Ever felt the crushing weight of bureaucracy? You know what I mean, right? Feeling as if you’re being rough-handled by a faceless system absent any feeling, empathy, or the most rudimentary common sense? A system that regards strict adherence to its own—often arbitrary—rules to be the only virtue that matters. There may be no greater hell on earth than being trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare, where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Ever felt that way?

Having taken an intentional break from movie references, I’m compelled to note another 80s Stallone movie here, Judge Dredd. Based on a comic book character of the same name, Dredd is a futuristic policeman in an over-crowded metropolis, teeming with humanity, surrounded by an outside world rendered desolate. Not just a police officer, he’s a hard-nosed, combative street cop with the power to act as judge, jury, and executioner in the legal system of the time. LOTS of executioner! Go figure … it is a Stallone flick after all!

Still, early in the movie he has a verbal exchange that I think sums up the bureaucratic mindset perfectly. He’s just arrested a citizen recently released from prison, having caught the man hiding inside a “recycled food” droid (try not to think about it!). The criminal was played by ever-popular Rob Schneider and Dredd says something to the effect of “And he hasn’t even been out of jail 24-hours. He’s habitual. Automatic 5-year sentence.”

Schneider’s dumbstruck, “Five years? I had no choice. They were killing each other up there!”

Dredd fixes him with one of those famous stares and says “You could’ve gone out the window.”

“40 floors?!? That would’ve been suicide!” Schneider cries out.

“Maybe,” Dredd replies as he replaces his helmet and turns away, “But it’s legal.”

That’s the bureaucratic mindset in a nutshell, isn’t it? Never mind that strict adherence to the rule in question leads to a consequence far worse than anything imagined when that rule was drafted in the first place, the rule is the rule. End of discussion.

Historically there have been some fantastically—and infamous—bureaucratic states that rose and fell, sometimes under the very weight of the institutions they’d created. The ancient Roman states come to mind, both Republican and Imperial, as do the Chinese governments from about the Han Dynasty around 50 B.C. through to … well … today, I guess. Is there anything more coldly bureaucratic than the way in which China discusses and addresses human issues? Just look at the way the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident has gripped international news all over the world this week. Everywhere but in China … where it apparently never happened!

Truth be told, Japan, where I’ve now lived nearly ten years, is a highly bureaucratized state, where the rule of law has far more value than its intent. It’s easy to understand, taking an historical perspective, why Japanese management systems and government institutions developed the way they did. As mentioned in a previous blog, Japan’s history is one of extended, ubiquitous, endemic warfare, characterized by back-stabbing and rapidly-shifting alliances. The crazy, bureaucratic rules of the Tokugawa Shogunate—my favorite being the requirement for local rulers to travel on foot to Tokyo every year at great personal cost in both money and time—essentially bureaucratized the samurai into oblivion. The rules, the government requirement, siphoned off the martial spirit of Japan’s most traditionally rebellious clans. This heralded the end of the samurai as a distinct class, leaving them too poor or without adequate time to plot a successful rebellion.

Yet in the Western tradition, derived from England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands amongst other contributing countries and cultures, the intent of a law or a rule, is generally considered to be more important than the law or rule itself. We try to make sure any given rule is being applied in a way consistent with its genesis. This concept lies—in theory, at least—at the heart of our legal system. And yet even we, who don’t normally conceive of rules as infallible and something to be blindly obeyed no matter what, even we have accepted a degree of bureaucratization over our lives that—when you step back and look at it—should be frightening to us.

In my own recent bureaucratic nightmare, I’ve been waiting for over a month for an important document to arrive from the U.S. Now, in a digital age, this should be a simple thing—and make no mistake, in terms of physical work it is—but the preparation of that one piece of paper requires coordination with several different offices. One of those offices is here in Japan where I currently reside. It’s not a Japanese office, it’s American, but it is located here, not terribly far away from where I live and work.

