Paper Power: How Paper Learned to Rule People
Bureaucracy is a child that never grows up.
Always needs a guardian.
A caretaker.
Someone to hold its hand at every crossing.
Standing alone would mean proving its worth,
the one thing it can’t risk.
The word itself tells the story:
Bureaucracy from bureau (desk)
Desk rule.
Paper power.
Authority behind forms,
responsibility buried beneath them.
Work expands to fill the time.
In bureaucracies, it multiplies
like mold.
One signature becomes two.
One request takes three forms.
Deviation? Meeting.
Meeting? Minutes.
Minutes? More meetings.
Each illusion keeps someone employed.
When all else fails, they summon “compliance.”
“Quality management.”
Paper armor.
The final trick:
fight bureaucracy with more bureaucracy.
Feed the parasite. Call it reform.
Efficiency is treason.
If things ran smoothly, half the staff would vanish.
Half the budgets collapse.
Now imagine the opposite:
“What’s the goal? What’s the problem? How do we fix it?”
Act.
No reports. No gloves. No theater.
Alive.
Human.
But you rarely build a career in government or big organizations on results
only on rituals.
Predictability is the real currency.
Solve problems too fast and you’re expendable.
So they keep the wheel spinning,
the same forms, the same meetings,
the same polite decay.
And government?
It’s not a service.
It’s a padded ring
where fighters pull their punches.
A circus of self-importance.
No trapeze. No danger. No art.
Just clowns repeating old jokes,
acrobats tightening ropes they’ll never climb.
And we, the taxpayers,
still buying tickets
to a show
that never begins,
and never ends.