Welcome to the Castle

(Just kidding, you're really a peasant stuck down in the village with other the peasants)

Preface: If you haven’t already, read Kafka’s “The Castle.” Read his “The Trial.” If you have time afterwards, check out Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading” and “Bend Sinister.” These absurdist works shed more light, more accurately, on the ground-level reality of our modern condition, then almost everything else since put together. Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarianism is absolutely key to understanding our world. It’s the analytical, dead spot-on explanation of the road to, and methodology of, this predicament in which you and I are stuck, and stuck at the bottom, and which is illustrated by the novelists mentioned. Think about your local DMV, or court system, or really any government institution, especially the ones you specifically personally despise, while you read these. Force yourself through them like you force yourself not to pull your hair out in the flickeringly fluorescent-lit, suffocating DMV waiting room. Especially in the novels, you’ll recognize the feelings they convey, and if that means you’re nauseated and anxious, alienated and wanting to escape, it’s the proper response. The Kafka novels also don’t have endings: this perfectly suits the subject matter itself. It doesn’t end. It never will, unless it is made to. Nothing has changed, in a century, except where it has gotten worse. Which is pretty much everywhere. In fact, we may be past the tipping point beyond which there is any realistic recovery.

This will be an exercise in admitting things to yourself. It’s okay to do it, you don’t have to take it too far if you don’t want to, and you definitely don’t have to admit it to anyone else. But maybe you should take it too far, admit it, then declaim it, over and over again, against the inevitable resistance, to everyone.

Thought exercise: you’re describing your current, oh-so wonderful modern existence, replete with all sorts of distracting conveniences, flashy TV screens, fancy electronic doodads and whatnot, to someone from two or three hundred years ago, maybe someone who lived then where you do now. Try explaining to them why you have to pay a property tax on a house you “own.” Explain why you’re not allowed, or need to apply and pay for a license, to collect rainwater that falls on “your” land; why you have to pay an annual license to own your dog or cat. Explain needing government permission to grow and sell your own food, and all the red tape and regulations, fees and taxes involved if you bother. For real fun, explain why your water is fluoridated without your consent. If you live in LA explain why it’s okay that the higher-ups have decided to start pumping treated sewage back into the aquifer. Try as you might, you’re not going to convince them you are more than a mere subservient, obedient, self-deluding serf. Worse, my guess is they’re going to catch on that you’re trained enough (I am) that you work to come up with ways to rationalize and justify these things. We’ve taken the bureaucracies’ jobs upon ourselves, and it shows.

Back to the DMV. What do you feel, waiting for a rubber-stamper to rubber-stamp the stamp that will affirm that they give you permission to do certain things within their limits of what is allowed with the vehicle you own? Provided your vehicle meets their requirements, in which you had no say determining? What do you feel the second, third, tenth time you do this? After 45 grinding minutes of waiting, sitting in the previous victim’s sweat-residue on a hard plastic chair, minutes you know are unnecessary if not intentionally geared to demoralize you into quiet compliance? What do you feel under the cold gaze of the unsympathetic pseudo-human ensconced safely behind their barren-topped desk replete with plexiglass barrier? How do you feel they see you? Maybe you’re super lucky and they make the Herculean effort to grace you with the a fake smile. What ultimate power do they hold over you and what are the potential ramifications of their rubber stamp for your livelihood and life? Why? Ponder on this.

What do you feel, driving on your peaceable way home from work or school or the grocery store, when a police/sheriff/highway patrol/etc. vehicle pulls behind you in traffic? Who has all — and I mean ALL — the power, right or wrong, in this situation, should they decide they don’t like the way you’re driving, or any other mundane aspect of you being in this particular place at this particular time? You know you don’t even need to give them an excuse: they can make one up. On a whim. Ponder on this.

