Institutions

Institutions are found in any big, brutalist building

Institutions refer to the various government, economic, education, and religious organizations that serve as the power structures in modern society, as well as the experts and subject matter expertise they contain.

Trust in these institutions is necessary to enable coordinate action and forward social progress. Without that trust, conspiracy, gridlock, infighting, and inaction are the result. Trust in institutions is strongly correlated with the happiness of a society.

In case you haven't picked up on it, you should click on the Trust link read more on this topic.

The Secular Institutions page addresses the need for institutions for community building without supernatural pretense.

The Organizations page lists many existing institutions working towards the goals of science and religion compatibility, universalism, secular institutions, and building the universal in-group.

The Problems With Our Institutions

Before trust can be restored, we must first examine why it was lost to begin with. The erosion of trust has come from decades of criticism from both libertarian and progressive perspectives. Many of these criticisms are fully justified. But the effect of decades of negativity bias and antigovernmental propaganda have caused many people to see our institutions as corrupt beyond repair. The only remedy that this perspective can offer is revolution.

Other elements of the media and culture that have contributed to the erosion of trust are:

• Regulatory capture
• Campaign finance, lobbying, and other forms of legalized political bribery
• Pervasive capitalist grifting in the economy
• Complexity makes them opaque and hard to understand
• Libertarian "government is the problem" rhetoric
• Anti-government conspiracy theories spread by social media
• Propaganda designed to sew discontent by our adversaries
• Religious scandals, hypocrisy, bigotry, and grift

Rage For The Machine

All of these factors have made general contrarianism with regard to our political and economic institutions into a mainstream viewpoint. This lack of trust becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the expectation of corruption encourages it in practice, and there is nothing the institutions can do to counter that notion because people assume everything they say is a lie. This leads to a sense that the institutions cannot be fixed and must be destroyed instead.

This type of revolution does not typically lead to good outcomes. Institutions in a modern democracy represent the collective wisdom of millions of people over centuries of experience. Destroying them will only result in having to re-learn all of those lessons again the hard way.

When cynicism dominates the zeitgeist, the truly subversive view is optimism and trust in our ability to self-correct and continue to improve the way that our government and economy serves its people.

A reinterpretation of Rage

Making Bureaucracies Sexier with Yuval Noah Harari

Hidden Brain: You 2.0 Fighting Despair