Bureaucracy is a loaded dice that moves beyond its initiators’ intended thresholds.

Evidence

Moreover, contrary to widespread opinion, bureaucracy is not merely a tool, which can be used with equal facility at one time for cruel and morally contemptible, at another for deeply humane purposes. Even if it does move in any direction in which it is pushed, bureaucracy is more like a loaded dice. It has a logic and a momentum of its own. It renders some solutions more, and other solutions less, probable. Given an initial push (being confronted with a purpose), it will – like the brooms of the sorcerer’s apprentice – easily move beyond all thresholds at which many of those who gave it the push would have stopped, were they still in control of the process they triggered. Bureaucracy is programmed to seek the optimal solution. It is programmed to measure the optimum in such terms as would not distinguish between one human object and another, or between human and inhuman objects. What matters is the efficiency and lowering of costs of their processing. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 303

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘loaded dice’ and ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ images are transferable metaphors for how administrative systems exceed their designers’ control.
• XREF: Connects to biopolitics and the notion that administrative rationality has its own momentum — carries forward into necropolitics readings. — connects to: Bureaucratic means-ends inversion sustained mass murder beyond its original purpose — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 308

Related

• Bureaucratic means-ends inversion sustained mass murder beyond its original purpose (similarity 0.81)
• Bureaucracy’s essence is dissociating means from moral evaluation of ends (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Bureaucratic means-ends inversion sustained mass murder beyond its original purpose #exemplifies (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 308