Wit & Attitude Quote by Barbara Tuchman

Discipline, Tuchman suggests, isn’t forged in the clean laboratory of sensible rules; it’s manufactured in the grit of absurdity. The barb here is aimed at the comforting civic myth that obedience is simply a rational transaction: good command in, orderly compliance out. She flips that logic. Anyone can follow a reasonable order because it flatters the follower’s intelligence and aligns with self-interest. The real social technology of discipline is getting people to comply when compliance feels pointless, arbitrary, even degrading.

The phrasing does quiet violence: “capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic” is a descending scale from fickle to procedural to outright stupid, implying that institutions don’t merely tolerate irrational demands - they rely on them. Bureaucracy becomes not just a system of management but a training regimen, conditioning citizens, soldiers, employees to treat authority as self-justifying. If you can be made to salute nonsense, you can be made to salute anything.

As a historian, Tuchman is speaking with the accumulated evidence of states and armies: regimes don’t collapse because they lack rules; they collapse when rules lose credibility, when the nonsense stops feeling inevitable. Her larger oeuvre is a catalog of self-inflicted institutional failure, and this line distills the mechanism: power reproduces itself by normalizing small humiliations that teach people not to argue with the premises.

The subtext is unsettlingly contemporary. “Habits” are built through repetition, and repetition is exactly what modern systems - paperwork, metrics, compliance theater - can generate at scale. Tuchman’s warning is that irrationality isn’t a bug of authority. It’s one of its most effective features.