Escaping a System That Traps You in Bureaucracy | The Daily Bell
Posted by M. C. on May 17, 2021
I mean, we are supposed to believe that requiring an ID to vote is racist, because apparently it is really difficult for racial minorities to acquire an ID.
But having to comply with 1,000 steps to start a business– which aren’t even given to you in a nice checklist– isn’t that disenfranchising the poorest people?
Yes, it is.
By Joe Jarvis
The Trial, by Franz Kafka takes the reader on a trippy, Tim Burton style trek through the bureaucratic nightmare of court proceedings.
The accused protagonist K never even learns what he is accused of. Many of the lower judges and investigators have no idea either.
K even feels sympathy for some of these low level bureaucrats, who he accidentally gets in trouble by complaining about their corruption. When K witnesses the guards who first arrested him being punished, he says he doesn’t “even consider them guilty; it’s the organization that’s guilty, it’s the high officials who are guilty.”
At first K brushes off the trial. He says he is only even attending the hearings to humor the court. But by engaging with them, he realizes that “he had suffered defeat only because he had sought to do battle. If he stayed home and led his normal life he was infinitely superior to any of these people…”
As an intelligent, successful young banker, K is sure he will be able to clear his name, and in the process even set the court system straight. He gives a number of judges a piece of his mind, telling them what he thinks of their whole kangaroo court.
This, he later finds, is a mistake. As another character explains, “almost every defendant, even the most simple-minded among them, starts thinking up suggestions for improvement from the moment the trial starts, and in doing so often wastes time and energy which would be better spent in other ways.”
The trial drags on, with K never really knowing when he will be called to another hearing, or visited at his home or office by officials. Slowly he is drawn into the process and can think of little else.
Worry over the case consumes him. K can no longer do his job properly, or think of anything but preparing a defense. He must prove his innocence, without even knowing what he is allegedly guilty of.
At one point he meets a businessman who has been on trial for five years. The businessman tells K that his business has suffered immensely, “not only from a withdrawal of funds, but even more from the withdrawal of my energy. If you’re trying to work on your trial, you have little time for anything else.”
Desperately K searches for ways to get away from the system– “not how to influence the trial, but how to break out of it, how to get around it, how to live outside the trial. Surely that possibility existed…”
And from personal experience, I know its common to go through these stages of frustration when confronted with the Kafka-esque bureaucracy.
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