Bureaucratic Insanity

Book excerpt: In contemporary America, schoolchildren can be charged with battery for throwing a piece of candy at a friend or threatened with expulsion for making a "gun" gesture with their index finger. They can also be imprisoned for cutting class and placed in solitary confinement or made to share prison cells with hardened adult criminals. In the workplace, our jobs are more monotonous, repetitious and rule-ridden and less secure than ever before. We are made to answer to uncaring and even sadistic bosses, teachers and police, all of whom care much more about following rules than about helping people. Every year federal and state legislatures and bureaucracies pump out thousands of pages of new laws and regulations-enough to make every American into an accidental criminal. By and large, America's bureaucracies are plumbing the depths of mass insanity. In Bureaucratic Insanity, journalist and social critic Sean Kerrigan documents this disturbing trend toward absolutist and authoritarian behavior by dissecting the psychology of obsessive, rule-focused bureaucrats. He traces the development of bureaucracy from its origins in the early industrial revolution to the modern information age. He also examines ways of avoiding being victimized by bureaucracy gone mad.