FEMA: A Warning on the Bureaucratic Mind

Distant officials are heartless officials

The fact that FEMA and fire authorities have tried to prevent people from rescuing others is not just an indictment of the individuals doing that. It’s not even just an indictment of FEMA and those paricular fire departments.

It’s not even just an indictment of the Biden administration.

It shows us two thing that happen in a society where people defer authority to the State on nearly everything.

First, many people themselves become helpless.

Second, the agents of the State become heartless.

The more the State takes sole responsibility for compassion, protection and rescue, the more it becomes a bureaucratic task the agents of the State own.

Their individual morality doesn’t increase in these jobs-it declines. Because it’s just a job.

And the bureaucratic mindset intrudes. Eventually, these people are more interested in protecting their turf than in the reason the job exists in the first place.

Protecting the fact that this is ‘the governments business’ becomes more important than actually saving people.

It begins sensibly enough. There are reasons why a cordon is established around an emergency. There are times where it makes sense to ‘leave it to the experts’. But institutions strip people of individual accountability and judgement.

Preventing someone making the situation worse becomes a hidebound rule that unimaginative people enforce regardless of the circumstances. And then they prevent people helping when those people really can offer necessary help. They then care more about the mere status of being, like them, from the government.

Deferral of all responsibility to the State creates helpless citizens and heartless officials. And this becomes true whether or not the administration at the top of it are malign and psychopathic-it just happens more when that’s the case.

The bureaucratic mind and the psychopathic mind are closely linked. Their priorities are not human priorities. The further a bureaucratic base of power is from the people, the more they begin to behave like psychopaths. Federal officials are more likely to be jobsworths without care for a specific community than non federal ones.

With any institution designed to help, you have to make it as local as possible, and you have to guard against the institutional, bureaucratic mentality. You have to install an ethos not of ‘this is our job’ but one of ‘this is our life’. Not of ‘I’m important because I have this badge’ but ‘I’m here to do what’s right’. People should have the individual capacity to judge an action is plain immoral-like trying to prevent a helicopter pilot from rescuing an elderly couple. That individual awareness should supersede (when it’s this obvious) the learned institutional defence of ‘this is our job’ and ‘let the experts handle this’.

Sometimes the experts are the worst people around, precisely because it’s just their job.

9/11 showed US rescue services at their very best. Those were local firefighters who cared about the place they were in. They were invested in those people and that city. It was all very real to them. FEMA in North Carolina have shown the system at its very worst, with jobsworths protecting their turf, with money spent by the government elsewhere, with the bureaucratic mind in charge and not really giving a shit about the people who need rescue. Because they aren’t their people. They are just MAGA voting ‘hillbillies’ sitting on mineral resources the administration cares more about.

That difference shows. But it would show to some extent by the nature of bureaucracies and the nature of deferring responsibility to the State, even without the administration being insane.