There are in this life a great many things affecting you which you can’t change. You might try, but if your attempts affect too much other people, it will simply create more and bigger problems. Do I need to raise the issue of externalizing the costs of our own personal comfort? If you feel it’s okay to impose on others, taking away what little comfort they have for the sake of increasing your own, you deserve to die right now. That’s not my judgment, but God’s; argue with Him.
Indeed, most of the world does argue with God, particularly about what constitutes reality. The world is fallen, people sin, even when they don’t really want to, and life at times just stinks. Suck it up. Upon being vested with some authority, if you suddenly begin to take yourself and your position so seriously you forget about the principle of externalizing costs of your comfort and convenience, you deserve to die even more than those without authority.
So it is bureaucrats and other government figures sin on a huge scale. Everybody wants to be left alone, and I can fully appreciate the Zero Aggression Principle. The world needs a really big dose of that. However, it also needs a dose of recognition some intrusions are not the result of aggression, and some aggressions aren’t worthy of response. When bureaucrats think of being left alone, they think in terms of not having to deal with anything which disturbs their comfort. So while their sole employment is wrapped up in handling the mass of variegated humans, they become grouchy because humans have this confounded habit of varying. Such bureaucrats want the citizenry to show up, walk through their bureaucratic process, then go away — all uniform, all simple, no surprises. It’s “leave me alone” blown completely out of proportion.
I first became conscious of this when I was working as a substitute teacher in public schools. I overheard a discussion about teenage sexual proclivities and how the school system really needed to get a handle on it. I groaned inwardly, knowing I was going to be forced to say something which would guarantee I’d never get to work in that school again. At some point, I said, “Yes, these things affect what we face in the classroom, and what administrators face, as well. However, not everything which affects us is our business. We just have to suck it up.” I’m sure you can imagine how that goes over in the socialist public education environment.
Nor would it have done any good to explain how the fundamental philosophy of most of what we were doing as teachers, the very structure of everything going on inside that building, was a major part of what caused whatever problems might arise from teenage sexual escapades. Whole books address this better than I could here. But there is a fully artificial culture kids create in that pressure cooker because socialist education philosophy rejects the notion of passing on our culture, which includes our morals. In the act of saying all morals are relative, you cannot avoid taking a moral position. That moral position demands an intervention which advances the idea those who work in public schools ought to be able to dictate how the world should think and act.
When it first happened, I wondered why the college professors who taught the classes I took while working on my teaching certificate kept trying to persuade me to do something besides teaching. Their arguments began with variations of noting my grades were too high for me to go into teaching in public school. Silly me for thinking the teaching profession needed teachers who knew their subject matter well. The bulk of full time teachers were first and foremost political activists of one kind or another, except for those who were simply trying to find a hiding place from real work.
That’s what I ran into with every job I had where the government paid my wages. The only people who prospered in the system were those who could hardly succeed elsewhere. These are the folks who cannot comprehend carrying their share of the load with the rest of the world. They had some authority, and darned if they weren’t going to make the most of it for their personal benefit.
And bureaucrats wonder why citizens hate them.
