Joshua Bell is perhaps America’s finest classical musician. Just this week he accepted the Avery Fisher Prize for his accomplishments. I admit I wouldn’t know; I’ve never been much into classical music. But I can recognize stupidity anywhere.

On January 12, in connection with a social experiment by theWashington Post, Joshua Bell played a very unusual concert in a very unusual hall: For 43 minutes, he pretended to be a street musician at the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, D.C., playing his $3.5 million Stradivarius.

And as a feature in last week’sPost Magazine has it, 1,097 people passed by in that time, virtually all of them government employees, and virtually none of them noticing.

I can’t possibly excerpt enough of the article to give you a feeling for it, but I will invite you to open the audio of Bell’s performance in a new window while you read.

Because, despite being a classical violinist, Bell has a sense of humor and knows how to have fun.

(The experiment had to be conducted on a rare piece of private property in the Metro system, because as the Cato Institute’s Jim Harper points out, the government bureaucrats wouldn’t allow it to be conducted on Metro property. The writer, Gene Weingarten, explains how he got the idea for the story and how dealing with the Metro bureaucracy was an eight-day nightmare, while securing permission from the private property manager took “six seconds.” But there’s more going on here than just one bureaucracy.)

Here are a few cuts from the magazine article, which you should read in full:

When Bell was asked if he’d be willing to don street clothes and perform at rush hour, he said:

“Uh, a stunt?”

Well, yes. A stunt. Would he think it . . . unseemly?

Bell drained his cup.

“Sounds like fun,” he said. . . .

In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler’s movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience — unseen, unheard, otherworldly — that you find yourself thinking that he’s not really there. A ghost.

Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts. — Washington Post Magazine

There’s the woman exiting the Metro whose child tries to stop and listen. She drags him along and out the door and was completely oblivious, too focused on going wherever she was going. The thousand or so government employees on their way to another day of making hell of ordinary people’s lives. They ignored the greatest classical musician in America.

And I can’t help but think how dehumanized almost everyone in this sad story has become. It’s hard to keep your humanity when you work for the government, when your day consists of enforcing arbitrary and capricious rules on other people. You yourself have been turned from a human being, capable of both reason and emotion, to a machine which steers other people through a maze of rules and regulations and punishes those who step outside the box. Why see the ordinary people forced to be your bureaucracy’s “customers” as human? Stay in line, follow the rules, and you’ll get by.

If that’s all life is to be, forget it. That sort of bleak existence is hardly worth contemplating.

And while this bleak, regimented almost-life afflicts government bureaucrats more than the rest of us, it certainly isn’t limited to them. Most of us don’t quite live our lives, but just trudge through each day as though we were Sisyphus pushing rocks up the hill, only to do it all again the next day. Too few of us, too little of the time, stop to appreciate the beauty and wonder that is life.

And that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.