There are two seemingly conflicting ideas of what it means to be privileged and powerful: on the one hand, it means that you no longer have to bother yourself about the day-to-day tedium of how to get your needs met; but on the other hand, it means that you’re in charge of all of this day-to-day tedium of how people get their needs met — bwa ha ha. You get to decide who owns what and how transactions will get transacted and who gets their cut.

Bureaucracy, according to [a:David Graeber|29101|David Graeber|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1253069199p2/29101.jpg], is part of the solution to this conflict. It allows the powerful and privileged to maintain their blissful ignorance of the tedium and the personalities of the hoi polloi they lord over, while giving them the illusion of knowledge so they can be confident in their mastery. Bureaucracy tediously collects data of usually stupid varieties and then summarizes them craftily so as to make it seem the epitome of knowledge — something that someone of privilege can digest in an afternoon and then feel as knowledgeable as though he had spent years among the people learning the lay of the land.

I can relate to this. I was once a low-level manager (more of a team leader) at a software company. Part of what I was supposed to do was valuable: I was supposed to motivate the employees on my team to work productively, and to feel good about what they were doing, and to help promote their career goals, and also to help coordinate their efforts. But most of what my new role entailed was wholly bureaucratic: supplying “metrics” to and writing weekly “progress reports” for people further up the ladder that they could use to justify their decisions (decisions I suspect that they would have made in just as slapdash a fashion without my input). I eventually found that my most useful role was to be an insulator between upper management and the people doing productive work — protecting the latter from having to think about the bombastic and erratic pronouncements of the former.

So, anyway, one of the purposes of bureaucracy is to organize ignorance in such a way that it allows powerful people to maintain their hard-earned stupidity while projecting an air of command and control. “Bureaucratic procedures,” writes Graeber, “which have an uncanny ability to make even the smartest people act like idiots, are not so much forms of stupidity in themselves, as they are ways of managing situations already stupid because of the effects of structural violence.”

By “structural violence” he doesn’t mean “metaphorical violence” as in “the ideology of racism is a form of structural violence because of how it demeans its victims” but he means “actual violence” as in “racism is perpetuated by the threat and use of police billy clubs on behalf of the dominant racial group, among other such things.” That violence is stupid is not an insult to violence but a description of it: it is the antithesis of understanding.

Graeber’s analysis of bureaucracy, both in government and in the more-or-less private sector, is also an analysis of how structural violence and bureaucracy support and justify each other, and also how the rest of us become complicit in structural violence and bureaucracy in pursuit of our own little slice of the stupid that we can luxuriate in from time to time.

My advice would be to skip the author’s introduction, which is kind of sloppy, and go directly to chapter one: “Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity” (also available on-line in an earlier form as “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor”).

Chapter two, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” is also available on-line. That leaves chapter three, “The Utopia of Rules, or Why We Really Love Bureaucracy After All,” for which you’ll actually have to get your hands on the book, and an Appendix, “On Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power” which is a meditation on the Batman movies and what sort of mythology they constitute.