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The challenge we face today is humanizing a Bureaucratic Regime, just as our ancestors humanized a German warrior regime. We’re in the position of the Apostle Paul, handcuffed to a Praetorian guard. As the Bubble grows more psychotic and inhumane, opportunities for evangelistic kindness and witness multiply exponentially.

As we survey our emerging Bureaucratic Regime and its psychotic culture war, we might say things like, “We face unprecedented threats,” or, “We’re facing the Apocalypse.” But from the perspective of two millennia-old Christianity, a free Society of Love reaching back to Paul in Thessalonica, the times are neither unprecedented nor uniquely apocalyptic. As I reassure my wife, “Things are always this bad.” Our first effort must be to exorcise entirely from our minds the seduction of the gaudy Culture of Catastrophe. The Religion of Catastrophic Scientism is the prophecy of the Bureaucratic Regime, so we must always recollect that we live in a Providential Creation of Truth, Goodness and Beauty—whatever the Centre for Disease Control may say.

Through the history of the West, free Christian societies earned an independent moral authority with sacrificial services of love: teaching, nursing, and sheltering. This witness was convincing, not despite its powerlessness, but because of it. When Constantine’s grandson Julian tried to turn back the clock and revive the old paganism, he found that the Church’s charity put it beyond the reach even of an emperor: “Impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also,” he whined. “They welcome them to their agapae, drawing them like children with cakes.”

This has been the pattern of the ages. Powerless, sacrificial Christian societies—like Austin’s monks, landing in Saxon Sussex—repeatedly challenge coercive political regimes. Since the smallest Society of Love can survive wherever “two or three gather in My Name,” they endure brutal bosses. With personal services of love—free education, nursing, and shelter—they soften those bosses and given hope to people, earning that moral authority. They plant a faith in the Imago Dei in each person, thereby re-seeding the constantly budding West with the cultural axioms of personal dignity, free association and subsidiarity, the rights of families, trades, and communities. In the Dark Age, they taught respect for women and manly chastity to the warrior sons of brutal chieftains—virtues incomprehensible to an Achaean or Apache warrior.

Over the last two millennia, loving Christian societies have challenged successively, first Roman Theocracy, then the Warrior regime of the Dark Age, then nationalist Oligarchies of the Enlightenment, then Democratic parliaments. Now, over the last two centuries, the West has faced the rise of a Bureaucratic regime, nascent Oriental Despotism (Wittfogel, 1962), replaying Roman Theocracy. The growth of public administration fuels a diabolical ambition of universal regulation, finding its cosmology or religion in Hegelian nationalism, Marxist internationalism, and now Postmodern Catastrophism. Traumatized by total war, Europe slides into a bureaucratic coma, in the hope that docile submission will bring lasting peace. There, the Christian witness is reduced to isolated families, educating their children in the face of grotesque State coercion.

Spared the trauma of total war, and blessed by a politically humble Constitution, America alone resists surging Progressivism, the ambition to absorb all of Society under State regulation. Virtuous legislators may yet corral Bureaucracy’s ambition and corrupt Scientism. And energetic federalism means the most suicidal Progressivism—restorative justice or universal welfare—is isolated in a few, especially psychotic states, amplifying the Culture War as sterile City Mice versus fertile Country Mice. Demographics is destiny. The relatively fertile Christian remnant is a Wild Card, given deeply seated cultural axioms of the Imago Dei. Societies of love endure heedless of coercion, so families uniting in education prove real lights in a regulatory night.

Nevertheless, even if legislators finally bridle the public administration, an intrinsically anti-social Bureaucratic culture will remain a brute reality, given urbanization, modern industry, trade and an enormous tax-base. Local banks, civic governments, and corporate “human resources departments” (charming phrase) all swim in the Bureaucratic sea. So we must take a deep breath, gird our loin clothes, and face the trial of evangelizing a regulatory regime.

