The Curse of Bureaucratic Myopia at Kindle Direct Publishing

And how a catch-22 might be a tragic blessing in disguise

Image by Jan Antonin Kolar, from Unsplash

Will our species end with a bang or with a whimper? Or will bureaucratic arrogance and inflexibility immure us, dividing us from natural reality so that our species will come to resemble a senile elderly person who’s no longer aware of how the world has passed him or her by?

Franz Kafka, George Orwell, and Douglas Adams showed how bureaucracy may be the death of us all. A bureaucracy is a social system that operates like a machine. The machine follows its programming, but like a computer it lacks commonsense. There’s often, then, a mismatch between the facts of a real-world situation and the bureaucracy’s grasp of those facts.

The stereotypical machine has no emotions or intuitions, but just cold hard logic, algorithms, or inflexible rules that are supposed to guarantee success in the machine’s operation. If the machine is programmed to fill round holes with round pegs, but the machine is presented with a square hole, the machine might not be equipped to recognize the difference. In that case, the machine might try to jam the round peg into the square hole, leading to a failure which the machine likewise wouldn’t understand.