Records and Bureaucracy

For humans to function as a group, records became critical, writes Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus. This makes sense – leaving things to memory led to disagreements. Over time though, the record didn’t just represent an aspect of reality (a loan, for example) – the record became the reality!

“If somebody repaid the loan but failed to “kill the document”, the debt was still owed. Conversely, if someone didn’t repay the loan but the document “died” is some other way… the debt was no more.”

This is exactly why during all revolutions, records are destroyed (That doesn’t work in a networked, digitized world though).

 

As societies advanced, the volume of records exploded. This created a new challenge: Retrieval. This need to organize information to make it easy to find led to the rise of the bureaucracy.

“Bureaucracy too tends to sacrifice truth for order. By inventing a new order and imposing it on the world, bureaucracy distorted people’s understanding of the world in unique ways.”

How? “Reducing the messiness of reality to a limited number of fixed drawers” was good from an ordering perspective but “it comes at the expense of truth”. Anyone working long enough in such a system soon develops a “distorted understanding of the world”. Which then leads bureaucrats to “pursue narrow goals irrespective of the wider impact of their actions”.

 

But sometimes bureaucracies work. A hospital, says Harari, is a bureaucracy with departments, hierarchies and protocols. While they have their own problems, they still manage to get people cured.

 

Regardless of whether they are good or bad, bureaucracies are very hard to understand. When your taxes are increased, you have no idea whether the money will go to sewage systems or hospitals or highways. It is this complexity that has then led to the rise of “experts in the arcane logic of documents”. This new layer, even without malice, further widened the gap between the rulers/administrators and the ruled/governed.