So, in the cases to follow, we will look twice at our day-to-day “interface” with the Bureaucracy, then twice at the growing pathology in that culture itself, then twice at its animating rationale for empire, the Precautionary Principle. Lessons will be drawn from each.

CASE ONE: Public Docility and Non-negotiable Protocols

Working as a journalist, I once got an anonymous call from a panicking single mom, begging me to intercede with the local Child and Family Services. Her two boys were going to be seized, because her house was so dirty that it threatened their health (which it probably did). She was too scared to identify herself, but I still called the social workers for their inevitable replies. Privacy protocols forbade their commenting. When I offered to provide a maid service, they could not tell me her address. I wondered if they had considered a maid service. Silence, of course: if they hired a maid, the very next week, hundreds of single moms would be outside their office, demanding their right to a maid. I did not ask if they weighed the relative danger to the boys from a dirty house, versus the real trauma of a seizure. Professionally, seizure was their safe option. They risked nothing in seizing the boys, but they might be disciplined for endangering them in a dirty house. Bureaucratic protocols are mandatory, categorical, and budgetary.

In my childhood, neighborhood church ladies would have showed up with mops and sponges, offering that mother service that was voluntary, personal, and sacrificial. The mom would see that she had no right to their voluntary sacrifice, affirming her personal human worth. Seeing her ignorance, the ladies would show her how to clean a house and enjoy it. Nurturing her autonomy and dignity, they’d start her down the path of free agency and citizenship, instead of impersonal public dependency, mentoring her into free society. If social workers had shown up, they might have shamed them into leaving. This doesn’t happen, today, because the Bureaucratic Bubble now claims dominion over loving families and society in the name of rational justice.

Now, the State’s core duties of common necessity—defense, justice and public works—must be mandatory, categorical, and budgetary. In a free Society, anyone entrusted with coercion must be bound by protocols and the Rule of Law. However, when a Free Society’s Services of Love—education, nursing and sheltering—are sucked into the Bubble, procedure is everything, results literally nothing, and coercion inevitable. Social workers may know in their hearts that child seizure is a crippling trauma, but violating protocols risks everything for them. Confrontation can only push them further into angry cognitive dissonance. In witnessing to the Imago Dei, what must come first is concern for the front-line minions, sympathy for their unspoken dilemmas. With kindness, it may be possible to help them find some Wiggle Room.

CASE TWO: Exploiting Ambiguities for Wiggle Room

Some years ago, an old friend was dying of cancer in local hospice. We visited Keith nightly, until the evening we found him in a deep coma. As we entered his room, the four-to-midnight nurse told us, off-hand, we should say our final goodbyes. We asked, why? She replied she had doctor’s orders to give him an injection. So after she left, Kathy whispered, “We’re not leaving.” As the evening wore on, the nurse periodically peaked in, to see if we were still there. Then at midnight, as her shift was ending, she announced that she had to give Keith his shot. My wife asked, will it kill him? She shrugged. Kathy asked, what precisely does the doctor’s order say? The nurse read, “If the patient is disturbed…” But he’s not disturbed, Kathy insisted. No, he’s not, the nurse agreed…resting quietly. Minutes passed. Then she said, “I’ve already drawn the ampule into a syringe, so I’ll have to squirt it into the sink.” She seemed pleased. “I’ve got to throw it away.” So there’d be no unused ampule to raise questions, if Keith survived the night.

What did we achieve? Another twelve hours in a coma? Keith’s daughter’s flight from Seattle had been delayed, but the next day, she made it to his bedside just before he died. More important, we saved a still-humane nurse from committing procedural murder, and she was grateful. The lesson: if we’d challenged her orders directly, she’d have been forced to dig in her heels or risk her job. Yet such orders are very often couched in conditional terms—“If the patient is disturbed…”—so supervisors can download the final responsibility to their staff. Probing for Wiggle Room can (rarely) encourage humane inaction in the name of regulatory caution. Yet almost always, looking for Wiggle Room is a gentle way to appeal to the humanity of clerks, trapped by tick-box protocols. We can always say, “It must be so hard for you, to have to make these sorts of decisions in other peoples’ lives.”

