Institutions

Institutions are found in any big, brutalist building

Institutions refer to the various government, economic, scientific, 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. [1][2][3]

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

Institutional trust is at an all-time low in the US. [4][5][6]

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:

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

Real corruption needs to be countered with checks and balances and electoral reforms.

The rest represent the ways we fail to understand how institutions work, the nature of reforms and incentive structures, balance of power, and many other concepts. Without these, simple explanations based on conspiracy theories and propaganda are the only ones that make sense to many people, especially if they are repeated on social media ad nauseum. It is not possible to counter this with more nuanced and accurate propaganda, it will always be overwhelmed by misinformation. People need to get the civics education that they never got in school so they can understand how institutions work before they can vote for policy that will effectively combat corruption.

Good People Doing Their Best

Most people within our institutions are regular people who are doing their best to help society within the incentive structures of their bureaucracies.

The vast majority of data in the form of research, reports, census data, and recommendations made by various agencies is independent, cited, fact-checked, and peer reviewed by other good people who are doing their best to help make sure this information is accurate.

Grand conspiracies like the "deep state" that would require the coordinated actions and ongoing silence of thousands of people are as cynical as they are nonsensical.

"Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead." -Benjamin Franklin

Corruption in the form of bribery almost always happens on an individual level.

Systems become corrupt due to corrupt incentive structures that shape the behavior of anyone that joins it.

Manufactured consent is another important concept to know about the nature of institutional behavior and how they become biased towards the goals of the rich and powerful without explicit coordination or bribery.

The contrarian position that rejects any and all information and recommendations that come from mainstream institutions misconstrues the nature of corruption. This causes people to talk positions that harm themselves and others, such as anti-vaccine sentiments, rejecting proven treatments in favor of alternative medicine, climate change denial, election denial, and support for authoritarians.

Recognizing the true nature of corruption allows you to accept the majority of verified research and other good information created by our institutions, while having a healthy skepticism when we can identify corrupt incentives. It also allows you to see the millions of people that work for government agencies, corporations, universities, organized religion, and other institutions as generally good people doing their best. This reduces cynicism, and encourages optimism and therefore happiness.

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