ORP & Personal Update: CS Lewis on Bureaucracy

At home, I have engaged in another reading project--this time, I am reading C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape Letters" to my family. I am reading a revised edition which includes the additional materials called "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" and an introduction written in 1960. This introduction is fascinating and recounts some of Lewis' motives and why he chose his symbols. In this introduction he shows why he chose a metaphor for how hell is run and shows his attitude, like mine, toward bureaucracy. I have to deal with bureaucracy in my job at the Port of Seattle, SeaTac airport, and since we are undergoing a transformation of our society into an amalgam of Sovietism and Fascism, this is especially relevant. Thus the eternally true adage, "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." Here is the quote in words only Lewis could put together:

I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.