By sympathetically assuming and voicing the inhumanity of their roles, we may touch a tortured soul. Remember: the Bubble’s first victims are its minions—ordinary nurses, teachers, city clerks, IRS accountants or police officers—responsible for implementing policies they know violate their own, deep desires for family, community and citizenship.

THIRD CASE: Undefined Crimes, Guilty Pleas, and Human Sacrifices

Today, a chasm has grown between Bureaucracy’s increasingly psychotic supervisors and its ordinary staff, obliged to implement their often inhumane regulations. Spawned in the universities, a megalomaniacal elite has arisen within the Bureaucracy that sees human nature itself as oppressive, and seeks public compliance to unnatural norms. How? Over twenty years, senior executives increasingly found themselves exposed to complaints of discrimination or demeaning conduct from their own staff, and constitutionally cowardly, they covered their rears.

During my final career as an administrative tribunal judge, I watched a colleague, a gentlemanly retired Navy commander, cut down at the knees. His own clerk was sporting an impressive new ring, so he asked her, “What’s this?” She replied. “It’s an engagement ring.” Being the complete gentleman, he cheered, “You look radiant!” And the next day, with no further discussion, she filed a formal complaint against him for his “demeaning comment.” He never knew what hit him. Being a gentleman, he tried to apologize, but this proved an admission of guilt. He was then sentenced to six months suspension without pay and mandatory sensitivity training. His apology was the only evidence of any crime, but it confirmed his guilt.

What’s happening? Given its monopoly, public administration is never subject to a real cost-benefit analysis. Traditionally, personal career advancement come not from real results, but from avoiding blunders, or ducking responsibility for inevitable blunders. Decisions are made in committee by anonymous consensus, creating internal tick-box protocols, protecting everyone. Responsibility is further defused and staff multiplied with endless reports and spreadsheets—“reporting more on doing less.” Thus reigns, internally, the legendary CYA principle, “Cover Your Ass, procedures everything and results nothing. Yet the fatal consequence of this inherent cowardice has been the rise of a power-mad elite. Few saw the radicals rising in their ranks, and no one had the courage to resist them.

Now, rather than restrain ambitious subordinates, supervisors routinely promote them diagonally up into the hierarchy. For example, our department briefly included the Angry Gay Guy (and this is no slight on Happy Gay Guys). He stalked the halls with eagle-eyed resentment, plainly searching for discrimination, and making all the comfortable clerks so nervous, that he was promoted diagonally into a new department lightning-fast, within a year.

Public administration would have bloated anyway, with urbanization, a burgeoning industrial plant, information technology, and State-sponsored research—soon to mutate into the Religion of Scientism. But one decisive influence was the post-war University Boom, generating what economists call Elite Overproduction. Arts and Education faculties produced a huge cohort of grads, unequipped for anything except government work and obsessed with their privileged status. The universities, equally insulated from the real costs, were dominated by spectacularly ignorant academics, devoted to Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s Long March through the Institutions.

In the Seventies, academic “experts” harvested lucrative public consulting gigs, further enabling their up-and-coming grads. Given Bureaucracy’s inherent indifference to performance metrics, this revolving-door with the Academy eventually overwhelmed traditional bureaucrats with a new authoritarian ideology—the “Deconstruction” of Marcuse, Freire, Derrida, and Foucault. All the divisive identities of our current public quarrels: medical, racial, sexual, gaia worship, were spawned in the Academy, matured in Bureaucracy, then set loose into the public.

FOURTH CASE, Vile Ambition, Diagonal Promotions, and the Virtue of Indecision

In my last months as a tribunal judge, I discovered that my podium microphone was broken and needed to be replaced. Six years earlier, I’d have told the office secretary, and she’d have gone to the store, purchased a replacement, and left the receipt in petty cash. But now, our office was bloated with internal administrators, so we had a new facilities manager, a blockhead known throughout the office for multiplying useless procedures and making life difficult. So I reported the mike problem. A month passed, and no new mike. A second month passed, and after a third email, I was told the requisition was sitting at the regional office. In the third month, I sent a fourth email to the manager, closing with, “This is not rocket science.” That’s all it took.

