In French, a bureau is a desk, so bureaucracy means basically "government by people at desks". Despite the bad-mouthing they often get, partly because they usually have to stick so close to the rules, bureaucrats do almost all the day-to-day work that keeps a government running.
The idea of a bureaucracy is to split up the complicated task of governing a large country into smaller jobs that can be handled by specialists.
Bureaucratic government is nothing new; the Roman empire had an enormous and complex bureaucracy, with the bureaucrats at lower levels reporting to bureaucrats above them, and so on up to the emperor himself.
The Quaker Practice of Surrendering the Self-Will “Intro”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHxJUtePHVQ
Max Weber: Authority and Power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlSDjqE5mtk
Bonehead
Bureaucracy Basics: Crash Course Government and Politics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8EQAnKntLs
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