Jerry Kirkpatrick

Bureaucracy buries the human spirit with paperwork

December 18, 2016

Role of Government

Bureaucrats have a fixation on numbers and rules. Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, describes this termination point: The emaciated bodies of the sick were thrown on two-wheeled carts which were drawn by prisoners for many miles, often through snowstorms, to the next camp. If one of the sick men had died before the cart left, he was thrown on anyway—the list had to be correct! The list was the only thing that mattered. A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive—that was unimportant; the life of a “number” was completely irrelevant."] The