Institution Creep
The nations, corporations, churches and universities may look important, and even real.
Insurance companies and casinos dominate the landscape of the American heart. They both deal in risk. And at their core is a single, identical, unalterable principle: THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS.
So who wouldn’t want to be a house? Who would want to be an individual?
Looks like its owner
By the logic of fake-it-til-you-make-it, people seem to be acting more like institutions lately. Worse, we talk like them. Within an institution, the somewhat powerful never say a single clear thing. The risk-reward argues against it. They’re all cheery non-answers until you hit the bedrock of their name and title.
The actually powerful - the ones who do speak - are as glib as you and I dream of being. In an atmosphere of heavy dread and scant attention, to speak freely and be listened to is like owning an enormous yacht.
Writer or publisher?
In the tiny but noisy world of fiction one guy wrote a nonfiction book called “Big Fiction,” saying the way to view the literature of the 20th century is through its publishers - the trust-fund dilettantes, the earnest independents and the conglomerates.
At least I think that’s what he said. I gave the book a sniff, and it smelled like well-footnoted chum for dissatisfied writers researching reasons why things haven’t worked out so great. As a dissatisfied writer, I didn’t take the bait, this time.
The question is valid, though: Who calls the tune - the writers or the publishers? History, as remembered by readers, would say the writers. But anyone laboring to make a buck by the pen, and looking at the samey-samey shelves of their local bookseller might say the other.
Advancement
But what writer would want to valorize the institution over the writer? The author of the nonfiction book is credited as an associate professor, likely a guy who’s trying to climb the ladder at a university, or at least find a ledge on the cliff face wide enough to sit for a minute. I get it.
Like him, we’re all under pressure. We’re all playing subtle games of allegiance, placing bets according to the little we know in a sloshing tide of flackery and self-deception. But the risks when you place your bet with an institution are multiple. Here are a few main categories.
You may appear craven.
You may lose self-respect.
The institution may not be what it claims.
You may be the food of the institution, rather than its beneficiary.
To stay on the good side of the institution, you may have to do things you really don’t want to do.
And if you’re an academic, you’re likely watching your friends and peers struggle and abandon their hopes and dreams left and right. The institutions that turn the screws on the associate and adjunct professors are the same ones raising tuition and racking up double-digit returns on their endowments. However unsavory it may be, the institution is winning.
A question of nerve
Another way of saying that the house always wins is that institutions always rip you off. So why do people turn to them? A promise, even a shaky one, is a balm on the nerves.
My own youth was a constant test of my nerve and my wallet. I was always trying to see how much risk I could bear, and how much risk-aversion I could tolerate without wanting to pluck out my own eyeballs from boredom.
In the test, my wallet gave out frequently. I was always broke, in part, because my nerve didn’t give out until later, when my best childhood friend was shot to death. I pared back my obstinate unreasonable demands of the world. A few years later, another friend drank himself to death. And the first job I got after that was at an insurance company. It was so boring I almost went blind.
A question of trust
The real challenge with trusting an institution is knowing where to stop. You trust the FDA with the Covid-19 vaccine, but what about when it said Oxycontin wasn’t addictive? And that’s just the institution we count on to promise our food isn’t poison. And that’s just in the last decade.
A question of life
The problem with putting your trust in a world of institutions is that it crowds you out. In the news, it’s the nations, corporations, churches and universities that are the actors. They make the changes and bestow meaning.
But you and I are not the actors in this world, which calls itself the real one. Our deeply held feelings and opinions are personal eccentricities, akin to hobbies. And our lives are confined to our spare time. It’s not even real. To put any trust or hope in what you and I might do or might think is to be unrealistic.
A question of significance
There are many ways that trusting an institution can go badly. Some are surprising. Some are accidental.
But when you’re misled, betrayed or abandoned by a government, corporation or university, you’re at least left with something. You have a story, an opinion, and possibly even recourse. The bigger the betrayal and the bigger the betrayal, the better the story. By better I don’t mean better, just that more people will listen.
By better I mean that it makes you look more important in the real world, where institutions are real and people are, at best, skilled puppeteers. Consider the status of a lead plaintiff in a class-action suit against a government or a large corporation - they’re the ones most hurt, and highest paid.
On the other hand, when you trust your own nerve, your own gut and intuition, you have no such recourse, no such good story.
Remember Sears?
Institutions breed paranoia. It comes from the top. Leaders – the ones who last - know their institution is on borrowed time, and that the benefits and privileges they extract can go away in a snap. Like a shared nightmare, an institution only has power as long as we believe in it.
When the house always wins, everyone else has to lose a little along the way. And every little loss leaves a little bitterness. That bitterness accrues. And when it accrues faster than an institution can grow, the institution has to either change its name, or go away. This decay is the spiritual driver behind many mergers and acquisitions.
The only hope for an institution is to become so big that it becomes a fact of life like the FBI, General Motors or Yale. Then it can hide in the slipstream of the unspecified bitterness we all feel toward our lives. That’s as close as an institution ever gets to being safe. But it’s closer than any human being gets.
A two-sided mask
That question of who and what is doing the actual living in our world is a surprisingly lively one.
Is it an institution masquerading as a human being, like the Soviet Union or Martha Stewart? Or is it a human being masquerading as an institution, like a politician or a media-savvy individual who’s branded themselves?
Negative faith
We’re all under pressure. And those pressures erode our sense of what it’s possible for us to do. This shows up vividly when someone is doing something they suspect is doing real harm to another human being. This could be working security at a luxury high-rise or making brain-killing Tik-Tok videos.
Its catechism is: If I didn’t do it, someone else would. This is the alibi of the person relinquishing their status as a living person, and taking on the shadow existence of a commodity, as so many of us do each weekday morning. This is the supposedly safe spot on the chain of command.
Positive faith
Interestingly, the negative faith of the workday is perfectly opposed that of the artist: The only work that matters is what would never be done if that particular living individual artist didn’t do it.
This faith retains its danger and excitement. It points to where the world might hold its breath long enough for something impossible to take place. But it requires nerve.
Selected bibliography
When There Are No Grownups Around
Games (They’ll Wonder What Happened to Us)