The Inhumanity of Government Bureaucracies.

• Author: SHERRER, HANS

The media attention focused on elected officials leads many people to think of them as "the government." Such thinking diverts us from the recognition of a critical truth: politically articulated agendas are transformed into reality only by bureaucratic systems. Bureaucracies are the dominant means by which governments control and influence the daily lives of people throughout the world.

If only because of the prominent position that government bureaucracies occupy in society, we need to understand the forces bearing upon the execution of their functions. This need is heightened by the common observation that government bureaucrats routinely treat people in ways that would be decried as inhumane if that treatment were meted out by anyone else.

The human devastation wreaked by past and present political regimes has not been inflicted personally by leaders such as Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and Poi Pot, but by rank-and-file members of bureaucracies or people acting with their approval. Whoever they may be or whatever position they may hold, political leaders merely issue directives or establish general policies (Ellul 1965, 147). Those policies are executed by bureaucrats and, to some extent, acquiesced to by the general public.

Adolf Hitler himself, for example, did not bring about the Final Solution. It became a reality only because of the independently chosen decisions of tens of millions of Europeans, including bureaucrats and professional people, either to participate in it actively or to do nothing to stop it (Ellul 1965, 147-62). Although a price may have to be paid, anyone whose conscience is shocked by the inhumanity of a bureaucratic program has the option of choosing not to participate in its implementation (Bettelheim 1960, 267-300; Mayer 1966, 168-73). The successful 1943 Rosenstrasse protest in Berlin by German women, which persuaded the Gestapo to release their Jewish husbands and boyfriends from custody, illustrates that acting in accordance with one's conscience can have positive effects even in the most totalitarian of regimes during a time of war (Stoltzfus 1996).

Although the central role of government bureaucracies in ensuring the success of political policies is often overlooked, interrelated aspects contributing to the inhumanity of these bureaucracies have been exposed in numerous books, journals, and magazines. In The Trial ([1925] 1988), Franz Kafka immortalized the essence of bureaucratic inhumanity from the standpoint of those who experience it. Relating the plight of Josef K., The Trial symbolizes a person's immersion in a bureaucratic process he can neither understand nor influence. Treated as a pawn on a chessboard, Josef K. is in a state of confusion and despair after being arrested, questioned, tried, and found guilty without ever seeing his judge, without being told who his accusers are or knowing what crime he has allegedly committed. Although first published in 1925, The Trial eerily presaged the atmosphere of unreality that pervaded the Moscow show trials of 1936-38 (Koestler 1941).

The intense negative feelings government bureaucracies evoke in the people caught in their web not only spring from their imposing structures, impersonality, and the murky rules that guide them, but are reinforced by the sheer magnitude of the apparatus: in the United States alone, more than twenty million people have chosen employment in one of the multitude of government bureaucracies.(1) Moreover, each of those organizations is a part of a greater functioning entity. Directly or indirectly, each bureaucrat relies on the awesome power of government enforcement agencies, which undertake to ensure that the bureaucrats are funded by taxpayers, that their regulations are obeyed, that their activities go forward unimpeded. In a sense, the bureaucrats resemble the members of a shrouded society; they constitute what one might call a "bureaucratic brotherhood."

The exercise of latent bureaucratic power is a theme of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem ([1963] 1994). Arendt uses the backdrop of Adolf Eichmann's 1961 trial in Israel to explore how bureaucratic systems facilitate unconscionably inhumane behavior by the apparently "normal" people typically associated with them. Although Eichmann was only a midlevel SS bureaucrat, his Israeli prosecutors and the world press portrayed him as Satan for his role in the Nazi regime. This media image, however, conflicted with Eichmann's single most distinguishing characteristic: he was an ordinary man who didn't exhibit any disturbing personal traits (Bettelheim 1963, 23; Kren and Rappoport 1994, 70). During the fifteen years between the end of World War II and his kidnapping in Argentina by Israeli agents, Eichmann lived a simple and quiet life with his loving family, going to work every day as people do throughout the world. His normality was unanimously confirmed by the half-dozen psychiatrists who studied him in prison during the year he awaited his trial and by the minister who regularly visited him (Bettelheim 1963, 23). Arendt subtitled her book A Report on the Banality of Evil precisely because Adolf Eichmann was psychologically indistinguishable from people who populate countries throughout the world.

Inhumane behavior by the evidently normal members of a bureaucracy is more in need of understanding today than it was at the time of Nazi rule in Germany. Prior to the Nazis' demonstration of the potential of bureaucracy, the destructiveness of rationally directed government bureaus was largely unappreciated. We now know, however, how easily political expediencies can mold bureaucracies into mechanisms of human destruction. This potential causes great concern because the panoply of nuclear, biological, chemical, mechanical, and psychological weapons available today provides bureaucrats with the means to act inhumanely toward large numbers of people with relative ease. In Modernity and the Holocaust(1989), Zygmunt Bauman has explored the inherent capability of bureaucracies as powerful instruments of destruction and control. He shows how modern methods of mass organization and production are applied to the bureaucratic control and processing of human beings as effectively as they are used in making and distributing automobile parts and office supplies (13-18, 104-6; see also Feingold 1983, 399-400).

Normal people acting within the framework of a bureaucratic system with access to modern techniques of action and control: these are the three elements that combine to enable a bureaucracy to function as a horribly destructive entity whose powers can be directed at any person or group that attracts its attention.

Serious inquiries have been made into various facets of the problem of bureaucratic inhumanity, but no single explanation suffices to explain the phenomenon. In this article, I discuss ten compelling factors, presented in no particular order, as a preliminary guide to understanding this important and menacing aspect of modern life.

Mindless Obedience to Authority

Most people exhibit a nearly mindless obedience to authority. Stanley Milgram's experiments almost forty years ago at Yale University revealed that two-thirds of a representative sampling of Americans would inflict life-threatening high-voltage electric shocks to someone they knew was innocent of any wrongdoing, even when that person was screaming and begging for mercy (Milgram 1975; see also Kelman and Lawrence 1972). Even more disturbing, this large percentage of Americans would inflict pain on innocent people willingly and even enthusiastically upon the mere request of someone whose authority was established by nothing more than his wearing the white coat of a laboratory technician and speaking in a firm voice. These people readily substitute obedience to authority figures for the dictates of their personal moral code. They have been called "sleepers" because they can slip into and out of a state of moral blindness on command (Bauman 1989, 167).

Apart from innumerable historical examples, the stories in a major newspaper on any given day provide support for the observation that bureaucracies are predominantly if not exclusively composed of persons who belong to the large pool of morally ambiguous and obedient people identified by Milgram's experiments. Furthermore, this phenomenon is not restricted by language, geography, political system, or era. It exists as much in the United States and other countries today as it did in Germany under the National Socialists and in Russia under Stalin (Kren and Rappoport 1994, 70). The conscienceless attitude of unreflective and amoral obedience exhibited by people in a bureaucratic setting resembles Eric Hoffer's unflatteringly description of "true believers" in a political or religious mass movement (1951).

Sadistic Behavior

Bureaucratic structures increase sadistic behavior by permitting and even encouraging it.(2) This effect is produced by the systematic lessening of the moral restraints inherent in personal agency (Kelman 1973, 52). Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo's "Stanford County Prison" experiment in the early 1970s confirmed this relationship in dramatic fashion (Zimbardo, Haney, and Banks 1973). The experiment revealed that the sadism of people unhealthily obedient to authority can be tapped into and given an expressive outlet by their association with...