i have note from 2019 titled ‘what is government and how do we thrive despite it’, and i want to get it out of my notes.
This is a post about me trying to figure out what government really is, what power really is, and how to live in a world where these things are real forces of nature that I have to deal with, skirt around, avoid offending – while still being a genuine, full version of myself. I want to be able to see more clearly. I also think this will inform what I write. The context– I wanted to think about this because… general elections were coming up, and I was embedded in a local context….
Modern life predominantly means living in cities. Modern cities are run by governments. If we want to understand our lives, then, it makes sense to learn about government. I should read Seeing Like A State.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/10-lessons-from-real-life-revolutions-that-fictional-dy-1634087647
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/021816/westeros-economy-financial-faq-got-fans.asp it’s about the economy, stupid
rwandan massacre lady https://medium.com/matter/everything-is-yours-everything-is-not-yours-d6f66bd9c6f9#.1b8dlh42y
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Bureaucracy. It’s such a wonderful word. It was coined by a French economist, first two names “Jacques Claude” (Marie Vincent de Gournay), and he meant it to be satirical. He was quoted as describing an illness known as ‘bureaumania’, and ‘bureaucracy’ was meant to be a crazy form of government – government by desks, from desks.
Somehow the term became neutral over time. Bureaucrat can be a compliment– there’s this mental picture of Sumerian scribes, Chinese scholars, Roman consuls (though come to think of it my mental image of Roman bureaucrats is skewed negative– I imagine them corrupt, shady. I suppose this has to do with the fact that the Roman empire ultimately failed.)
I initially began on this train of thought when looking for an antonym to ‘brutish’. I was writing a bit about modern civilization, and I found myself thinking that “bureaucratic” was the right one. Life used to be brutish (violent, short) and now it’s bureaucratic (desk-bound, slow, long).
Can we do better? What does the future of bureaucracy look like? How can we have the best of both worlds?
Do I care about digging deeper into the history or nature of bureaucracy? I suppose it would be interesting to know how exactly all this stuff happened. it began with… sumerians, in mesopotamia. irrigation led to surplus, which had to be managed and distributed.
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