Recently, I’ve had to apply for quite a few things to our local council. Mostly things to do with the house. But I’ve also had a car ‘incident’, plus regulatory hiccups with work things…. And it’s driving me crazy. It just seems that there’s so much more red tap than there used to be. Why?!!? It got me wondering…
In so many ways, Humans are still as dumb as our ancestors. There’s a pile of “base brain” stuff which is just hard-wired in at the basic level and we can just as easily ditch it as we can ditch sleeping and eating. That is, to say, almost impossible.
Our collective inability to rise above our basic needs is never more obvious than with bureaucracy, the method by which societal order maintained. We like to think that a well balanced society is run through well balanced bureaucracy, the oil which ensures the moving parts slip past each other with minimal friction. But I think we can all sit down and agree the truth.. It’s there to stop people doing dumb stuff.
But the big problem is that it’s all there to control humans, but it’s written by humans. When you get immoral / criminal humans in charge (see current events), they will rewrite all the bureaucracy to suit them. It reminds me of the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, where the Galactic President was some guy living in a shed on a planet somewhere. Occasionally two people would turn up, explain a problem in neutral terms, let him decide, and then they’d leave.
But we don’t have anyone “outside the system”. The closest the UK got was to having Brussels decide on some overarching regulations which would affect us here in the UK. That worked quite nicely, and society was doing well, until idiots made us leave the EU, and now we’ve got all the same regulations we had before, but we’re not technically “in the club”, so we’ve got even more bureaucracy to prove to the bureaucrats in Europe that our bureaucrats have done their jobs properly in keeping our bureaucracy the same as their bureaucracy. Aargh.
I believe the number of controls a society needs to stay ‘on the rails’ boils down to two things:
- The strictness of the government
- The size of the population
We like to think our society has “levelled out” in terms of its strictness. In the UK, except for some crazy right-wing parties that want to upend all of the careful balance in favour of some quick-fix populist solutions, all of our recent governments have been just gently ramping up the societal controls through the use of laws and bureaucracy. It’s not a new thing, but the advent of the Internet has laid all that bare, so it feels like things are accelerating.
But, is it the case that as society grows we need more controls? Well, if we consider the degenerate case: A society of one person; then there’s no need for any rules at all. A small group can get by with a few ‘house rules’, a town needs more to do with communal spaces, access rights.. Cities need clean air rules, traffic rules…. etc… So, is it so crazy to believe that we will be forever seeing an increase in bureaucracy as our society grows?
Let’s look at what it’s there for:
- Building regulations are to stop people using illegal materials.
- Marriage licenses are there to stop people lying about their marital status to get benefits or migrate to places they shouldn’t
- Bank paperwork is to stop people overspending or stealing money they have no access to.
- Dog licenses stop people owning dangerous breeds and making sure they care for their dogs
- Gun licenses ensure crazies don’t get guns (in theory).
The list is seemingly endless. Almost every aspect of our lives seems to have some regulation around it. China put regulations on how many children you can have, which most of the world saw as far too invasive into our personal freedoms, but you could possibly look at that as being the ultimate limit of that graph above. Once society has reached an unstable maximum, even procreation itself becomes a bureaucratic paperwork exercise, including taxes, fines, and imprisonment.
There are many Sci-Fi movies where AI decides that humanity is a danger, and must be controlled… In those movies the reins of society have been handed over completely. Take Logan’s Run for an example. The AI makes all the decisions, and the humans just live in a peaceful state, ruled by a malevolent/benevolent AI. Another example is “For the world is hollow and I have touched the sky” (an episode from Star Trek -one of many).
I feel that, rather than grease the wheels, most of bureaucracy is there to stop people doing stupid/selfish things. Look at some of the crazy laws in the US where it’s illegal to marry a horse, or it’s illegal not to flush the toilet in Singapore. As people often say “There has to be a reason for it”, and that reason is usually because some bozo pushed something too far, and other humans had to step in and put their foot down.
However, there are many examples in the literature about how Bureaucracy, rather than control society’s excesses, has been weaponised. The 27b/6 in “Brasil”, Mr. Bumble getting the blame in Oliver Twist “The Law is A Ass”, The entire 1962 movie “The Trial”, to name but a few. It’s a common trope that some automated process results in some bizarre action that ends up just making everyone’s life worse.
The problem is that the bureaucrats know full well why the bureaucracy is there. Look at Sir Humphrey in “Yes, Minister”. He’s a caricature, but often described as a “damn good caricature” of a Whitehall bureaucrat. He knows exactly why all the red tape is there, and he uses it (mostly) with aplomb to prevent MPs (almost exclusively, but not always Jim Hacker), from doing something exceptionally dumb.
Because everyone knows why the bureaucracy is there, there’s no point in making it easier. Why should they? People are stupid and need protecting from the results of their own actions. But this means that honest, good, efficient citizens who wish to do simple, law-abiding common-sense activities find themselves also needing to navigate horrific labyrinths of bureaucracy in order to do the most simple tasks.
.I honestly believe that, as a species, we find it difficult to create a fair and balanced society. We’re too partisan. We want everyone to be like us, look like us, believe what we believe. We try to create systems of government and laws which are fair, but we just can’t bring ourselves to ensure that the people making the laws are controlled by the law. There’s always a ‘meta-level’. As the latin phrase goes, “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – Who watches the watchers?
So, I just don’t think we can get rid of the number and strictness of the controls on our society, and we just need to accept that, as the population grows, there will be more stupid people and criminals, and those people will try to do stupid or criminal things… all of which increases the general level of red tape which we all must suffer. Can AI come to our rescue? Naaa, any AI would be borne of our own innate biases, plus I don’t think anyone would hand the controls over to an AI for fear of it deciding humans were the problem.
Is there a point to this blog post? no, it’s just my random musings on why I’ve had to spend an inordinate amount of time answering ridiculously repetitive forms to do things that really shouldn’t need all this red tape.