gat

servant... the lawyer...."
Quill-Driving Babus
A servant to the imperial virus! Here is a whole new take on what I was hired to do with my adult
life. It helps to explain why I encountered such violent reactions from administrators as I
innocently deviated further and further from my function in an effort to be useful to kids. While
straining to find ways to be helpful, I constantly ran afoul of this hidden directive forced schooling
was created to serve, about which I had previously not the tiniest clue except that gleaned
through intuition.
Professional associations of proles expand or contract according to the schedule of the political
state for absorbing fringe groups and outsiders for retraining in new habits and attitudes. If a great
social project is underway, bureaucracy grows. When no compelling agenda is afoot it shrinks. As
populations learn to discipline themselves, the need for expensive professional assistance to do it
for them diminishes.
For instance, if the managerial promise of computer workstations is realized—hooking children
into automatized learning systems which have been centrally engineered—then great numbers of
schoolteachers and school administrators who were hired for a computerless moment now passed
will melt away like ice in spring to be reabsorbed into the leveled and featureless common
proletariat. My guess is that this process is already well underway. Low-level school
administrators are a class facing imminent extinction if I read entrails correctly.
Indeed, the bureaucratic giantism we have endured since the end of WWII has clearly lost
momentum. Whether or not we should consider that a cause for celebration is dubious. A
retreating bureaucracy is a sign the dominant minority considers the proletariat tamed, its own
danger past; the bureaucratic buffer becomes superfluous. It marks a time when people can be
trusted to control themselves. Woe to us all if that is so.
There is a catch, however, to the wonderful elasticity of bureaucracy. It is found in the degree of
violent backlash occasioned by bureaucratic shrinkage, or downsizing as it has come to be known.
This dangerous reaction Toynbee refers to as "the bitterness of the intelligentsia."
Indeed, grounds for bitterness are formed in the very scheme for training civil servants. They
surrender any prospect of developing full humanity in order to remain employed. Private
judgment, for example, is an inevitable early casualty, personal courage is totally out of order.
Bureaucrats often regard themselves privately as less than whole men and women, not totally
insensitive to the devil’s bargain aspect in what they do. For Toynbee:
This liaison-class suffers from the congenital unhappiness of the hybrid who is
an outcast from both the families that have combined to beget him. An
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