Rule by decree keeps subjects ignorant of what governs them

Evidence

The administrator considers the law to be powerless because it is by definition separated from its application. The decree, on the other hand, does not exist at all except if and when it is applied; it needs no justification except applicability. It is true that decrees are used by all governments in times of emergency, but then the emergency itself is a clear justification and automatic limitation. In governments by bureaucracy decrees appear in their naked purity as though they were no longer issued by powerful men, but were the incarnation of power itself and the administrator only its accidental agent. There are no general principles which simple reason can understand behind the decree, but ever-changing circumstances which only an expert can know in detail. People ruled by decree never know what rules them because of the impossibility of understanding decrees in themselves and the carefully organized ignorance of specific circumstances and their practical significance in which all administrators keep their subjects. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 620

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism that decrees exist only in application and keep subjects in organized ignorance connects to Weberian bureaucracy and to readings on bureaucratic rationality enabling mass exclusion. — connects to: Poor Americans remain largely ignorant of their legal rights — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 1061