Administrative Bliss.

Perhaps amongst his numerous vocational desires for us, God calls people to be administrators. These people are given special gifts of vision, detail orientation, a listening and discerning ear, and a sense of the people for whom which they pursue their tasks.

Unfortunately for those so called, they’re out of luck. They will rarely (if ever) be allowed to fulfill their calling by the powers-that-be. Administrative positions are often filled by those people who quantitatively lack such good qualities. Throughout my academic career, every great effort of mine has been opposed by at least one of these beady-eyed detail hounds, seemingly bent on opposition for opposition’s sake. I’ve often wondered how any human being can behave in such a manner, and how supposedly intelligent people with numerous degrees to prove their intellectual ability still were capable of human indifference.

The Polish Poet Alexander Wat said that administrators “are a separate species, like in appearance to homo-sapiens, which have infiltrated our higher establishments.” (This is a loose quote, since my copy of the book is currently in another state.) Wat knew a thing or two about this “other species” – he spent years in Soviet Prisoner of War Camps, enduring trial after pointless trial. Reading his descriptions of these patently insane yet clearly by-the-book hearings, I cannot help but be reminded of the mentalities behind the administrative roadblocks I have encountered during my young career.

While we Poles tend to be rather sensitive and intolerant towards overly pedantic thinkers, I think there is a deeper truth to be found here. If you dig under the surface of history for a little while, it doesn’t take long to see that the engine that drove the greatest evils of the 20th Century – the Soviet and Nazi Regimes – was the administrative personality (or, species.) Visit the concentration camps, and you see mass-slaughter executed in neat little rows, completely by the book. Read transcripts of Soviet trials against political “dissidents,” and you see a chilling resemblance to the modern bureaucratic process. Anyone who has enjoyed long-term administrative oversight cannot help but see the chilling parallels. My conclusion? That the greatest horrors of the 20th century would not have been possible without the keen oversight of droves of picky and (as they are today) inhuman administrators.

Bureaucrats and administrators are not “people” who are merely overly right-brained – they are a species entirely devoid of a left brain. They are a specimen which burrows itself deep into a pile of rules and regulations, quoting them with ruthless efficiency while punishing those who would speak out of turn.

You may think me bitter, but I’ve already had my fill of these people, even at my young age. A wise teacher of mine once said that the aforementioned species was a type of “coward, lacking the backbone to make their own judgments, therefore hiding behind regulations whenever possible.”

If you doubt any of this, then just observe summer road construction or the Illinois tollway system. Can you honestly see a single line of sanity running through the mentality which governs such processes?

History has shown us the danger of hiding behind regulations. My attitude can be summed up by the following quote (whose source I have long forgotten.)

”Administrators are to be approached first with patience, and then with a bulldozer.”

Act now, for the sake of mankind.