The Squirrel, the Raccoon, and the Bureaucrats

The sad story of Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon has inspired many people to think about the nature of bureaucracy.  I’m reminded of a few stories:

When the fire alarm went off at Como Park High School in Minnesota in 2013 , a 14-year-old girl was rousted out of the swimming pool–dripping wet and wearing only a swimsuit–and was told to go stand outside where the temperature was sub-zero and the wind chill made it much worse. Then, she was not allowed to take refuge in one of the many cars in the parking lot because of a school policy forbidding students from sitting in a faculty member’s car. As Bookworm noted:

Even the lowest intelligence can figure out that the rule’s purpose is to prevent  teachers  from engaging sexually with children.   The likelihood of a covert sexual contact happening between Kayona and a  teacher under the actual circumstances is ludicrous.   The faculty cars were in full view of the entire school.   There was no chance of illicit sexual congress.

But the whole nature of bureaucratic rules, of course, is to forbid human judgment based on actual context.

Fortunately for Kayona, her fellow students hadn’t had human decency ground out of them by rules: “…fellow students, however, demonstrated a grasp of civilized behavior. Students huddled around her and some frigid classmates [sic], giving her a sweatshirt to put around her feet. A  teacher  coughed up a jacket.”  As the children were keeping Kayona alive, the  teachers  were  working their way through the bureaucracy.   After a freezing ten minutes, an administrator finally gave permission for the soaking wet, freezing Kayla to sit in a car in full view of everybody.

As Bookworm notes, this sort of thing has become increasingly common. In England in 2009, for example, a man with a broken back lay in 6 inches of water, but paramedics refused to rescue him because they weren’t trained for water rescues. Dozens of similar examples could easily be dredged up.

In Sweden, also in 2013, there was rampant rioting that included the torching of many cars.  The government of Sweden didn’t do a very good job of protecting its citizens and their property from this outbreak of barbarism.  Government agents did, however, fulfill their duty of issuing parking tickets…to burned-out cars.  Link with picture

The behavior of these bureaucrats is very similar to the behavior of a computer program confronted by a situation for which its designers did not explicitly provide. Sometimes the results will be useless, sometimes they will be humorous, often they will be harmful or outright disastrous.

Here’s an essay written by a Spanish naval official in 1797, on the subject ‘Why do we keep losing to the British and what can we do about it?’  The pathologies that Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana saw in his country’s naval operations are now disturbingly present in many American organizations.

Thoughts from Peter Drucker, the great writer on management and society, on the nature of bureaucracy.

An old SF story, “Dumb Waiter,” by Walter Miller, is very relevant to the subject of mindless and destructive bureaucratic behavior.  (Miller is best known for his philosophical/theological novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.)

In the story, cities have become fully automated—municipal services are provided by robots linked to a central computer system.  But when war erupted–featuring radiological attacks–some of the population was killed, and the others evacuated the cities. In the city that is the focus of the story, there are no people left, but “Central” and its subunits are working fine, doing what they were programmed to do many years earlier.

1 thought on “The Squirrel, the Raccoon, and the Bureaucrats”

  1. While we associate bureaucracy with government, it exists as well int he private sector. In a prior professional life with a Fortune 500 company, there was always the choice when presented with a problem; you could follow procedure and guarantee failure or you could try something new and different and have a 50-50 shot at success. Want to guess which one was the safer option?

    I will also add that at the field level said company now hires employees remotely. Local management has no say in the process. It is entirely conducted remotely by HR

    Procedure just doesn’t become a tool of conscious expansive tyranny but a refuge, a version of only following orders. The circumstances regarding P’Nut and Fred are not only tragic and heart-rendering they are also ridiculous. Leave aside the raid in the first place, who sends that many people for that period of time?

    I’m going to guess that the state government agency received a complaint and middle-tier management thought through the choices. If they didn’t investigate the complaint it would sit on the books, best take it seriously by following procedure. If they were going to investigate a potentially hostile situation, then best follow procedure to the letter and like a SWAT raid send enough people to make sure there was no resistance. The P’Nut did his don’t tread on me, the agency followed antiquated rabies procedures and killed him. Not sure what the reason was for Fred.

    Safety in procedure.

    Keep in mind procedure can never mirror reality, it is only a written approximation of it. In today’s grievance culture with identity politics it becomes even worse because to grant any discretion at the “customer” level is to invite legal action.

    That doesn’t even get into malicious actions of bureaucratic aggrandizement and and the sins petty tyranny.

    Btw… I had to renew my license the other month and my experience was great… in and out in 20 minutes including an eye test. Of course I spent a few minutes before arriving in preparation, but the experience was much better than say trying to return a defective item at a store or getting a discount on distressed merchandise.

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