Process

In Process, an essay from The Administration of Reality, Lucas Varro examines one of the most common alibis in modern institutional life: I’m just following the process. The sentence sounds modest. It sounds responsible. It sounds like the adult refusal of arbitrary judgement. But beneath its calm surface lies one of bureaucracy’s most durable moral technologies: the transfer of agency from a person to a system.

The sentence is usually spoken with a small shrug.

Not theatrical. Not proud. Not cruel. A mild exhaustion, a practised neutrality — as if the speaker is merely reporting the weather.

I’m just following the process.

It appears in school offices and HR rooms, at service counters and immigration windows. It appears in hospitals and universities, in aid agencies and public departments. It appears in emails written with the tone of polite finality. It appears when someone wants the conversation to end without having to end it personally.

The process requires it.

The process doesn’t allow that.

The process has been followed.

It is difficult to fight this sentence because it does not feel like an argument.

It feels like a fact.

And that is its power.

Process is one of the modern world’s most available moral technologies. It does not merely organise decisions. It organises conscience. It takes choices that would otherwise require justification — refusal, exclusion, delay, punishment — and moves them into a structure where no single person has to feel responsible.

A decision is still made. A harm still occurs. A life still becomes smaller.

But the speaker remains clean.

That is the promise embedded inside process: that one may participate without ownership.

We tend to treat process as harmless. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is even beautiful: a sequence that prevents arbitrariness, a set of steps that protects against corruption, a method that makes fairness possible under pressure.

Some lines are merciful.

There is an argument here that must be granted in full. Discretion has often been the greater danger. It is precisely because unchecked judgement can be racist, nepotistic, vindictive, or casually biased that people built processes in the first place. Standardised assessment was, at least in part, an attempt to prevent someone’s cousin from always being admitted. Asylum procedures, however punishing, arose partly because pure discretion became a theatre of prejudice. For many marginalised lives, process has sometimes been the only shield available — thin, imperfect, but real.

So the target is not process itself.

The target is what happens when process becomes an alibi.

The phrase I’m just following the process is not merely descriptive. It is a moral manoeuvre — the handoff of agency to a system. It is a way of saying:

Do not look at me.

Look at the form.

And once the form becomes the agent, responsibility thins into air.

This is moral delegation.

Not the delegation of labour.

The delegation of guilt.

Continue reading: Process at The Administration of Reality on Substack.