Kafka’s Victory -Add the EU to the welfare state, and simple problems become insoluble.

City Journal ^ | 18 October 2004 | Theodore Dalrymple

[fight_truth_decay]

Kafka’s Victory

Add the EU to the welfare state, and simple problems become insoluble. | 18 October 2004

In the bureaucratic welfare state, administrative problems grow geometrically with the number of administrators, who devise rules ostensibly to guarantee probity and increase efficiency, but whose effect in practice is to increase the number of administrators necessary to achieve any given end.

In the prison where I work, a problem has arisen in the provision of medical care. For complicated reasons, having to do with where records must be stored, doctors must now examine patients without their prescription charts in hand. The situation introduces a dilemma: either the doctor cannot prescribe at all, or he risks prescribing something incompatible with what the patient is already taking. This problem has continued unsolved for several months.

The obvious solution, as everyone acknowledges, is computerization. If the hospital called in a local firm, the computer work could be done in a week or two. But the contract would be above a certain size, and according to government rules must therefore be put out to bid—and put out to bid in every country in the European Union. The prison being a prison, moreover, anyone engaged on the installation of computers or software would have to have security clearance. If the winning company were Lithuanian, say, or Slovenian, this might pose a slight practical problem, easily outweighing any price advantage.

So what could, with a minimum of local initiative, take two weeks will now take two years to achieve, if it is ever achieved. But at least many people will keep busy who otherwise might not have enough to do. The doctors’ frustration will mount and reach a peak, before it declines into cynical resignation with the realization that Kafka cannot be defeated. Of course, the possibility that a patient might one day pay with his life is not part of the equation.

[fight_truth_decay]

Note:
Czech novelist[Franz] Kafka's passages from some of his diaries derived from a struggle (how some artists love to suffer and dwell on an all dark and bleak existence) in his love of writing and his job as a civil servant with The Worker’s Accident Insurance Bureau. For Kafka the drudgery of obedient, routine office work became a metaphor for the modern-day inescapable labyrinth of bureaucracy in which man finds himself trapped.

He penned Amerika with a "sense of Kafkaesque dread" with the Statue of Liberty sword in her hand instead of the torch - depicting her "as a symbol of war and violence instead of freedom and enlightenment". Kafka, however, had never visited America. Meeting up with pacifist, Albert Einstein at the University of Prague in 1906, Einstein interested Kafka when he spoke on ‘Nationalism’ – saying how "it brought out the worst in human beings, setting the citizens of one country against those of all other countries". But how a bureaucratic welfare state is considered a "victory, I do not know. Unless a victory for those who live for or dwell on despair.

[Mr. Bill E]

I don't know about Kafka's political leanings, but I do know that The Metamorphosis is one of the greatest writings of all time.

[vpintheak]

Let us all pray it never comes to that here. Let Freedom and Capitalism ring!

[lainde]

Your comments are very astute. Government work inevitably results in levels of chaos and inefficiency in order to justify its existence through never ending "correction" cycles.

[MaryFromMichigan]

....I do know that The Metamorphosis is one of the greatest writings of all time.

When I was a kid, I came across the "The Metamorphosis" and "The Trial".
Loved Kafka.
(I was a strange kid.)

[lentulusgracchus]

Perhaps the writer errs when he describes a "victory" of or for Kafka. Kafka was the critic, not the system.

Of course, the EU's busy little bureaucratic moles would be precisely the people Kafka was complaining about.