mostly, though not only) the DEI structures. The word “system” obscures the reality, insofar as the bureaucrat herself claims that she is fighting “the system,” by which she means the society at large. Note: an American bureaucrat always makes the claim of fighting the biggest system possible, but she does this by playing the game of, and conforming to the most immediate—smaller—system in which she functions, in this case, the university. In theory, the larger system (society) has more power, but in reality, this power doesn’t touch her. What has an impact for her is the university (the local system) in which she works, which rewards her fight. This is how the American bureaucrat can eat her cake (claim that she fights the large system) and have it too (get rewarded by the small system). In Communism, the “system” is the Communist Party, and there is no difference between the small and the large systems. There is only One encompassing System. (That’s why the concept of “systemic racism” in the US is absurd because it is based on the presupposition that the US has a single encompassing “system,” just like a dictatorship or a totalitarian society.)
I stated that the work of the bureaucrat is mostly harmless and consists in moving papers from here to there. This is, generally, true. But every now and then, the work of the bureaucrat transcends the banality of the office where it takes place. Take for instance the bureaucrats who, one day sometime in the late 80s in Communist Romania, left their office and, when my then-husband and I were not at home, forced their way into our apartment and, unbeknown to us, installed a microphone behind our bed. Now, it is true that these bureaucrats worked for the institution named Securitate, but I suppose that it is not every day that they did this sort of thing. Most days, they were probably just getting bored in their office—the same office where they transcribed the conversations my husband and I had in our bed and which, together with all our daily activities—including those in bed—were duly recorded in the 2,000-page dossier my husband discovered he had many years later.
Cronica de carte: De- Dacii si Romanii de Dan Alexe (Humanitas, 2023):
Love it! Especially " the American version of 'comrade' is "person with...'"