As time progressed, of course, my need to receive this document increased exponentially and I started leaning on the home office back in D.C. for a status update. After DAYS of calling, emailing, sending carrier pigeons, dropping letters in bottles, and scorching my thumb sending smoke signals, I finally got a full appreciation for the problem and, hence, the hold-up. My office back in D.C. sent the coordination packet to its higher office in the same city, which the next day forwarded it to the office in Japan. So far so good, right?

The office in Japan notes a form is missing and sends it back to the higher office in D.C. which then forwards it—the next day—to my office in D.C. who then—THE NEXT DAY—sends it on to me. <sigh> Within minutes of receiving this new form, I’ve filled it out, signed it, scanned it and sent it back as an email attachment, but the number of days required for the full turn-around are now clearly longer than I have available. So instead of waiting for the system to “work”—if you can even call it that—I called the office here in Japan, asked what they needed, sent it directly to them, and they cleared the paperwork for return to me … all in an hour-and-a-half!!!

And wouldn’t you know it … still took another three days for the system to get back to me with the final signed document I needed in the first place. It arrived on a Saturday morning, too late to be useful until the following Monday, by which point the resultant delays incurred will be significant and impact my whole family. Unbelievable!

Dealing with bureaucracies can truly be hell on earth, and leaves you feeling utterly powerless to affect even small things in your life. You end up being trapped by the certainty that whatever result emerges, it will be insufficient, untimely … or both.

Brutal as they could be at times, I sometimes feel for Japan’s medieval samurai. A great climactic military showdown would have seemed—to them at least—a preferable way to exit the world stage. Instead, their government bureaucratized them into extinction, and they likely felt powerless to do anything about it as they watched elements of their lives, and those of their families, being systematically snipped away to fit the rules and adhere to the latest laws.

Sure, there were rebellions in the end, some fairly bloody, but the vast majority of samurai families sort of just dissipated, in time melting back into the rest of Japan’s population. A people they’d ruled for a very long time.

Today, bureaucratic incidents can lead to a cynicism that’s destructive for us and our loved ones. In an effort to dispel that a bit, I’ll offer another story, this one dealing with perhaps the most vilified of bureaucracies in the U.S. Government, the IRS. Say what you will about the taxman, but when I ran afoul of this agency several years ago—through what turned out to be a simple, if rather dramatic, accounting error—the folks I dealt with were not at all what I expected, meaning essentially they weren’t Sith Lords waiting to pounce.

Never felt like I was dealing with an impersonal, Men-in-Black type of organization, they listened, recommended a course of action, and helped me work through it. Sure, they withheld my tax refund until I fixed the problem, but the accounting error made it seem as though I owed an additional $40,000 in taxes, so I understood the measure they were taking. Yet when all was said and done, not only did they release my refund, they paid me interest for the time it had been delayed.

I no longer speak ill of the IRS, as the folks I worked with showed me how government should be done. They were completely and in all ways professional and reasonable, right up to the end, and it left a lasting impression upon me.

That’s the way government is supposed to be. That’s the way rule of law is supposed to be administered, taking into account the circumstances surrounding a given incident. That’s the way a democracy’s governed are supposed to interact with their government. But in the end, it still came down to people, on opposite ends of a data or phone line, dealing with other people. At its heart, that’s really what’s supposed to make democracy great, an underlining concern for the people. You know, of the “We the people…” fame!

As our society becomes less and less social, as we shrink further and further into the tiny, personalized, insulated bubbles our smart phones and “friend” lists facilitate, the future of such personal interaction looks dim indeed. Reciting rules is easier than listening. Blind adherence to the law is simpler than trying to understand a problem. The inability—or growing disinclination—to communicate with other human beings, hints at a greater reliance upon bureaucratic procedures that handle people but don’t really ever fix anything.

If we’re not careful, that’s where we as a society seem to be heading … and Judge Dredd might just be waiting for us at the other end of that journey. Perish the thought!

M.G. Haynes