The Amnesiac State: Why We Are Deleting Our Own History?

We often complain about bureaucracy, but what happens when the ‘memory’ of the government is wiped clean? The push to dismantle the Department of Education isn’t just about saving money—it’s about erasing the structures that keep us sane.

Symptoms: The Noise Before the Silence

You have heard the noise. It sounds like a roaring chainsaw, but they call it ‘efficiency.’ We are watching a coordinated effort to gut the cabinet and dissolve entire agencies, specifically the Department of Education. The symptoms are visible in the firing lists and the legal maneuvers designed to bypass the usual protections for civil servants. It feels like a renovation, but if you look closely at the blueprints, you realize they aren’t removing a load-bearing wall; they are digging up the foundation. It is the sound of a system preparing to forget how it functions.

Diagnosis: The Lobotomy of the State

I believe we are misdiagnosing this moment as mere politics. It is something deeper. It is a rejection of the idea that the state should have a memory. When you fire the career staff and close the offices that oversee our shared standards, you aren’t just saving money; you are performing a lobotomy on the body politic. The true danger of this overhaul is not that the government will stop working, but that it will stop remembering why it works in the first place.

To be benevolent when no one is looking, to be just when the rules are complex—this is the burden of the institution, which must carry the memory of justice even when the ruler of the moment has forgotten it.

– Tony Judt

Prognosis: A Nation of Strangers

If we let this fever burn unchecked, the outcome is terrifyingly simple: we become strangers to one another. Without a Department of Education to set a baseline, truth becomes a local dialect. Without a professional bureaucracy to ensure the law is applied evenly, justice becomes a perk of patronage. We are heading toward a reality where the only continuity is chaos.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

– Hannah Arendt

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Prescription: Hug the Bureaucrat

I know it sounds absurd. No one writes songs about the Department of Education. But right now, the most radical thing you can do is defend the boring, frustrating, slow-moving machinery of the state. We have to recognize that this ‘friction’—the forms, the reviews, the standards—is the only thing slowing down the slide into authoritarian whim. We need to prescribe ourselves a heavy dose of institutional respect. We need to realize that the desk-bound clerk is sometimes the only thing standing between us and the abyss.