From the moment we are born we find we are not alone. We belong with other people. Through circumstances, we find ourselves gathered together in institutions, the first institution being the family we are born into. Geography determines our birth nationality, admitting us involuntary to another institution known as nation-state.
We are born into this world on our own; we leave it on our own. But during life we are rarely on our own, even when alone. We exist within human organisations, whether we choose to or not, and whether we like it or not. Every hermit has family, and citizenship, even if they reject it.
Later on in life, we find ourselves in even more human institutions, through circumstance or choice. Our nations form alliances and join supra-national organisations. We accept a salaried job and are admitted to a commercial corporate organisation. Our personal interests lead us to connect with others and join hobby or sporting or religious organisations. Even the social media circles we form online are a type of impromptu virtual organisation (though they seem far from organised most of the time!) We humans voluntarily organise ourselves into groups with common purpose, common interest or values, and shared community identities.
It is no surprise really. It is natural. Since our earliest days humans have gathered together for survival. Hunters survived better when individuals learned to cooperate, fulfilling different roles – ones who would drive the prey, and ones who would spring the trap. As our groupings slowly expanded in size, and as predation evolved toward agrarianism, our organising tendencies turned toward defence and protection, from human marauders and thieves outside of the walled battlements. The present day proliferous organisational structure of the human race is simply our way of attempting to deal with the complexity of modern human life in an increasingly globalised society. As humanity proceeds, organisations will only impose further on us.
We like to think our race has evolved from those predatory days of hunting to survive, that perhaps our predatory nature has evolved into an organisational one, where organisations have become a more civilised way of handling our threat-response instincts. The modern existential threats we perceive have become global in nature, such as the climate change crisis, and as such we’re given the impression those threats can only be repelled by global organisation, superior to the agenda or wishes of any lesser organisational groups. Such organisations love to set targets, and goals, and deadlines and don’t see the hubris of trying to achieve “net zero”, be it zero emissions of a particular gas, or zero road traffic deaths. It is the delusional privilege of organisational elites to think they can remove all risk from life. But of course that’s not what it is really about. Manufactured deadlines are not meant to be met, they are meant as an authoritarian tool to coerce a momentum through manipulative fear. And they are quietly put aside when it is clear they are not — and can not be — met, in order to be replaced with yet another new target. It is about organisations validating their own existence. They have to keep convincing us of the need for them.
In reality, human nature never fundamentally changes, and organisations can simply become weapons too - tools to be used to predate on our evolved modern worlds new prey, that is ... people.
The bigger the organisation is, the more dangerous a weapon it can be, because of the greater number of people it can influence or harm. We saw during Covid times how quickly organisations we believe to be there for one purpose (such as ensuring personal freedom and social liberty) can be so quickly turned for an opposing purpose (such as enforcing limitations and prohibitions). For that same reason, the larger the organisation, the more attractive a target it is for those individuals or bad actors who would seek to dominate it, or manipulate or corrupt large groups of people.
The hazards of modern organisation is not just limited to usurpation by powerful individuals at the top, but organisation also holds an inherent danger due to the anonymity of the individuals within. Joseph Ratzinger warned of the implicit limits and dangers of our institutional structures because in them, the principle of personal responsibility easily slips into anonymity. Because no one individual has to account for what the group as a whole decides to do, it means no individual is considered responsible for what the group decides. The group spreads responsibility for decisions and takes them out of hands of individuals; majorities are products of mere chance and so hold no legal responsibility for themselves.
A third danger of organisation is in separation. When we come together in an organized grouping, we implicitly create a second group of the people who do not belong to our organisation. Exclusive communities risk dividing people into insiders and outsiders, “othering” people with a distinction that can grow and become a discrimination or even an oppression. We eliminate respectful individuality by reducing people’s identity to just membership of a particular group. Wars are begun when we clash along lines of human organisation, be it geographic, national, religious, ideological or cultural.
Our individualism gets pressurised by organisation. We can end up going along with the groupthink just to get along. Just following orders. Our membership of an organisation can be a means to coerce a uniformity of opinion or action within us that otherwise we might not submit to. We don’t like to stick out. It is a constant tension in our existence, the old story of man versus society. We like to be seen to belong, and yet we like to be recognised for ourselves and our individuality too. Individuals, as well as being subject to organisational impositions, are also contributors to organisational experience and culture. We should never consider organisations as things we are simply subjected to. Membership of an organisation gives us status, to speak for the organisation, (and the implicit responsibility that comes with that power of speaking for others). It also gives us – more importantly – the power, perhaps even the obligation, to speak with authority to that organisation.
It may seem sometimes like an organisation is an irresistible force that steers us, one whose rules we are compelled to play by. The larger the organisation membership, the further we are from the top of it, the less impactful we feel our influence is. But let us never forgot that an organisation only exists because it is a collection of individuals. Without people, it is nothing, it does not exist. And those people, including us, both define and influence every organised community they belong to. Ask yourself what organisations are you party to, and what influence you could have. Are they collaborative for the benefit of all members, or are they predatory on those outside or even inside the organisation? Do they reflect our individuality? There is one organisation I have not mentioned so far. It is one we are all members of, though none of us chose to join it. It is the human race. It is constantly open to us to influence it – and to choose to do so – in even small ways, even though we are not in it by choice. If we choose not to influence it, we fall prey to those who will.