The next day, the facilities manager came to my office and asked, “Can I shut your door?” With antennae out, I agreed. He sat, smiled, and said, “Someone might find your comment about rocket science demeaning.” I replied, “I never said anything about anyone in particular; I said the problem isn’t rocket science.” Still smiling, he insisted, “Someone might find that demeaning.” Given my colleague’s fate, I knew apologies are blood in the water. So I turned back to my computer and simply ignored him. Minutes passed, and I hadn’t admitted guilt. Stymied, perhaps, he said nothing. Finally, I heard him close the door behind him.

I immediately rehearsed my defense. He was twice my size, and he had a really weird smile. I didn’t know what he might do. I felt threatened. What if he turned violent? But alas, all my preparation went for naught. A week later, I learned that the vicious manager was already getting a diagonal promotion up into a new department.  He’d earned the reward of his malice.

Polite kids, confronted by cry-bullies, must learn this lesson: never apologize to anyone clearly malicious. Bureaucratic culture intrudes into kids’ lives with Zero Tolerance Policies against bullying, the perfect tools for clever bullies, bringing false accusations against the innocent. Apologies are blood in the water, so innocent kids (and clerks) must learn never to concede fictional wrongdoings. This is a challenge. Teachers (and supervisors) will advert to the school-marm reflex, shifting the onus to the good kid (or clerk) for the sake of peace in the class (or office): “Apologize, so we can get on with it.” But we never “get on with it;” we get more of the same. Persistent refusal may then spark a supervisor’s angry, even bullying reaction—“It’s your fault.” And this is the opportunity to push the problem upstairs—asking politely to take it to a principal (or manager). At this, the teacher (or supervisor) will likely balk, and shift her (or his) animus back to original source of the problem. And this can all be done with love.

FIFTH CASE: The Precautionary Principle and Unreliable Representatives

Government regulators have no motivation to calculate the relative cost of rectifying a problem, versus preventing it in the first place. Since it disperses its costs across Society, public administration—and legislators obliged to corral them—always seek to prevent possible errors, malfeasance, or disasters, before their records are tarnished with the charge, “They failed to stop it.” Bureaucratic ambition metastasised into the Society by means of this Precautionary Principle.

At its extravagant extreme, the Precautionary Principle states, “Any possible calamity, statistically projected, justifies limitless expenditure of public resources for a global prevention program”— mandatory, categorical and expensive. In the Seventies, this was popularized by the mantra, “Think Globally—Act Locally,” meaning: Impose real local costs for global prevention of hypothetical catastrophes. Thus, Bureaucratic Scientism imposes a managed decline on the broader economy, shrinking the Middle Class like Rome’s overtaxed farmers.

One crisp autumn lunchtime, while leaving our big federal building, I saw two of our mid-level clerks, heading out to check on a contract agency. But they were waiting at a bus stop? “Why don’t you guys take a taxi?” I asked, and got the now familiar glower of long-suffering civil servants, oppressed by protocols: “It’s such a pain-in-the-ass getting a taxi chit,” one complained, “and we have our own bus passes, so it’s just easier to take the bus.”

When I started in that office, the taxi chits were in a mail-room desk with a binder: sign one out, use it, and return the copy. Six years later, the chits were controlled by two clerks, with multiple binders and a shiny new safe with a closely-guarded combination. A safe for taxi chits. Had someone purloined thousands of dollars in chits? No; but what if someone did? An ambitious deputy supervisor had seen an unexploited opportunity for micromanagement and over-staffing—now called, “transparency” and “accountability”. So now, dispirited clerks ride public transit, wasting buckets of salaried hours. The bus-consumed lost productivity– five times the cost of a taxi? –never shows on a spreadsheet, but a meaningless reduction in taxi use does.

