scared

What’s the scariest thing in the world? Aliens? Vampires? Zombies? Nuclear war? Terrorism? Most of these aren‘t real but, even the real things we are afraid of don’t have nearly the destructive power of the scariest thing in the world. The thing that keeps me up at night is bureaucratic do-gooders. These are the fastidious, bespectacled, beetle-people who are satisfied when every i is dotted and every t crossed. Without conscience, they follow the law and obey orders, content to allow others to suffer the consequences. They didn’t make the decisions and they won’t carry out the final acts. They just make sure that the paperwork is in order. If the paperwork calls for shipping food to a famine stricken area it had better be filled out correctly or that shipment isn’t going anywhere. If a shipment of arms is headed for a genocidal dictator, so what? All the beetle-man cares about is that block 27b is properly countersigned. It was beetle-men who organized the holocaust. Six million efficient solutions without ever getting their hands dirty.

Our world today has a surfeit of this species. In corporations and governments large and small they are just doing their job filing paperwork. They go home at the end of each day to watch football or go to church after having enabled the abrogation of rights, environmental rapine, and worse. All they care about is that they followed the rules and no consequence will come back to haunt them.

The worst part is that they truly believe that what they do is beneficial. After all, they bring order to chaos, they uphold the law, and they are the wall between civilization and anarchy. They believe in stability and the primacy of the state. Rights, truth, and justice are what the state says they are and that suffices for the beetle-man. When the apocalypse comes they will produce the paperwork that authorized it.

Our national boogie-man du-jour is terrorism. The message that Islamic fundamentalists are out to get us is drummed into us day and night. Frankly, I am more afraid of the IRS than Bin Laden. The Taliban may kill some but the central bankers rob hundreds of millions every day. We fear what affects us little and are lulled by the vampires of state. The balding accountant haunts my dreams in ways Jihadists never could.

The beetle-men have a demonstrated capacity for executing great evil with callous banality but the press of their numbers is really felt in the trivial. There is no lemonade stand they won’t shut down, no absurd code enforcement they won’t pursue. They are the high-handed masters of the miniscule who will demand to see papers allowing you to breathe while smiling in self-satisfied, self-righteous smugness.

They are quislings and boot-lickers. They close their ears to the pleas of the oppressed and jump at the chance to report on their neighbors. They spend tax money like water but only give money for the tax deductions. They are the world’s most pervasive and pernicious evil.