Benedict's soulcraft as statecraft

....our reliance upon institutions instead of ourselves has not exactly worked out fantastically well.... Our reliance upon institutions, especially ones of a political nature, has resulted in disaster of epic proportions.

PNWCC, here’s the problem. Institutions don’t come out of nowhere; they develop in the first place either to solve a problem or to enable people to do something they couldn’t otherwise do. That’s why their history is coextensive with the history of civilization itself, which is essentially a 5,000-year-long story of the building of institutions. I can’t think of any human communities beyond the hunter-gatherer stage that aren’t heavily dependent on institutional structures of some kind.

So if you’re going to call on people to rely less on institutions, you also need to explain why they should be happy returning to the kinds of situations that prevailed before the institution(s) in question were developed. Ask them if they’d be happy, for instance, giving up the institutions that supply them with electric power, or the system of food distribution that currently frees them from having to spend all their time farming in order to supply their own food. You mention the banking system -- why does that exist, again? Could it be because systems of money and credit are essential to large-scale activity of all kinds? Would you suggest to people that they conduct all their business by carrying around bags of gold?

Where you’d really run into resistance is with medicine. When my father developed a heart infection a few years ago, his life was saved thanks to efforts that depended on innumerable institutions: not just the hospital where he was treated, but the churches and big philanthropies that underwrote the hospital; the medical plans (including Medicare) that financed the treatment; the universities and labs that conducted the research needed to understand what was happening; the medical schools that trained the surgeons and other specialists; the government agencies and foundations that sponsored the fellowships that paid for those specialists’ residencies; the companies that built the complex equipment needed, and the R&D labs that developed it; and on and on. A heart infection is not something you can handle “on your own”; the difference between self-help and relying on institutions, in this case, is the difference between a dead father and live, healthy one (or, if you’re the patient, it’s the difference between death and life). My family's dependence on institutions in that case DID work out "fantastically well," and most families would probably be able to point to a similar benefit they’ve received from living in a world of big, complex institutions.

Indeed, without institutions, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Banks, private corporations, government agencies, universities, research labs, power companies, and all their affiliated institutions were involved in financing and conducting the research and undertaking the production that gave us computers, silicon chips, fiber-optic cables, etc., and that allow the whole thing to work. Should we do without those too? Since I haven't seen any big rush to join the Amish, I'm guessing most people's answer is no.

Quoting:
PNWCC, here’s the problem. Institutions don’t come out of nowhere; they develop in the first place either to solve a problem or to enable people to do something they couldn’t otherwise do. That’s why their history is coextensive with the history of civilization itself, which is essentially a 5,000-year-long story of the building of institutions. I can’t think of any human communities beyond the hunter-gatherer stage that aren’t heavily dependent on institutional structures of some kind.
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Hmmm... I was right. You can't see it. Or, you absolutely refuse to see it and defend the indefensible for partisan reasons.

Nobody, including me, suggested that we don't need courts, police, a Congress, or schools, or whatever. Let's examine something that made the news yesterday. Some Senator said that "we all agree that what people need is access to health insurance." Well, NO WE DO NOT AGREE on that. Before I need INSURANCE, I need health care. We let an artifact of ill advised policy create a near universal institution... where we shop for health care from insurance companies and our employers pay the bill.

That's like negotiating with Geico or Allstate for your next new car, after your employer picks the company and level of the new car. That would be insane. But nobody questions it when it comes to health care? Why? Our refusal to question "institutions".

Does Congress REALLY need to regulate the number of watts allowed to be consumed by a light fixture? No. But millions of people are applauding Cap and Trade, which does just that. Even forbids you selling your home unless you update it to federal standards. And nobody has a clue what those are, not even the fools who voted for them.

But nowhere here did I suggest we should abolish health care insurance, or do away with the courts, or police, or schools. All I did was point out that we're on a train track at high speed headed for a impenetrable wall called catastrophe because we have turned over EVERY facet and aspect of our lives to institutions. We've come to expect government to spare us from every stupid mistake, or else to alleviate the consequences. For every thing that can hurt you, we're busy creating institutions to "protect" us.

But we've done this to a point where individuals have lost control of their own lives to a huge degree. For every "protection" we lose more than we gain, and we've rushed down this sinkhole madly for a couple generations now.

Is it hard to own a home? Well, we'll just create an institution to lend money for one. In fact, let's make two, and then let's get banks, lenders, brokers, and others in on the deal. Now we've all but destroyed our currency and future economy with the results. We turned over trillions of dollars to the market to play with and create "securities" of uncalculable merit.

And that's just ONE tiny facet of what we've done when it comes to institutionalizing our daily lives.

But, now I'll bet that your response to this is to say that was needed was to have an institution with more power and invasive control from the same people who brought you the first one, to control the first one. And then we need yet another institution to watch the second one to make suer it doesn't get to cozy with the first.

And we're all paying for this folly. Our children, and our children's children, and their children's children will inherit the results of this. And we don't even know what that will be. But we KNOW it will not be good.

Yet, here you are, unwilling to reverse course, attempting to mock the statement of the plainly obvious problem.

The same thinking that I discussed years ago is still plainly evident. What, we let PEOPLE decide things? Or the consequences of their actions determine their welfare? Oh, heck no. Charity isn't real, people's judgement isn't real. Individual wise choice isn't real. No, only institutionalized judgement is real and good.

Thus, we pretend that the parties are to blame for their woefully bad politics, excusing ourselves from having not gotten ourselves in to displace those with bad judgement.

Thus, we pretend that a lack of oversight of Fannie and Freddie was the blame, not the notion of lending to high risk borrowers with foolish rules and bad rates and insufficient reserves. We created two institutions, and then gave them JUST THAT PURPOSE. All, of course, to "benefit" us.

We turned over our choices of health care to insurance companies, and then we blame capitalism for spiraling prices and costs of health care. Say what? That's silly, even at face value, but that's precisely what we did.

And now, we want to make it STAY THAT WAY to ensure that individuals are NEVER again invovled in the choices and judgements about health care, and all the decisions that matter turned over to faceless beaurocrats.

We note with pride that until the end of the 50's and even 60's, our public schools were quite good. Then, they started downhill. And the spiral worsened. So, what did we do? Well, we took away local control more and more. The worse they got, the more we put the states and feds in charge. And the more we did that, the worse they got, and the less power over them the citizens have.

We turned over oversight of the public learning institutions to yet another institution, rather than ourselves.

And then we play word games, pretending that "this is a democracy, ergo, the government is us, and reflects us".

Bleah. What rot. It takes a huge sum of willful blindness to ever believe that. The reality is as obvious as the sun rises in the east.

Well, we can't turn over control of our schools now. Why, the masses, they're "common" and everyone knows that "common" is dumb and ignorant. Just view the Palin debate.

So, now we can't even go back, because everyone "KNOWS" that the elite must govern. That's institutionalized.