The Unknown CitizenThis Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
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The bureaucrat brings the poem around full circle. The “unknown citizen’s” life is planned, measured, and evaluated in real time. Judgments are made not on the basis of achievements, but on the ability to adhere to the plan – on both the individual basis but also on the basis of the plan’s effects on the level of the mass. Notations are made only of deviations from the expected norm of the mass, not on the basis of objective achievements of the individual. So the fact that we (the bureaucratic class) are not aware of any “problems” (deviations from the mass norm) is all the sign we need to make the final judgment: not whether the “unknown citizen” was either free or happy (words which have no meaning in this technological context), but whether he was in conformity with the expectations of social planners. A perverse sort of utopia if ever there was one.