“Bureaucracy is the Opium of Governments” Karl Marx (plagiarised and rephrased !)
Nowhere have I tasted the ineptitude of government machinery and systems like I have done in the East. The idea that one has to fill a form or raise a mundane request (which must be done at one of a plethora of typing centres; in case one gets it wrong!) for the simplest of procedures gets on my nerves and turns me off from doing anything meaningful in such countries. What is the origin of these bureaucratic procedures and the damned B word ??
Tom Holland, in his “Persian Fire”, a historical account of Persia and its wars with Greece, explained how the Persian Emperors had mastered control over their empire and its society down to the T. Even for ducks to travel from one part of the empire to another, they had to be accompanied by an intricate pass procedure. No doubt they had to have typing centres and employed Indian or Egyptian typists to fill the application forms - invasions in those days were for labour resources not oil ! Could the Persian’s contribution to world civilisation have been as great as the ‘damned’ B word ?
In Iraq, nowadays, typists flourish on the streets outside government buildings. Sitting on tacky rattling chairs and using broken desks to write on, they offer their ‘typing’ services to the public. Actually, hardly any of them use computers or typewriters. They do a lot of handwriting and I guess for this reason one cannot blame them for making lots of money as a result. Some make so much money that they can afford to buy big houses in expensive neighborhoods ! One can never imagine their wealth could have been amassed from the hefty charges they demand for a residence card, an ID card, an authenticity issuance report or any other Bureaucratic paperwork !! Apparently the expensive charges are supposed to pay for the bribes up the echelons of Bureaucratic power to the head signatory’s office. Seriously !!! surely this can never happen in Iraq … "Where’s your proof ? " asks the former PM.
Now, the Gulf states fare a lot better than Iraq in this regard. Gone are the old desks and chairs on the streets and pavements, but Hallelujah for the modern offices (Tasheel centres etc), nicely dressed Egyptian and Indian typists, computers galore and queue ticket machines. The rich Gulf states have really gone to town to modernise and computerise Bureaucracy. EGov is the new buzz word and EGov is here to stay and with it unsurprisingly the ‘damned’ B word, but unfortunately much more of it !!!
I think the modern Bureaucratic state has its roots in the British empire (the ‘damned’ B must be common for a good reason !! ). Great Britain did well in transplanting Bureaucracy to India under Raj rule; and don’t the Indians adore Britain for it ! They cannot get enough of it and they cannot function without it. The 18th century rules and procedures thrive there to this day and in any other country where Indian white collar workers are in high demand; with or without EGov !
Recently, I was reminded by a police lady officer in London that “it’s not a crime to lose a passport. That’s why we stopped issuing police loss reports for these. We don’t have time for this. We have informed all Embassies in London about this.” I told her that Embassies of third world countries don’t understand this and need police reports for lost passports. She said: “it’s not just third world countries; the US, the French and the Russians are the same if not worse”. I felt slightly relieved that my embassy’s insistance on Bureaucratic procedures was not uncommon ! So guess who has capitalised on Bureaucracy on this matter?? reportMyloss.com. Hey Presto !!! the internet’s .com bubble is still alive and kicking!
Can someone please invent a new .com bubble site which is ‘damned’ B free !
I think I should do it. I will make a killing with it and I shall call it hmmmmm, wait for it … .com. Actually, I can’t tell you yet. I have to fill a ‘damned’ B form first to register and protect my invention !
A side effect of bureaucracy is the growth of grey zone economy. It is often easier to pay cash instead of invoicing, or smuggle, or skip a permit or ignore a licensing requirement, than to go through the paperwork hell that may take longer than the work itself.
This just-below-the-surface violence is the crux of Graeber’s argument. He mocks the academic left who insist that violence is symbolic these days, suggesting that any grad student sitting in a university library
reading Foucault and thinking about the symbolic nature of violence should consider the fact that if he’d attempted to enter that same library without a student ID, he’d have been swarmed by armed cops.
Is this referring to a specific incident? I’ve never been asked to show an ID when entering a university library. Are there university libraries where this is required? Genuinely curious.
Obviously you have to deal with the horrors of the library bureaucracy tracking the books, dictating arbitrary lending terms, and demanding explanations/issuing fines for damaged books backed by the threat of state violence, but I’ve never had to show an ID to simply enter a general library (I have had to show an ID to, for example, access an area of a library that holds rare manuscripts, etc.).
Interesting point about those intrusive regulations.
I used to do taxes for a living, and it’s always amazed me the nonsense the right spouts about the IRS and nobody calls them on it. Case in point: the tax code is millions and trillions of pages! But the reality is that less than 100 of those pages apply to most of us. The rest are for corporations, and the 0.01%.
