The Hero as Flexible Bureaucrat

against efficiency and accountability

In his beautiful proem On Heroes and Hero-Worship, Carlyle describes how the figure of the Hero has transformed over history. The Hero begins as Divinity (e.g. Odin), becomes the Prophet (e.g. Mohammad), then the Poet (e.g. Shakespeare), then the Priest (e.g. Luther), then the Man of Letters (e.g. Voltaire, Jefferson), then the Dictator (e.g. Napoleon). In the first half of the 20th century, I would guess that the Hero was best incarnated by the Physicist.

Who is the Hero now? In the circles I travel, the most common answer is probably the tech company Founder. But I’ve been mulling over a much stranger answer: the modern hero is a bureaucrat who fudges the papers in service of a human interest. A bureaucrat who is… not corrupt, exactly… but maybe a little bit flexible.

---

I remember a debate with my brother when I was teenager. He’s twelve years older, and spent his formative years in Russia, whereas I moved to Canada when I was two. We were arguing about whether Canada and Russia were more “free”. The answer seemed obvious - Canada was a well-functioning parliamentary democracy with a virtually incorruptible legal system. Russia was… well, on paper also a parliamentary democracy, but there the similarities ended.

My brother offered a silly thought experiment: Suppose you live in some suburb, and you want to improve your house in some small but unique way. Perhaps add a little turret, with a spiral staircase leading up a little reading room in a tower.

If you live in Canada, sorry, no chance. Even if your house isn’t part of an HOA, a turret almost certainly violates a dozen federal safety codes and local zoning regulations. There’s no one to appeal to, either. The bureaucracies that wrote the codes are accountable only to Parliament, and Parliament has a hundred other priorities. Your chance of ever getting that turret approved was probably higher in the days of Louis XIV the Sun King - at least then you could maybe walk to Versailles and line up to petition and maybe the king is in a great mood and decides to grant you a royal exemption.

If you live in Russia… well, the turret still probably violates a dozen federal safety codes. But, unlike in Canada, you can just go talk to the building inspector. His name’s Ivanovich, your cousin went to school with him. Maybe bring a nice bottle of vodka. Help him understand that you’ve always dreamed of having a house with a turret, ever since you were a young boy and stumbled on Walter Scott’s Waverly romances on your grandpa’s bookshelf. And maybe his daughter needs piano lessons, and your fingers still remember something from the old conservatory. And so maybe Ivanovich looks the other way as you build your turret. If a couple years later, a nosy neighbor complains, maybe he finds a piece of paper somewhere signed by a former superintendent, now retired of course, granting you a safety code exemption. Over the decades, your turret becomes a minor local attraction and the pride of the neighborhood, a little patch of creativity and wonder in an otherwise drab and gray suburb. All thanks to our modern hero, the corrupt, er sorry, flexible bureaucrat.

The thought experiment stacks the deck in favor of flexibility, of course. Ivanovich could have just as easily used his power to oppress and bully our protagonist, and a corrupt court system could have shielded Ivanovich from consequences while imprisoning an innocent man.

But imagining this situation was the first time I realized that an incorruptible bureaucracy was not an unalloyed good. Actually incorruptible bureaucracies are terrifying. They might still be composed of people (give us a decade or so to replace them with silicon!) but they are already colossal, relentless, inhuman. They cannot be bargained or pleaded with any more than a hurricane or a volcano, unless you go through the ‘proper channels’ - which may or may not have been cut off years ago. Yet bureaucracies rule larger and larger portions of our world.

