At the heart of our society, an elusive creature reigns: bureaucracy. A dense and bewildering kingdom of paper that ensnares us in its labyrinthine clutches.
Administration has always been a respected and feared institution for its complexity. Lately, however, it seems to have surpassed all bounds of absurdity. Ordinary citizens are faced with endless procedures, hooks of paperwork, and officials who seem lost in their own system.
Mrs. Durand, a resident of Nice, spent three months trying to obtain a copy of her birth certificate. “I was asked to fill out form ZJ-413, which doesn’t exist, so that I could then request form KY-200, which actually only exists online, but requires the QR-Code from form ZJ-413,” she complains. “And when I tried to explain this vicious circle, I was told that I had to file a complaint using form… ZJ-413.”
Stories of this kind are common. People spend hours searching for non-existent forms, speaking to officials who are not trained to help, and are ultimately sent back to their starting point, like mice in a bureaucratic hamster wheel.
“It’s Kafka meeting the absurdity of Monty Python,” says Professor Lutens, a philosopher and analyst of our contemporary society. “The problem is that bureaucracy has created its own reality, a reality in which rules and procedures are more important than helping people.”
Faced with this Kafkaesque administrative chaos, one might well wonder if administration has not become its own monster, devouring paper and man-hours while leaving the citizen helpless in the face of a labyrinth of complexity that he struggles to understand, let alone navigate.
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