Logic and the Law

Recently, I watched a scene from another time in history, a set piled high with paper, where professionals in business suits scurried through rooms with dollies stacked with boxes of paper, all stamped, signed, and distributed in huge amounts of copies. Everything was tabbed and filed beyond all comprehensibility, people were flipping madly through binders in a race against time, no one agreed on any of the facts or could find any, and the end result was a mop of perspiration and a guess at the facts in most cases. Those who might know the real answers were chained behind a procedural wall of silence, though they were only two feet away. All gathering and interpretation of data was left to the officials, who lumbered and puffed like prehistoric mainframes, invariably coming up with incorrect data, incorrect logic, and incorrect answers, while telling each other that the actual facts did not matter that much. It was only the very course of people’s lives that were being decided.

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