I’m disgusted with the ‘efficiency’ of most modern bureaucracies. The more efficient and centralized they are, the more they fail to deliver to the local. Administration should be geared to back up the frontline, not dictate to them.
efficiency
Efficiency is actually about making a system run smoothly, which usually means it isn’t people-centred. The inevitable result is a disenfranchised population.
Efficiency is also about running to its optimum, most cost effective way. Nowadays this makes it machine-like and doesn’t cater for the unexpected. This is why systems so easily overload today. The ‘efficient’ is actually inefficient.
ideology
One major problem here is that a bureaucracy caters for an ideology alone. It may not seem to be the case, but a totalitarian system is not total, and never has been. If it was, a totalitarian system could not operate at all. As long as you don’t question the ideology, dictators usually leave you alone.
Today’s bureaucracies are edging towards totalitarianism as they are geared purely for globalised consumerism. Think different and you are so easily marginalized.
single system
Such totalitarianism will always appear when the bureaucracy is geared to a single system, for whilst such a system needs a fanatical centre, it grows and survives because of the little people in bureaucracies. They naturally slide into propping up the system.
time to serve
This is why a totalitarian system can take over a country so easily.
If you think it isn’t happening today, just note the speed and totality of the political correctness brigade, trashing everything traditional, just as globalised consumerism requires. A true bureaucracy should always be as small as possible, non-ideological, and there to serve the people through a myriad of organizations of every type. But instead, today’s bureaucracies have perfected subtle totalitarianism with the onward march of little dictators in jack-slippers.