“The bureaucracy will expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” Please read that in the lovely baritone of Leonard Nimoy as I heard it while kicking the everloving shite out of the militaristic expansionist xenophobe Russians in Civ5.
My day to day life seems mostly free of dealing with the aforementioned bureaucracy, unless I’m dealing with the DMV or, more recently, buying a house. In the case of the latter, the entire process seems like one big language game intended to obscure and obfuscate the process so more money can be eked out of the consumer.
The DMV, on the other hand, exists entirely to make my life a living hell: “Oh, your name is Mike on this electric bill, and you’re named as Michael on this gas bill–we can’t accept these as proof of residence.” Please kill me now.
the overwhelming majority of university libraries in the US and UK require ID to enter. I don’t know about elsewhere.
this is the most famous incident of someone being physically attacked for failure to show proper ID in a university library:
look up “UCLA Taser Incident” on wikipedia
but it happens all the time - at my own former university, Goldsmiths, a student recently spent the night in jail for protesting too forcefully not being allowed back in with a written slip instead of a proper ID card (the guards had changed shift) http://www.theleopard.co.uk/library-arrests-continue-as-student-forgets-her-id-card/
News to me. I have spent a lot of time in many university libraries of the US and never needed to show an ID card. I am generally opposed to ID cards anyway, since I am the expert on me, and can tell anybody what they need to know.
Let’s see, undergrad I went to SUNY Purchase. ID required. Graduate University of Chicago. ID required. Taught at Haverford, ID required, NYU, ID required, Yale, ID required, Goldsmiths, ID required, LSE, ID required. All New York City university libraries require ID for entry (at least into stacks, sometimes lobby is accessible, but obviously I’m talking where the books are, and usually as at Bobst even lobby is inaccessible), and all London libraries, likewise. Same was true at UNC and Duke and all university libraries there when I visited. In fact the only university library I’ve ever been in where you didn’t need an ID or visitor’s pass (which requires an ID from a different university, usually from a list of acceptable institutions) to enter was McGill in Montreal, and everyone noted that this was an exceptional policy they were rather proud of.
Which then are the university libraries that let anyone enter without showing ID? You haven’t actually named one.
Firstly, it is crucial to distinguish the difference between an ID (which is you) and an ID card (which is issued by others). They are different concepts and work differently.
There are seven universities I can think of off the top of my head, some with several libraries. Including one that you listed. Perhaps I am invisible? I never actually asked any of them whether or not this was their policy.
At the last two places I’ve attended school, UC Santa Cruz and The Florida State University, neither required an ID card to enter the campus libraries. That said, I can recall an ID being required at a few other campus libraries I’ve visited, but only to check out items or to use their wireless internet access, and not solely to enter the building.
And as any of my friends will note, I do not respond well to authority, but I’ve never been required to show ID in order to keep from being attacked by library security forces (thankfully).
I’ve been to a number of universities in Illinois and Indiana that did not require an ID card to enter: Illinois State University, Southern Illinois University - Carbondale, Illinois Wesleyan University, IUPUI, IU-South Bend, Notre Dame. Even at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, only the main stacks requires appropriate ID – the departmental libraries are all open-access.
In the UCLA Taser incident, though, it appears the library only requires IDs after 11 p.m. when it is open only to faculty, staff and students (the library is open 24 hours).
Looking online, it appears universities are all over the place with their policies on this, so you could easily end up going to a number of libraries and be confronted with a “must have student ID” policy or never seeing such a policy.
I assume the libraries that require IDs do so out of safety concerns, but it doesn’t make sense to me to wall off the university library from the general public. I work at a university in the US Midwest and have visited other libaries in the region, and have never had to show an ID.
As this is the comment section of BB I assume everyone here is familiar with the classification of people to “mutants” and “norms”, fringe and mainstream, outsiders and meat-puppets… and so on.
While the literature is divided about the traits attributed to each group…
I’ll get to the point. One main difference is inclination/aversion to absurdness:
Mutants thrive on wyrdness, psychedelic and surrealist experiences and so on. On the other hand they exhibit extreme discomfort and aversion to bureaucracy. finding lines; paperwork and other mindlessness excruciatingly painful and unbearable.
Normatives just love when things are in meticulous and predictive order’, to them bureaucracy is the ritual of thier religion. To them anything wired’ paradoxical or mind-bending is too crazy, headache inducing to intolerable and unacceptable.
Even if you’ll find a mutant in a job like accounting its probably because he’s fascinated by the quirks and oddities of the field. Looking on everything from an outside perspective wondering how things got hat way, how come people accepted that as a reasonable solution.
