Technology and bureaucracy give us a form of control and dominance over nature and man-kind. Max Weber termed this bureaucratic rationality *, a term I often shorten to just 'rationality'. Such technocratic rationality of technology, corporations, and government gives us a lot of new freedoms and the ability to exist as a mass society, but it also comes at the cost of corrupting individual's spirit and demeaning what it means to be human.

To illustrate this point and to critically examine our belief in bureaucratic rationality, I use a dialetical method that contrasts bureaucratic and technological rationality to it's anti-thesis. I call these things the 'rational' and the 'anti-rational' or 'irrational', based on notions from Max Weber and mathematics. You will see my frequently refer to these concepts in my writing, and they play a key concept in my thinking.

Everything in our world is fundamentally 'irrational' and unpredictable **. Man has learned to harnass nature and mankind in a variety of ways, but he come far from controlling it. He simply can not understand fully the complexities of nature and mankind. You should think of the world as not being much different from the mathematical concept of PI, a number that can not be exactly defined except in terms of itself.

Even PI has a degree of predictability, and we can approximate it's meaning through the decimal system. A similiar thing applies to mankind and nature: we understand a lot about it, even while we do not understand or are totally innocent to it's nunances. In the social sciences, we call that concept parsony, a simplication that gives fairly good results, but does not try to overcrowd we details. This blindness can explain much of the contemporary social problems we face, from apathy to environmental pollution to crime on our streets.

As a society, we ought to respect not only what science, technology, and bureaucracy tells us, but also what we percieve to be the truth. We need to look beyond the blinders of the limits of current technology, and try to understand our deeperselves and the world around us. This challenge is essential for our existance as human beings.

Rationality should not be confused with reason. Humans are able to make good judgements when all the facts are kept in perspective. The human existance is uniquely different from rational machines and bureaucratic existance.

* Weber was far more of a proponent of big government, technology, and bureaucratic ratinality then I am. Yet, he was also critical of such bureaucratic-rational organizations and challenged them to improve themselves. His ideas helped reshape how we percieve bureaucracy today, and have lead to a great deal of criticism which has increased our freedoms as individuals.

** I have distilled my theory of irrationality in an article known as Dialetic of Irrationality Revisted. Many scholars and friends have noted the flaws in this theory, but it does provide an interesting way to start criticizing the weakness of the increasingly bureaucratic world around us today.