When bureaucracy devours humanity

Half a century ago, a dystopian parable warned us what happens when survival is reduced to paperwork and transcendence is erased.

No doubt we’ve all had this experience: you’re interacting with some form of bureaucracy and the apparatchik on the other end of the line says something like: “I’d really love to help you, but unfortunately the system won’t allow it.”

With the rise of the ‘algocracy,’ this seems to be happening more and more often.

Back in 1971, a short dystopian film played that scenario out to a chilling conclusion. And Then They Forgot God (1971) melds three distinct themes into a single, unsettling parable: the machinery of bureaucracy; the costs of survival under authoritarian systems; and the lost memory of transcendence.

In a suffocating bureaucratic future where the environment is poisoned and food comes in the form of monthly rations of ‘Nutracakes’, a man finds his government-issued ration card rejected because it was slightly damaged in the mail. Although the officials he turns to for help are sympathetic, none can break their prescribed procedure, leaving the man and his wife without food for an entire month.

After becoming increasingly hungry, desperate, and aggravated, he returns to the ration department at the end of the film, looking gaunt but with a new, intact card in his hand. The good-natured clerk is pleased to see him and asks how he survived a month without food. As he walks away, we see he has lost an arm. Did he sell it? Eat it? Hard to know, but the film ends with a clear indictment of a system that buries compassion under paperwork, where survival demands sacrifice and where people have forgotten how to call on anything beyond the state.

For a film from 1971, it feels eerily predictive. Swap ‘ration card’ for ‘digital ID’ and the setup works perfectly today, or perhaps the near future: access to survival is tied to scannable codes, mobility is restricted unless you comply with unintelligible rules, compassion is overridden by algorithms no one understands. And the bureaucrats’ shrugging sympathy — “sorry, nothing more I can do” — feels so hauntingly familiar. “What’s happening to you is wrong, but I can’t risk losing my job over it.”

That’s the essence of bureaucratic tyranny: the individual’s conscience is disarmed by procedure and overridden by self-preservation. That disempowered humanity is precisely how cruelty gets normalized and evil becomes banal.

Ultimately, the film’s title is what hits the hardest. In a system where every act of survival is mediated by the state, people stop reaching for anything beyond it. The divine, the transcendent, the spiritual all get eclipsed.

Today, we get a similar effect from our reliance on algorithmic judgment and The Science™ as the ultimate arbiters: why look towards heaven, why question the outcome, why resist the system, when the glowing screen has all the answers?

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