How institutions tend to inhibit human development

Over the last nine thousand years, since tribal peoples began to settle in villages and towns, leaders arose to defend and administer territory, control trade and collect taxes. They became chiefs, warrior kings, pharaohs, emperors, etc. and their relatives and descendants often formed an aristocracy which in some cases in some cultures lasted hundreds of years.[7]

Whenever these kings created periods of comparative stability, other power structures that could satisfy the innate human need for status proliferated in all areas of human activity: religion, law, war, crafts, business, education, health etc. This process was as inevitable as ice crystals forming when the temperature drops. As populations rapidly grew, the people at the top of each hierarchy devised laws and systems to help themselves maintain power and counter the tendency towards complete anarchy. The most thoughtful of leaders managed to minimise the excesses of cruel and greedy behaviour and harness human creativity and cooperation for the greater good. (As one would expect, the great intellectual discoveries and achievements of earlier civilisations mostly occurred during periods of relative order and tranquillity because it is difficult to reflect, think and plan constructively when one is hungry, sick or frightened and has to concentrate on survival. But it has also been observed that great technological progress is made in times of war and disaster — necessity being the mother of invention.)

As cultures expanded, the possibilities enabling yet more people to satisfy their own need to exercise power grew too — every king needed an army, and every army needed a hierarchy to run it.

The more complex a kingdom's administration became, the more its functions divided and specialised, into tax collection and road building, for example. These functions also generated their own power systems and the chance to gain status and exercise influence both at home and far away. As trade flourished, merchant princes and guilds associated with building, crafts and manufactured goods arose too, each with their own hierarchy based on skills, wealth and patronage.

The religious life of the people, driven by our need to answer questions about the meaning of life and our place in the world and the cosmic order, provided further opportunities for power structures to develop and priesthoods did not hold back from seizing them. As cultures became more complex, the animism and shamanism of tribal people were superseded and more formally organised religions and philosophies developed like a veneer over the primitive magical forms of thinking that still survived. (Much modern behaviour is still governed by primitive beliefs, superstition, magical thinking and animal reactions.[8]) Most of us, and especially representatives of institutions, like bishops, judges and politicians, pontificate about civilised behaviour — saying "this is civilised" and "that's uncivilised" — but such judgments are not as secure as we all pretend. Even the most 'civilised' among us have, in certain contexts, been shown to behave like primitives.[9]

For a long time the churches, monarchy, parliamentary institutions, and the legal and educational institutions of this country were a source of pride. People trusted them, boasted about them — until recently a politician's stock-in-trade phrase, when an institution was found wanting, was to say that, "It may not be perfect but our such-and-such is the envy of the world". This doesn't wash any more. Trust in institutions, trust that is earned and deserved, the cement that binds civilised people together, has almost completely crumbled away.[10]

Any organisation set up for a useful purpose may quickly become an institution and lose touch with its proper function. Since the foundation of city-states, people with authority have abused the powers invested in them — every office at every level is vulnerable to corruption, to 'jobs-worths' and to takeover by petty tyrants.[11]

It is in the nature of institutions that they cannot react in flexible, appropriate ways to changing circumstances in the way that individuals or small groups can. By and large, the bigger the institution, and the more power held at its centre, the more inflexible it is. This inflexibility can feel like mindless malevolent cruelty to those on the receiving end of its actions. The story of the destruction of the British fishing communities is just one example. The helplessness of the fishermen and their families in the face of their livelihood being heartlessly and unfairly taken away by the European Union was heartbreaking for many people to watch. It remorselessly resulted in the break up of families and increased suicide and drug abuse in those previously proudly independent people.[12]

In a way, our institutions are a symptom not of civilisation but of failure. They are nothing to be proud of. Indeed, it would be more appropriate if we were ashamed of them because they are an obvious visible sign of how primitive and uncivilised our behaviour mostly is. Clearly they sometimes perform necessary functions but they are the social equivalent of the barbed wire used to corral and contain wild animals — there to contain our excesses and stop us becoming completely degenerate, destructive and out-of-control, just as prisons are needed to house dangerous, antisocial, criminal people. Institutions exist because we can't trust each other to be honest, fair and humane towards one another, or act from a real knowledge about how to behave. This is all well and good when the circumstances mean that people are so awful nothing else can be done — barbed wire has its uses, the soldiery has to be knocked into shape — but the trouble with an institution is that it can't think. Like barbed wire they do little more than set limits (which is perhaps why our present collection of them in the UK has the nickname 'nanny state'[13]).

To date, as the recent Balkan wars and atrocities and the invasion of Iraq by the USA and Great Britain show, institutions of government have not managed to prevent wars and other large-scale atrocities from occurring. Indeed, when governmental institutions are taken over by psychopaths, such as Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein, they make war more likely. In addition, because it has no central 'brain', an institution can't take responsibility for what it does. Scapegoats have to be found when things go wrong.

Another, perhaps more subtle, difficulty is that implicit in the existence of institutions is a denial that humankind can progress other than by following their diktats. Obvious examples from history include the idea spread by the Catholic church that only Catholics could get to heaven[14] and the belief of the British establishment in Victorian times that it had a divine right to rule the world.[15] Today we see the equally lopsided idea, blindly believed by most Americans (and many outside America), that the American style of free market capitalism should operate everywhere.[16]

Curiously, despite the problems institutions can cause, people easily become emotionally attached to those with which they are familiar. They can even become proud of them and, like members of cults, assert that their belief systems are somehow superior to the belief systems of rival institutions.[17]

This combination of disaffection with the nanny state and its institutions and the rise in the 'blame' culture, emotionalism, divorce rates, mental illness, addiction, violence and disrespect for laws, are not unconnected. They follow from the lack of a generally shared understanding as to what constitutes the purpose of life. Unless something is done about this our current systems will continue to drive down our collective mental health, and institutional madness will continue to undermine the effectiveness of good government and destroy the country's infrastructure. Then collaborative society itself could collapse.

There are people, of course, who assert that our lives have no purpose. They believe that life and the evolution of consciousness are just the random results of meaningless evolutionary processes. We take a very different view. Our approach to the concept of purpose is that it derives from the cherishing of nature's rich endowment to each one of us — what we bring into the world. It must be further enriched, so that it is of benefit to more than just ourselves, and be passed on. This requires us, firstly, to understand what that endowment is.

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