Posted on 10/03/2017 12:19:12 PM PDT by Kaslin
RUSH: Now, a lot of people are still asking about motivation. We don’t know. It’s still a matter of speculation because nobody talked to the guy beforehand to hear his grievances.
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.
Bureaucracies in governments function exactly as cancer does in humans - and with the same result.
This is absolutely right.
Ours has metastasized.
I think when you take the immoral effects of taking religion out of our politics you lose a moral compass.
I wish I had read this during my set-to with the VA. I discovered that there was, in fact, no way to deal with those people. Once the VA puts you on their enemies list, that’s it for you. There’s nowhere to turn.
This puts it in perspective. You either admit helplessness, or you act out your rage.
Interesting discussion about `Brazil’-type bureaucracy, but not at all sure what it has to do with mass murderer Stephen Paddock.
Was he battling with some agency? I thought the reason for his meltdown was that he had a gambling problem and was deeply in debt.
His father was on FBI Most Wanted. Screwed up kid and man.
But what does any of that have to do with Hannah Arendt and totalitarianism?
Great Post!
Very True!!
Designed to frustrate and not just government... anyone who has dealt with the cable company “customer service” knows he drill. On hold and then passed around and around and you have to recite your name, address, account#, “last four of social” at every stop. :(
I know it’s a leap, but the two stared out being mentioned together. This is proposing that a 60yo millionaire with planes and properties and cash to throw away at the casinos in cart-loads feels neutered by bureaucracy? uhmm... Maybe I’m just not wearing my empathy cap today. I can’t seem to get there.
Interesting article though, on the socio-philosphical level
So true. I went to get a license to drive taking with me: my non-expired license from another state, my birth certificate, my soc.sec. card as well as my original soc. sec. card in its original envelope, my barely expired passport. But this was not enough to validate me as a citizen because my original soc. sec. card and my birth certificate had my unmarried name, while my current license and soc. card had my married name. What was needed was my marriage certificate. Went back home and came back with that - nope, not good enough because it was laminated. At that point I broke down in tears I was SO frustrated. I was making a sort of scene so they waived me through to the next obstacle where I had to prove my address...and on it went until I just dumped a whole load of papers on their desk, old utility bills, royalty check stubs, etc. It was a traumatizing nightmare. So yeah, I really can see how this sort of thing can drive someone to things they would never ever normally do because it is all just stupid, meaningless harassment by little unimportant people that happen to have power over your life.
So true. And it's happening in the private sector as well. Companies barricade themselves with automated phone answering systems that make it impossible to talk to a real human being with the power to deal with problems. Frustrations are reaching the boiling point.
You could add an activist judiciary to Arendt’s warning about the bureaucracy. As the final arbiter of the law, it likewise has the power to rule people without leaving them a recourse. They rule, and then change just happens, whether voted upon and debated or not.
Sounds like a multi layered approach to the prelude of an Ayn Rand novel.
The ‘banality of evil’... I suspect she’s wrong on this... but that’s another thread.
My God, sorry for your experience. The DMV is one of the most unfriendly animals in government. Sympathy or empathy they have none. Soulless drones is my experience and some even outright nasty.
The point of the article is valid, but I’d be cautious about touting Arendt without qualifications: she was close to the Marxist Frankfurt School and she was one of the Vietcong’s key contacts with the U.S. antiwar movement.
Will have to read up on Hannah Arendt.
I have experienced that vividly, multiply, and repeatedly in the past two years - and I have found no place to have my grievances resolved.
It is indeed Tyranny by No One: the communist apparatchiks.
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