Bureaucrat: Man or Machine?

Man has dignity and this dignity deserves respect.

To treat someone as a means denies this respect and is evil: people should be treated as ends.

A human being is not a piece of equipment, yet the good bureaucrat is nothing more than that.

Politicians write a line in a bill among some 4,000 pages which describes the total functions of one person over their entire professional lifetime.

In government, people become mere means to reach policy goals.

Thus is the conflict for the vast majority of bureaucrats:

• to carry out the letter of the law and do their job well while becoming a replaceable automaton,
• or to have individuality and damage their part of the system.

Truly, a man cannot serve two masters.

The crisis of this choice is the reason for the higher rate of depression among public employees around the developed world.

(Empirical: In France and the Low Countries, suicide rates among public employees is much higher than the private sector (France's total population suicide rate is 14.7% while among public employees it is 15.3%). In Canada, depression and mental health issues account for 45% of disability claims in the government. In Japan, a country with (with 1/3 the US's population) 90-100 suicides PER DAY, news reports are plagued with pressured government officials killing themselves. In the US, however, the formula is different: our government officials (according to the DHHS) are more depressed than the general population, but kill themselves at about the same rate.)

It is both bad economic policy and morally wrong to put an intelligent, responsible person in a situation where doing a good job and having personhood are incompatible.

Government employees suffer from the delusion of efficacy and individuality supported by high wages, public unions, and encouragement from their co-workers: they will oppose cuts.

No matter their conditions, however, who someone is is more important than what they have.

We have it in our power to literally rescue them from a system which denies their rightful dignity.

It is the same kind of tough love we practice with drug addicts.

Cuts, like rehab, will not be liked by bureaucrats, but must be done both for their moral benefit and for the good of our civilization.