Life & Mortality Quote by John Stuart Mill

Mill’s jab lands because it treats bureaucracy less like a system and more like an organism with a predictable pathology. “Disease” frames administrative life as something that spreads, weakens, and eventually kills the host institution. The surprise is what finishes it off: not scandal, not incompetence, not even malice, but routine. That’s Mill’s real target - the quiet tyranny of process-for-process’s-sake, where repetition becomes a substitute for judgment.

The intent is characteristically liberal in the 19th-century sense: a defense of individual discretion against the encroaching machinery of the modern state. Mill lived through the expansion of governmental and managerial structures - and, crucially, he worked inside one, the East India Company. He knew the seduction of standardized procedures: they promise fairness and efficiency, but they also create a class of people whose job is to follow rules rather than think about consequences. Routine, in Mill’s view, doesn’t just slow decisions; it trains citizens and officials into passivity, turning living problems into boxes to tick.

The subtext is a warning about institutional self-preservation. Bureaucracies don’t merely administer; they reproduce. Routine is their immune system and their addiction: it wards off risk, novelty, and accountability while steadily draining purpose. Mill’s phrasing implies a grim cycle - bureaucracy “inflicts” itself on organizations, then dies of the very habit that kept it stable. It’s witty, but not cute; it’s a diagnosis of how modern governance can rot without ever looking overtly corrupt.