This happened to me: my wife and I decided to have solar panels installed on our roof, for the purpose of saving money on our electric bill, which had been increasing astronomically. Read: incompetent, ensconced bureaucracy at its best (worst: I live in California). The crew came (after nearly a year of bureaucratic rigamarole) and finished installing within a few hours. I was sitting on the couch an hour afterwards when I heard a knock on my front door (which was wide open). I stood to see several sheriff’s deputies at the door. They grilled me on who I was (in my own home), and one who had already been in my backyard, spying on me through the window, came around from the back. We had two old Italian Greyhounds (about 15 pounds each) at the time and the older one, 90% blind, gimpy with bad back and knees, grey in the face, point being clearly not a threat to anyone, came around too, barking & rasping at the deputy who’d been in back. The deputy actually unsnapped his holster & prepared to shoot my almost two-gallon dog. *Side note: do an internet search some time on how many dogs per year are killed by law enforcement in the US. Seriously. He wasn’t the only one with hand on pistol grip; the others were facing me in my doorway. I intervened (meekly) and continued answering the bevy of questions they heaved at me. Turned out they were after someone on the solar crew. So on and so forth, yada yada: they were willing and ready to shoot my dog who was literally incapable of inflicting harm, on my property, after coming through my gate, sending a deputy behind my house, with no warrant to search my property. They were willing and ready to invade my home despite the person they were after obviously not being present: it was clear there was no crew there. I could see they were barely restraining themselves from coming through the door. They were willing and ready to shoot me just for being there. It took cautious de-escalation on my part to clarify and end the situation. Once again I had to do the bureaucracy’s job for them, this time to potentially save my own life. Living under bureaucracy, these are the frontline responders I am supposed to call to save me in a tight situation because I’m not allowed to save myself.

There is something engrained, or more likely inculcated in me, that hates to admit it, but I can’t pretend it isn’t true: law enforcement is just the armed branch of the bureaucracy. Maybe this is just a side-effect, a function of order-following, union dictates, etc., but never underestimate this fact. Never. It’s the same but with stamps and guns, instead of just stamps. Worse, compliance is no guarantee of safety. *More homework: look up Duncan Lemp. John Hurley. Breonna Taylor. There are myriad cases like these. All the bureaucratic machinery is in place to protect the on-the-ground agents of the bureaucracies if they do something wrong — or outright horrendous.

Ten-plus years ago I went back to school to get my Master’s degree in Political Science. I was in my late twenties/early thirties then. All the other students but one were in their early to mid twenties, fresh out of undergrad. Without exception every one of them explicitly stated that they supported more bureaucracy, more government, more lobbying, more academic morass, etc., because those were the fields they sought to enter or sought to research and teach. Their interests and “focuses” or “fields of research” were simply geared self-servingly. You see the mindset here. Don’t expect it to end since they graduated, and don’t expect them not to do whatever is required to tow the line to guarantee that juicy tenure, early retirement and pension.

They see us as sheep to be managed: nothing more. Your only hope, day after day, year after year, is the herd of beasts/school of fish strategy: safety in numbers. Constantly hope you’re not the one to be eaten, with greater herd numbers raising your odds, if only slightly, temporarily, and contingently. Stay in the middle, hard to spot, hard to get to. Bump and fight the other prey like you, never the predator. Fret at everything, because you have to; that’s how the system works.

I can’t stress this enough: read Hannah Arendt. Once another individual has the weight of a bureaucracy behind and in front of them, you don’t amount to anything to them but a bit of gravel beneath the wheels of the machine in which they’re a cog or a gear. Your inconsequential form sits on their desk piled amidst a hundred identical copies with some other poor bastards’ names on them. Decades before the Nazis, in a different country but deep within modern bureaucratizing Europe, Kafka diagnosed this issue. He was an absurdist, but our world had already tilted toward unwieldy top-heavy absurdity when he was writing. It’s only snowballed in the same direction, without let-up, since. If you read what I suggested above, you’ll not only feel it (all but the willfully blind that is), you’ll now better understand it. You already see it. You can admit you’re not a human in the eyes of the people in charge of your life. You can admit rather that they are in charge of your life. Everything you do, you do with permission or by escaping attention. The only spaces where you are “in charge,” are where they haven’t noticed you. And these spaces are shrinking with accelerating rapidity. This is the absolute hardest thing to admit, but you have to if you want to get out.

