Anonymity: A Revolt of the Masses?

In the past (here and here) I've complained about the anonymity of modern politics, and I suspected that many people shared this concern with me.

Well, now I know that I'm not not the only one. Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal thinks that the voting populations around the world are finally running out of patience for anonymous bureaucrats and irresponsible politicians putting our countries deeper and deeper in debt.

I'm not so sure that we're going to see a "revolt of the masses" any time soon, but hopefully the current financial crisis will inspire some people to reconsider the anonymity of modern politics.

Personal Authority (Part II)

Yesterday, I tried to show that even in our bureaucratic age, we still desire personal authority, whether we realize it or not. Today I want to add just one more observation in connection to a book I recently read.

In Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle, the story revolves around the protagonist (K) and his attempt to navigate a village’s labyrinthine bureaucracy so that he can go to work there as a surveyor. The village officials rarely go into the village, usually staying in the castle above the village. Each higher official has hordes of secretaries, many of whom seem to work at cross-purposes to each other. Many of their decisions seem completely arbitrary; letters are written, then stored away for years, and only sent years later after the whole affair has already been cleared up, causing more confusion than there originally was. Interestingly too, these bureaucrats are at times referred to as “the count’s officials,” but nowhere is the count given a name. And most disturbingly, many officials seem to have faces that don’t remain the same. This is literally authority without a face. And yet, the people of the village really seem to love these bureaucrats.

Kafka’s novel is obviously a nightmare about a bureaucracy taking over society, and it might come across to a reader skeptical of my thesis as just a clumsy exaggeration of the bad experience we’ve all had waiting on hold for an hour just to speak with an insurance representative or to an IRS agent. There is some truth in this objection, but there is a fact that most people don’t know: Kafka was a lawyer for an insurance company. Kafka knew the system from the inside. He dealt mostly with workplace accidents and improving safety guidelines for workers. He must have known the hardships—physical and spiritual—faced by a worker who finds himself unable to work and thrown upon the mercy of a bureaucracy. This sympathy with the ordinary individual must be what led K, in The Castle, to exclaim when he was most frustrated by the bureaucracy: “I feel that my very existence is threatened!”

All this is to say: Try telling an injured worker that the delay in his medical treatment is the system’s fault, and he won’t believe you. He needs a person, an authority, to blame (or to praise for resolving the problem). As much as we try to deny it and work our way around it, we can’t change the fact that authority needs to be personal.

Personal Authority (Part I)

Last Friday one of my law school classes took a field trip to the federal Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago to hear oral arguments. The second case of the morning involved a woman who was suing her health insurance company for breach of contract. The key issue was whether the insurance company had actually authorized the surgery. This may sound like an easy factual question to resolve—just look for a letter or some other record—but what made it difficult was the fact that even though the insurance policy seemed to state that it did not cover surgeries related to the woman’s condition, this policy was nearly impossible to decipher, a customer representative gave oral authorization for the surgery in question, and the insurance company had approved a surgery relating to the same condition just a year earlier.

The insurance company’s lawyer tried to make the case that this was an ordinary insurance policy; she even said to the three judges that this 50-page contract was probably just like their health insurance policy. This move backfired, however. All three judges looked rather uncomfortable at this comparison, and one of the judges even asked: “But, counsel, what about the ordinary person reading this contract? Would he know that this procedure wasn’t covered?” From then on, the judges’ questions seemed to indicate that they wanted to rule in the woman’s favor.

This made me wonder about two things. First, these three federal appellate judges appeared not to have read their own health insurance policies. They seemed uneasy—if I may extrapolate a bit from their reactions—with the realization that some of the most important aspects of our lives are governed by contracts and regulations which even the finest legal minds in the nation have a hard time understanding. Health insurance, taxes, Social Security, probate, etc., these are all areas of law whose details are nearly incomprehensible to a non-specialist.

Second, lurking behind all this was the question whether a mere customer service representative can speak for the insurance company and whether a patient should rely on that representative’s word. This is a completely natural question for a vast bureaucracy, such as an insurance company or a government agency. When an organization is made up of thousands of people, many of whom do little more than answer phones and look up answers to simple questions on their computers, it’s obvious that not everyone can speak with authority for the entire organization. But, who speaks with authority then?

These two considerations, I would submit, point to the conclusion that one of the main problems with modern bureaucracy lies in the anonymity of authority. Authority is nowhere to be seen. When we deal with authority, we naturally look for a person to exercise that authority. But that’s simply not how the world works today. Rather, today we try to compensate for this lack of personal authority by weaving an ever denser web of contractual and regulatory obligations to give the appearance of authority, but don’t really succeed.

This is not to say that we should breach all our contracts or disregard state and federal regulations. All this means is that in a world of impersonal bureaucracy, supported by impersonal law, we will remain deeply dissatisfied because of the lack of personal authority. Laws and contracts are not enough, and can often make us unhappy, but it’s nearly impossible to rebel against just a law. Rebels and revolutionaries understand this quite well. They don’t fight against abstractions. What did American colonists do to protest the Stamp Act? They went out and tar-and-feathered the first British official they could find. What did they do to protest the taxes on tea? They dumped crates of tea into Boston harbor. Even today, when members of one political party in Congress express their opposition to a particular bill, they denounce “Senator X’s bill” or “President Y’s proposal.” The ad hominem attack may be bad logic, but it’s indispensable to the way people think. Authority needs to be personal.

Part II tomorrow...