Yes, Minister
I’m watching “Yes, Minister”, a British comedy from the 1980s, where a competent politician becomes an incompetent cabinet minister in the British government. The permanent secretary of his department is an experienced civil servant, devoted to the bureaucracy. He’s not actually trying to make things difficult for the minister, but it’s to his advantage to keep the minister in the dark, like a mushroom, and feed him half-facts; let the minister be the public face of the department and take the heat, while the permanent secretary leads from the rear, with all the real power. Part of what attracts me to this comedy is the tremendously large vocabulary used, mainly to obfuscate the truth, misdirect and delay any real movement. It’s hilarious and painful, because it’s true. Government really does work like that: you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. There are rules and occasionally policy actually changes, but inertia is the main driver. Only after the society has moved on will the bureaucracy take any real notice of changes.
The minister has a private secretary as well, a younger man, newer to civil service. The permanent secretary, in showing the private secretary how to work the system, how to protect the bureaucracy, is rotting the private secretary’s morals, as we watch and laugh.
In my country, the United States of America, I opposed Obamacare because I didn’t trust the government to make positive changes. Now that I’m in its clutches, that is, I’m applying for healthcare in the marketplace set up by the Obamacare program, I’m glad it’s there… sort of. I feel like a monkey in a trap, only it’s not my hand being held captive; it’s my backache and my cholesterol numbers. It’s an enormous bureaucracy added on top of what was already there, in an effort to provide us with healthcare responsibly. Like all bureaucracies, it both serves best and hurts most the people serving inside it.
One of the side effects of the Covid 19 pandemic was an influx of people talking online. Some spoke up to entertain, some to educate, some to earn income in any way they could while stuck at home. Many of them talked quite plainly about what they knew: the healthcare system, its ins and outs, where it works and where it fails miserably. Giving people no option but to stay home, gave us time to think. Access to the internet gave us information and community, like-minded people to commiserate with.
I see the web of bureaucracy more clearly now. There’s no escaping it, because we build it and support it. Every rule is there because someone made a mistake. Regulations are there to prevent more people from being hurt. You think physical hurts, and yes, regulations are there for that: fire codes and the like. But regulations are also there to prevent competition. Established businesses want to limit innovations from new businesses that might hurt them.
I understand better now why freedom must be replenished periodically by blood. Our society is taller, wider, more complex, a superstructure of wealth and power over an increasingly rotten core. The structures that should be helping, are failing. Bureaucracy alone cannot save a bankrupt society. The poor, the sick, widows and orphans, and increasingly hard working men with skills, are falling out of the windows, becoming homeless, relying on government assistance, because the regulations protect those who have, at the expense of the rest of us. The only real solution is to cut it all down and start over—
but with God and with trust in each other; we work together to reassemble society, or we will fall apart.