As government becomes the major patron of scientific research—or the only respectable (“non-capitalist”) patron—it instinctively selects research anticipating potential calamities, justifying possible prevention programs, thereby bloating public employment. A Bureaucratic State naturally sponsors scientists who predict disasters, spawning a bastard brother of real science, the Religion of Catastrophic Scientism. Scientism evangelizes a cosmology of hidden, impersonal, unforgiving laws. It prophesizes Divine Retribution with the statistical extension of isolated trend-lines, chanting invisible disasters, like the 1970s’ “Scientific Certainty,” the New Ice Age (Time), or our Carbon Dioxide Demon. Contrary to science, it ignores a thousand other variables and natural feed-back loops (like 18 trillion carbon-consuming trees). Scientism inflicts anticipatory sacrifices on people, stoking their natural guilt for being human. Prevention’s punitive cost—the more expensive, the better—confirms the prophecy. Catastrophes that never happen prove the power of the sacrificial liturgies, like profligate recycling, windmills, or gasoline taxes.

The Precautionary Principle assumes that the cost of preventing a hypothetical calamity is less than the cost of repairing it. Yet preventable disasters are necessarily local, and therefore repairable, while a truly global disaster—like an erupting Yellowstone Caldera—cannot be prevented. A three-inch rise in the Global Sea Level is a only local disaster for coastal cities, but easily repaired with six-inch dykes. Ten times as many people die yearly from cold, as heat, so Global Warming would be a blessing, disguised by prophecies of catastrophe. So, please, a bumper sticker: Local Repairs Work, Global Preventions Waste.

SIXTH CASE, Demonic Precautions, Child Sacrifice, and the Stockholm Syndrome

Bureaucratic protocols mutate from merely wasteful to viciously psychotic as they detach from the problems they were meant to prevent. Trivially, plastic recycling costs far more energy than it saves, as proven by its gross public subsidies. Demonically, the Precautionary Principle’s abuse prevention protocols abuse children.  The lingering Christian axiom that children are infinitely, intrinsically valuable, and not simply herd animals, grants the State a limitless obligation to protect them. Then, paradoxically, the kids sucked into the Child-protection bubble are inevitably treated like herd animals, regardless of their genuine good, like a stable family.

Two years ago, daughter Mary and her husband lived in London with their three kids, including little Sebastian. When Bazzi was a year old, he developed an infection in his penis. A friend across the road happened to be a pediatrician, and this doctor herself watched the infection erupt over three hours, from a problem-free diaper change into screaming inflammation. She told Mary to take Bazzi instantly to emergency, giving her a note for the staff physician and even phoning ahead.

At the hospital, however, the pediatric surgeon walked in, took a thirty-second look at Bazzi, asked nothing, and walked out. Bazzi, sporadically screaming in pain, remained untreated. A nurse then announced that the doctor had called in a Section 47, suspected sexual abuse, and any treatment must stop while they gathered legal evidence. When Mary asked about the note from her pediatrician neighbor, she was told, once a Section 47 is called, none of that mattered. They could not leave. Mary and Bazzi were slotted into a ward of six. That night, Bazzi was not permitted to wear a diaper, so the nurses could check on him—which they never did—so Mary spent the night repeatedly changing cold, soaking sheets.

Day Two, the chilled, lethargic toddler, treated only with acetaminophen, was strapped to a board and subjected to full-body CT scans and X-rays for legal evidence. Social workers began laboring in the background.. Meanwhile, a lawyer friend warned Mary most urgently to remain docile, agreeable to everything, or Bazzi would be seized.

Day Three, Bazzi was still untreated and had taken no food or drink for 48 hours. After another restless night, Mary was told that some X-rays were foggy and would have to be redone.