So where are we at now? What is the predator-to-prey ratio nowadays? Consider this table from Statista.com:

That’s right. As of 2021, there were 18.83 MILLION local and state government, unelected bureaucrats in the US alone, loyally serving their respective bureaucracies, bureaucratically protected & bureaucratically leeching off your tax dollar, all while bureaucratically regarding you as the sub-bureaucratic cockroach you let them make you. Add 2.85 MILLION federal bureaucrats to that list, and that excludes military and other non-civilian employees, plus all the people the government “forgets” to mention. And that was last year: add 87,000 new heavily armed IRS agents literally gunning for you, at the stroke of a bureaucratic pen (or stamp, they like stamps). Also, much of the collective bureaucratic bill goes to bureaucracies promoting their bureaucracies through bureaucracy-promoting advertising and propaganda (via corpo-governmental advertising bureaucracies).

Let’s call it 21 million non-military government bureaucrats you and I are up against, or trying to avoid. We’ll disregard here the umpteen million health insurance bureaucrats, car insurance bureaucrats, life insurance bureaucrats, police (yeesh), lobbyists, corporate shills, bankers, NGOs, school teachers and staff, and on and on. So, working with a baseline of 21 million, out of a US population of 330 million (give or take):

That means 6.4% of the population is out to get you, to grind you down and squeeze every penny out of you, on your dollar. 100 neighbors? 6 or 7 of them see you as a cockroach to be dealt with as slowly and painfully as possible, with misdirection and obfuscation at every opportunity. They get a vote just like you, and it will always be to continue and increase the bureaucracy, and increase its funding. If they forget, their unions remind them how to vote. Their families vote in their interest too. They will encourage their friends and acquaintances to do so. They ensconce further and further, expand more and more. It’s such a taken-for-granted adage in political science that institutions always seek to expand, in their own interest, that I don’t even remember who said it.

Meanwhile in daily life they will, with clear conscience, pretend they’re sympathetic and not part of the system or admit it with a dozen adjoining justifications or rationalizations. Bureaucrats’ best trick is to maintain distance where possible, but this is a thin charade. They literally can’t any more, there are too many of them.

They’re there, as Arendt said, not deciding to be good or evil, because their job doesn’t require that. They just stamp the papers handed to them, then pass it down to the next stamper in line, until it activates the stamper who stamps with bullets, or gas canisters, or whatever — and none of them even have to interact with each other, let alone you; there is no chance, or even space, for debate or doubt or qualm. Their brief polite interaction with you in line at Starbucks on the way to work is not going to keep them, the moment they sit at their office desk, from stamping your death warrant or the paperwork saying you can’t open a business, or whatever. Either way they will love the system because they have to. Your hospital staff is this way. You property managers are this way. Your bank manager is 100% bought and paid for this way. Your kid’s school’s staff is this way. They thrive on this, it’s how they get by. Even if they don’t want to be this way, they have to be and they’re stuck, in most cases forever. In union cases it’s literally enforced. You’re a minor obstacle among a million other minor obstacles and they have the entire self-justifying, ever-expanding weight of their institutions behind them. Granted, that is while they’re working: maybe some of the Nazis, or Stasi, or NKVD, were really cordial with their less-fortunate neighbors in day-to-day interactions. Who knows. Who’s left to say otherwise? Then back to work on Monday and STAMP STAMP STAMP STAMP STAMP STAMP STAMP STAMP STAMP.

How do you face this? You’re a character in an never-ending absurdist novel. You’re K., who can’t even find his way through the village to the castle. Nobody will help, or they do but you can’t know if they’re right or wrong or messing with you, or part of the impenetrable edifice you’re up against. Or you’re Josef K., on trial by the bureaucrats who refuse even to tell what you did wrong, or how to amend things. Maybe none of them even know. It doesn’t change their job one iota. You’re alone. It’s baffling. It’s intentionally overwhelming, even at the lowest and simplest levels, and gets recursively worse as it goes up. Too many stamps and stickers and forms and signatures and copies and whatever between you and anything near the top. The lower levels of embedded obstructionism are enough to deter you from even trying.

The “proper,” i.e. expected, response: go home if you can, and forget about it. What they want is: “Don’t even try. Pay us taxes to continue this gross misconduct, perpetrated against you, so we can take more taxes and fees and anything else we feel like. Give up. That’s the whole point. Hope we don’t notice you. Hope you do what you’re told. Hope you don’t gain our attention. Meanwhile we’ll go on stamp-stamp-stamping (or stamp-stamp-shooting), ourselves hoping you don’t do the only thing you can do…”

Stop pretending you’re not in this position, or pretending it’s normal and just. Pull your head out of the sand. Get mad.