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Broken Window
If a bomb goes off and kills a lot of people, does that mean the bomb is broken? The question is ludicrous. If the bomb were broken, it wouldn’t go off.
That is self-evident, but why is it self-evident? It’s because, intuitively, we all understand that the purpose of a bomb is to kill people. Successfully designed, manufactured, and detonated bombs do just that.
Now ask about a society: If people in that society suffer and die, does that mean the society is broken? The question can’t be answered without knowing the society’s purpose.
Actually, we first have to ask, “What is a society?” A society is a group of people and a set of institutions that connect those people. Societies always have institutions. As a very bare example, a society’s economic institutions include (but are not limited to) workplaces. A society’s governmental institutions include (but are not limited to) legislative bodies. There are other types of institutions beyond the scope of this essay.
These institutions are not like laws of physics. They are mutable, changeable, shapeable. The acceleration of gravity and the laws of thermodynamics are the same today as they were 5,000 years ago, but human social institutions are very different. I would argue that, fundamentally, people are basically the same, but a discussion of human nature is beyond the scope of this essay.
So when we ask about a society, we’re really asking about a society’s defining institutions. Are they broken? Can they ever be broken? Well, how do when know when a bomb is broken? When the bomb doesn’t accomplish what its designers, builders, and users want, that means the bomb is broken.
In the same manner, assessing society’s institutions means asking who designed them, who built them, and what is their purpose?
If people live in squalor, does that mean economic institutions are broken? If rules-making bodies act dictatorially, does that mean they aren’t functioning properly?
In any society, there is objective power. There are people who make decisions and shape the society. They quite naturally see that social institutions serve their interests. If people live in squalor or live under tyranny, it’s because the big people want it that way.
No (stable) society ever has “broken” institutions. It’s impossible for institutions to be broken; they always function exactly as intended — just like people-killing bombs. If a bomb kills people, that’s a feature, not a bug.
If people live in poverty, or have no say over their lives, again, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Realizing this brings up obvious questions, but they are beyond the scope of this essay.
Photo by KAZ Vorpal licensed under Creative Commons
3 Comments
Great questions, Patton! Very thoughtful post.
A couple of things that make it hard to change institutions in the US: 1) An imbalance between the I and the We. US society has a hyper-individualistic understanding of social relations that tends to elevate the force and value of individuals over groups. Thus, we often think that installing a different manager or director in an institution will change it while paying no attention to the machinations of the institution or its many participants. 2) Hyper-individualism helps inform a prevailing authoritarianism (closely linked to and reinforced by a high degree of monotheistic faith) in the US that creates a predisposition to following leaders and applying the Big Man theory to how society operates. Such a perspective supports gods, kings, generals and other dictators but works against institutions and citizens.
How these two things might be changed toward creating better institutions, especially in the face of the recent decline of faith in the social contract and adherence to the rule of law, I don’t know. I suspect that it will take a catastrophe or some other critical mass of anomalous feedback to alter our collective thinking in the US that might get us to invent different institutions.
I agree.
Put another way, people often hit exactly what they aimed at.
(Paraphrase from a Gary Cooper Westerb I saw on TV when I was a very little kid.)
Thing is, does anyone have any specific suggestions for what we can do about it, if anything?
“Thing is, does anyone have any specific suggestions for what we can do about it, if anything?”
The book of Ecclesiastes has a suggestion (the King James version, of course, not one of the subsequent versions with the watered down language amounting to near censorship).
George Carlin does too (paraphrased): Enjoy the show.
A couple of small ones: Live like the institutions don’t matter; Take care of those around you.
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