---

I was in Buenos Aires late last year, and met up with a family friend who had moved there a couple years prior. He mentioned that the Argentine immigration bureaucracy was byzantine if you approached it as a system of rules, but simple if you treat it with a modicum of emotional intelligence. If you’re caught in some bureaucratic catch-22, missing some document that you can’t get without getting another document which the first document is a prerequisite for… don’t try to untangle it with your engineering brain. Get visibly upset, speak from the heart, show the immigration officer you’re really struggling to figure things out, and they’ll find a way to waive the rules and get you what you need. And of course, it doesn’t hurt if you picked up a box of chocolates or some flowers on your way to the immigration office…

On one hand I’m repelled by this - having to cry in front of an immigration officer can feel more demeaning than typing numbers into boxes. But something about it feels better, more human. Instead of you and the bureaucrat both squeezing yourselves into perfectly standardized machines - “what is the number I need put in box 8 of form 187?” - “80,000” - “very good sir” - there’s more space for a relationship, for emotions, for some measure of autonomy and responsiveness to local conditions. I’d love bureaucracy to not be a part of my life at all; but if it has to be, on balance I’d rather it be more Argentine and less German.

(An obvious objection is that giving bureaucrats flexibility can enable systemic discrimination of various kinds. They will give preferential treatment to people of the same social class, gender, ethnicity, etc. This is a real problem, but I don’t accept ‘make the bureaucracy more rigid’ as the solution. People can be morally bad, so let’s reshape them into machines that cannot err? This is an anti-human ideology if there ever was one.)

---

I think this helps explain why I find the idea of juries and especially jury nullification so beautiful, so viscerally relaxing. I know that no matter what kind of crazy Kafkaesque legal-bureaucratic snare I end up in, I can just follow common sense, and fall back on twelve regular old human beings being able to see that I did the right thing. Juries are a backstop against bureaucracy getting too evil (or too ‘misaligned with humans’ as we say these days) - no wonder we seem to be trying our best to effectively eliminate them.

Notably, jury nullification is how abortion was decriminalized in Quebec - the province could not find a jury that would agree to convict abortionist Henry Morgenthaler, and so began to treat the law as unenforceable. Whatever your object-level position on the issue of abortion, it seems much safer for decisions like this to be made by the moral sentiments of regular people in a local context than by distant unelected elites. A juror exercising their right to jury nullification is a clear example of a flexible bureaucrat. They are going against their explicit instructions and the letter of the law, knowingly reporting a false verdict of “not guilty”, because lying to a bureaucracy is sometimes the lesser of two evils.

---

And then, of course, we have the two most celebrated flexible bureaucrats in history: Oskar Schindler, who saved more than a thousand Jews from death in the Holocaust by manipulating the Nazi bureaucracy, and Stanislav Petrov, whose refusal to follow Soviet military protocol likely saved the world from a full-scale nuclear war. Their stories are justly celebrated, but I don’t want to emphasize them too much because their situations were too clear-cut, the stakes too high, to be relatable. “I’d bend the rules too, if I knew it would save millions of lives”. Yes sure of course so would I, but would you bend the rules to save someone an hour of unnecessary paperwork? Knowing that if your boss found out he might use it as a pretext to fire you? That’s the kind of subtle, small-scale heroism that, repeated millions of times, creates a more humane society.

Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world

One of things that worries me most about AI progress is that it seems tailor made to increase the power of bureaucracy relative to other forms of social organization. As Eugene McCarthy wrote in 1979, “The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.” Well, thanks to language models, our bureaucracies are about to become a lot more efficient. Corporations and governments are already rushing to replace many customer-facing jobs with language models. This makes a lot of sense if you take the State-eye view and see human bureaucrats as faulty robots. But if you see the work of a flexible bureaucrat as noble, sometimes even heroic - these are precisely the jobs we should protect.

The lesson from the last ten years of AI progress is that we humans are just not that good at thinking. If we haven’t already built machines that think better and faster than we do, we soon will. But it will take us much longer to build sensors as amazing as human eyes and ears and hands and hearts. So the medium-term future I see is one where we are all field agents or overseers of a vast bureaucracy, running its opaque computations in giant water-cooled towers. I hope we’ll have the foresight to resist the siren calls of efficiency and accountability, and give ourselves some room to be flexible. And have the courage and compassion to use that flexibility for humane ends.

Thank you to Dan Davies for the conversation that inspired this essay.