Day Four, despite the acetaminophen, Bazzi’s temperature spiked to 103 degrees. However, when the nurse looked at his chart, diagnosing sexual abuse, she said, “That can’t be right.” She reset the thermometer and moved it from his armpit to his chest. It now read normal. She said, “That’s better,” and put the lower temperature on his file. By now, however, Bazzi’s penis was oozing pus, so Mary begged her to take a swab. Momentarily compassionate, she agreed, but warned that the doctor would have to sign off on a biopsy. No more was heard of it.

Day Five, after 96 restless hours, the pediatrician returned, saying that they’d passed their CT-scans, x-rays and police checks, so they were free to go. Bazzi was now vomiting regularly, so Mary asked, “How can you release him like this?” The doctor replied, “It must be something he picked up in the hospital,” and “It happens all the time.” They were free to go. Leaving the room, the doctor explained, “I’m responsible for his safety.” Perhaps unwisely, Mary reacted, “No, you’re not, I am—and I’d never make him suffer the way you have.” The pediatrician was insulted. Still, with Bazi untreated, they were permitted to leave. They then saw a private doctor.

Two months later, after many, long home visits and school interviews, the social worker, a sane Nigerian immigrant, thanked Mary for being so polite, since, “When people are not cooperative, we must call law enforcement and seize the child.” Mary was told she had the right to see the hospital record, but when she requested it, the doctor refused to release it. The lawyer friend later said that child abuse files are never closed, even when proven baseless. If Bazzi is ever again taken injured to an NHS hospital, it starts all over.

Such stories are common among Mary’s middle-class friends, yet the British have a deep devotion to their National Health System. Repeatedly, hospitals refuse to release dying babies to their parents for experimental treatments abroad, and the courts rule that hospitals have a right to let them die. Yet “the doctors know best” is the British reflex to such merciless management.

Parenthetically, the British Museum recently had a special exhibit, celebrating the beauty of ancient Aztec Art. It is unclear what they found beautiful in it, like celebrating the architecture of Auschwitz and the extermination of human beings like ants in an anthill.

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL: The Meek Inheriting the Earth

Is there hope? Inevitably. We’re not England—though one California school district has reportedly introduced ancient Aztec prayers. Chinese despotism endured for millennia, given its elite culture of Confucian virtue. In general, though, in breeding anthill docility, Bureaucratic Despotism generally dies from infertility, as Rome collapsed from depopulation: obliteration of the fertile middle class by crippling taxation, and the infertility of its spoiled elites and despairing slaves. Demographics is destiny, yet a mindless Bureaucracy seeks to regulate even the natural family. People who no longer own their own children stop having them, so here in North America, the political and cultural issue will be decided, thanks to federalism, by demographics.

To come full circle, the challenge we face today is humanizing a Bureaucratic Regime, just as our ancestors humanized a German warrior regime. We’re in the position of the Apostle Paul, handcuffed to a Praetorian guard. As the Bubble grows more psychotic and inhumane, opportunities for evangelistic kindness and witness multiply exponentially. The greatest need is within Bureaucracy itself. At the base of the Tower of Babel, its first victims are its minions.

There are methods for humanizing Bureaucracy. Services centralized for “efficiency” can be decentralized, permitting comparisons of relative efficiency. In education and health care, public money should freely “follow the client.” The public administrative unit should be intergenerational families, rather than isolated individuals. The family is the issue. In the 1880s, facing the challenge of educating Catholic and Orthodox immigrants, the Protestant Elite might have respected the Christian principle of family autonomy, and promoted vouchers for free Christian schools, rather than Progressive bureaucratic education. But that’s another discussion.

In the meantime, we deal with the culture as we find it, a culture of clerks, oppressed by their supervisors, oppressing the public. If history is any lesson, our culture today really needs a new Uncle Tom’s Cabin or To Kill a Mockingbird, dramatizing the martyrdom of a family, heroically caught up in an impersonal, regulatory persecution. Perhaps: Dad’s Day in Court?

This essay was originally presented to the Home School Legal Defense Association’s National Leaders Conference in Nashville, TN, 19 September 2024.

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