(2021-04-26) Torenberg Why Are Institutions Failing Us

Erik Torenberg: Why Are Institutions Failing Us? The macro trend is an overall collapse of faith in institutions.

Gallup has been running polls

They found that institutional trust peaked in the 60s, only to decline rapidly

Well, the way our institutions have responded to COVID-19 is a recent reminder of just how poor their performance was (and is) — nearly every major institution has failed us. ((2020-04-14) Guinn First The People)

Last week we talked about this in terms of media: Was past journalism actually better? Or was it the same quality, but we called it great out of ignorance? (2021-04-18-TorenbergHowTheInternetAteMedia)

In the old days, we experienced media, culture, and politics through the lens of a centralized authority — we were fed whatever narrative they provided, and no one really knew just how bad the "bad news" was, nor did we have context to even wrap our heads around the idea of questioning that authority.

we've seen that institutions get less competent and more bureaucratic as they get older. It's clear that today's government in 2021 is not the same one that accomplished the Manhattan Project in 1950

We also realized legacy institutions weren't built for the information age

Maybe it’s also that, for some institutions, we merely expect different things from them than we used to.

the scorecard by which we use to evaluate them

We used to think institutions were a place for formation. Certainly education, that was where people learned how to be citizens.

Instead, we think of institutions as places for individuals to perform. The role of institutions is explicitly not to form us, or at least not without consent — that would be oppression.

the shift from a Christian/Hobbsean mentality to a Rousseauian one can be looked at as a change from "honor culture" to "dignity culture

"Honor" was thought of as fitting yourself into the role society expected of you — "knowing your place."

Today we live in a “dignity culture” — one where we believe we should have a right to pursue any role we want.

In addition to the focus on the self as the highest goal, another corresponding shift is a change in how we think about truth

Truth is not “out there”, the logic goes, it’s within you.

Which of course results in relativism.

Which is why stronger institutions — at least institutions that we think of as forming, like education and media — won’t fix this problem.

Rousseauists don’t want institutions to help them acclimate better to society, they want them to get out of the way so they can be themselves — or more precisely, reengineer society so they can be in reality who they are in their imaginations (totally equal to others).

institutions where our expectations diverge — education being a prominent example — and if we want them to perform “better”, we should first align on exactly what “better” means and looks like. (Or design meta-institutions of choice.)