Bureaucratic power shifts guilt from wrongdoer to victim

Evidence

63 See especially the magnificent story in The Castle (1930) of the Barnabases, which reads like a weird travesty of a piece of Russian literature. The family is living under a curse, treated as lepers till they feel themselves such, merely because one of their pretty daughters once dared to reject the indecent advances of an important official. The plain villagers, controlled to the last detail by a bureaucracy, and slaves even in their thoughts to the whims of their all-powerful officials, had long since come to realize that to be in the right or to be in the wrong was for them a matter of pure “fate” which they could not alter. It is not, as K. naively assumes, the sender of an obscene letter who is exposed, but the recipient who becomes branded and tainted. This is what the villagers mean when they speak of their “fate.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2442

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the toolkit concepts of how modern bureaucratic rationality enables mass exclusion and the construction of the ‘Other’ — victim-blaming and tainting as mechanisms of exclusion. — connects to: Ruling powers claiming victimhood is a hallmark of authoritarianism — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 936; The source trumping content of information can shift national guilt — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 2094; Bureaucratic contact stigmatizes even people officially cleared or acquitted — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 528 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Defines ‘fate’ under bureaucracy as the arbitrary conviction that right and wrong are unalterable matters the individual cannot influence.