“That smell is made up of impersonal bureaucratic procedures, political correctness, and the obsequiousness that results when people worry lest speaking up will lead to bad consequences…”

What do we call that? Oh yes, politics.

Briefly, a thousand details — “pedantries” as Field Marshal Gebhard von Blücher was to call them later — that had originally served a useful purpose now became detached from reality, so to speak. They continued to float about solely as parts of a highly developed culture, one that no longer made sense in any terms except its own.

Ah, good old lost purposes.