As part of his candidacy Obama promised us that he would create a more open government. People say he will bring government into the 21st century. He was, after all, the internet candidate, amassing Facebook friends and Twitter followers in the millions. His inaugural speech has now had some 3 million views. Surely if anyone can update the government, tightening the connection between that big system and the people it is supposed to represent, he can.

Then I read a recent report by Wired magazine in which they sat down with the people who have been in charge of the federal government’s online presence (consisting of 24,000 separate sites). They expressed doubt in what Obama would be able to do. See, they had been trying to do it for years and, at every turn, the bureaucratic mess of our government got in the way. The system is full of rules: a part of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act makes sure that every website is “reasonably accessible” to disabled users; web pages of the federal government can’t link to nongovernmental sites to “avoid the appearance of endorsing one product or organization over another;” the Presidential Records Act makes it so that posted web pages cannot be altered or changed, only replaced.

Notice the reasons why those regulations exist. The first was to help the disabled, the second was to ensure an unbiased government, and the third was to require transparency and prevent cover-ups. But look at what they do to us. Instead of providing freedom and equality they do something else all together: they lock us into an unfathomably complicated system making it so that we can’t do anything at all. The whole principle of democracy is that the people and the government are supposed to be intimately connected. Yet, in the past two hundred years we’ve seen our government become such a mess of rules and systems and protections that it is no longer accessible to the everyday citizen.

Why is it this way? Because we have drifted away from the principles of freedom and equality, replacing them with fairness and security. Ultimately these are counterintuitive.  Freedom allows equality by ensuring that everyone can act as they will. But freedom only promotes equality when it is grounded in social values, not forced by the hand of government. This force promotes something different: fairness. This is like forcing the best sprinter in the world to use a wheel chair in a race just because someone else might need to. Then, in a desperate attempt to ensure freedom and force integrity, we amass a series of obstacles and place them on the track.

Congratulations America, we’ve sat Obama in a wheelchair and told him to go through an obstacle course. I hope he really can produce miracles.

Bomber Command was an early example of the new evil that science and technology have added to the old evils of soldiering. Technology has made evil anonymous. Through science ann technology, evil is organized bureaucratically so that no individual is responsible for what happens. Neither the boy in the [plane] aiming his bombs at an ill-defined splodge on his radar screen, nor the operations officer shuffling papers at squadron headquarters, nor I sitting in my little office in the Operational Research Section and calculating probabilities, had any feeling of personal responsibility. None ever saw the people killed. None of us particularly cared.”

                             ~ Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe 

DQotD: Disturbing Quote of the Day