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Post by Dr. Nemmers on Jul 28, 2024 23:24:12 GMT
The book I'm planning to write after this one is going to be about absurdity and bureaucracy.... there are a number of books, from Catch 22 to All of the Names to The Trial to Gravity's Rainbow to The Pale King, and they all have so much red tape and bureaucracy and absurd outcomes and it's great.
Citizen 13660 also has a lot of bureaucracy, but there doesn't seem to be anything particularly absurd about it. It seems that every single step of Okubo's journey is governed by a board or a directive or an order or a memorandum. They seem to be constantly negotiating or petitioning to various authorities for any shred of ability to do anything. The induction and the supervised release are subject to bureaucracy. What they can grow and eat; where they can go; what they can read; what they wear and what their newspaper can print...
How does bureaucracy relate to existentialism?
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Post by connorswauger on Jul 29, 2024 2:35:23 GMT
Well I would think that just as the future is vastly unknown, bureaucracy is also totally random sometimes. I feel like we try so hard to put faith in government officials but sometimes decisions can be made that drastically alter someone’s life. Like I’m sure Japanese Americans weren’t planning to be put into internment camps with every aspect of their lives planned out from then on. I think it has to do with free will and how sometimes we are subject to a situation that is out of our control.
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Post by garrison on Jul 30, 2024 16:13:56 GMT
Beaurocracy is somewhat a leap of faith for the masses. To live under a beaurocracy is pretty much blind faith that the decisions made will be what's best for the people. Sadly, I think a lot of that blind faith has been spit back into the masses faces. In that way, I think a beaurocracy can certainly be absurd.
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Post by mjunious on Jul 31, 2024 1:08:20 GMT
I think that bureaucracy can lead to a need for rebellion. It also feels a bit Sisyphean in that it never seems to end: the lines, the memos, etc. These stories differ in that compared to some of the other examples (The Trial and Gravity's Rainbow specifically) the bureaucracy in Citizen 13660 does not feel as caricaturized and it also seems to lead somewhere. This might be because Citizen 13660 is a reflection on a specific event whereas the others are commentary on institutions (war and the legal system)?
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Post by Dr. Nemmers on Jul 31, 2024 3:19:57 GMT
Yeah, and jumping off this, totalitarian governments (communist, socialist, and otherwise) are pretty much top-down control: there's all sorts of bureaus and ministries and departments and whatnots. Much of existentialism developed in direct response to these governments (i. e. Dostoevsky (sp?), Kafka, and Camus). These really stress the loneliness and fundamental inadequacy of the human (any human) to deal with modern systems of organization and government.
Agree with you, Mitchell, that the Sisyphean aspects are profound. I keep thinking of the mass standardization in these camps, how all the buildings looked alike, how everyone wore the same clothes, how everyone was just given a number instead of a name.
Navigating the bureaucracy was like the most heroic and dangerous thing these people could do... (if that isn't a sad portrait of what it's like to be the "modern man"...)
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