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“Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Contrary to what Jean-Paul Sartre said about hell being other people, it is bureaucracy that is hell.
Bureaucracy, Hannah Arendt suggested, was the most despotic and cruel form of domination. And the more public life is bureaucratised, the greater will be the attraction for violence because in a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left to argue with.
Bureaucracy, which comes from the French word ‘bureau,’ meaning ‘desk’ or ‘office,’ and the Greek word ‘kratos’ which means ‘rule’ or ‘political power,’ usually refers to the nonelected persons employed by a state to oversee policies and programmes, from welfare to intelligence gathering.
While as an administrative system it has existed for millennia, it is only in the last centuries that it has increased its grip on our everyday lives. Bureaucracy is also what makes mass control and extermination of people not only possible, but efficient.
Arendt’s critiques of bureaucracy are found throughout her writings, yet it is often overlooked as a fundamental enabler of totalitarianism and violence, both in history and in today's discourse.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she writes that bureaucracy, together with race, are two tools of empire, while both emerged independently of each other, they are essential elements for imperialist rule and modern totalitarianism.
Bureaucracy is the rule by experts, by offices, by reports over the inferiors. The bureaucrats see everyone as inferior, and they can choose which rules to apply; they degrade men, she says. In On Violence, she writes: “[b]ureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she emphasised how the Holocaust was made possible because of bureaucracy, where nobody was responsible, except the system. The thoughtless bureaucrat: the banality of evil.
While bureaucracy does not necessarily lead to mass murder, it is what makes it possible. Worryingly, many of us have become so obedient that we often follow mindless rules without ever questioning them.
In The Utopia of Rules, anthropologist David Graeber says there has been a total bureaucratisation of our daily lives. We are endlessly filling out forms, for everything, forms are getting longer and they make everyone stupid.
Bureaucracy evaluates everything we do. And this is felt most cruelly by the poor who are constantly monitored by “armies of moralistic box-tickers” watching their every move and making them feel bad about themselves.
This imposition of impersonal rules and regulations, Graeber says, can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of violence. Bureaucracy is therefore violence, he insists, and state violence is meted out by a bureaucratic system.
The police are bureaucrats with weapons. Rather than keeping people safe, most of their time is spent enforcing rules, no matter how stupid these are. And what police mostly do is bring the threat of force (and force, increasingly) to bear on situations that would otherwise not need it.
The recent rapid development of new technologies made us believe our lives would be simpler and less bureaucratic. While it may have reduced paperwork (in some countries), the actual bureaucracy has not reduced, it has just become less visible, all the while becoming more efficient, more connected, more insidious, more dangerous.
Bureaucratic tools, like identity cards, that were used by colonial powers, from South Africa to Rwanda, were about separation, Achille Mbembe explains in Necropolitics, separating the bodies of the coloniser from the natives. With new technologies, this kind of control has been taken to a whole other level. Palestinians, for example, are the most surveilled people on the planet; Palestine has become a bureaucratic laboratory. And Israel is enthusiastically selling its tools and techniques to states around the world.
These tools are being deployed in our own countries, especially for those people the state considers undesirable (it could be anyone, and it can change at any moment). Mbembe calls this ‘nanoracism,’ where the state implements more and more controls from borders to our streets, to the digital space, making it clear who is welcome and who is not. It practices segregation and discrimination in the full light of day, all the while waxing lyrical about rights and citizenship.
This is the society of control. Everything and everyone must be constantly evaluated, credentialised, tabulated, counted, audited. If it cannot be quantified, it is not real. When something goes wrong, we create new rules. We do it in our organisations, our movements, to each other and to ourselves. This makes us ill prepared for what comes next.
If we want to understand and practice freedom, we have to de-bureaucratise our lives, our relationships, ourselves. When we speak about solidarity or liberation, this has to include people’s liberation from bureaucracy, we each have a responsibility to do this work. A liberated world is a post-bureaucracy world. For as Kafka warned: “Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes.
Works by Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Violence, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, and ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,’
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, David Graeber.
Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe.
The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, Antony Loewenstein.
‘Automated Apartheid: How Palestinians Became the World’s Most Surveilled People,’ UntoldMag, Ethan Rooney, 10 October 2025. Read here.
‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ Gilles Deleuze. Read here.
Psychopolitics, Byung-Chul Han.
The Trial and The Castle, Frantz Kafka.
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Stanislaw Lem.
English, August: An Indian Story, Upamanyu Chatterjee.
Palace of Dreams, Ismail Kadare.
All the Names, José Saramago.
The Pale King, David Foster Wallace (unfinished).
“To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” — E.E. Cummings
“Diego had never seen the sea. His father took him to discover it. . . . And so immense was the sea and its sparkle that the child was struck dumb by the beauty of it. And when he finally managed to speak, trembling, stuttering, he asked his father: “Help me to see!””— Eduardo Galeano, The Function of Art I
"Politics in dark times such as those in which we live, cannot proceed without a counter imaginary: a passionate vision that rivals and defeats the moralized sadism of fascist passions and their phantasmatic landscape." — Judith Butler
“It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.” — Franz Kafka
“I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.” — Albert Camus
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” — Anais Nin
