Institutional rationality

We might imagine that systems can think. We must remember they cannot.

1.

It’s not us, it’s the bank. A bank isn’t like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn’t like a man either. That’s the monster.

Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

The quotation above is taken from the fifth chapter of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It is a passage to which I return often, as it speaks to something both infernal and universal, that often stirs right at the edges of our sight.

Here Steinbeck is grasping something that, back in the early 20th century, was still gestating and is now more than fully-formed. He saw this tendency we have to disappear within our institutions, and to imagine that these institutions can and should do our thinking for us. It is a dangerous hallucination, and often a fatal one.

2.

My friend David Dark has spent a good deal of time developing his robot soft exorcism hypothesis, which is a model for understanding those who feel trapped into certain forms of duty that hurt actual persons. As I understand it, “the robot” he refers to here is a machine designed to produce expected outcomes. A robot is a mechanism to manage or eliminate surprise. If necessary, the robot will be commanded to eliminate surprise by force—but the key is, it’s not the robot doing this, but the person in the robot, committed to playing the role.

The robot is, I think, very similar in its structure to what Steinbeck called the monster. “Men made it, but they can’t control it.” Or, at least, we tell ourselves we can’t control it.

Whar David Dark calls the robot, and what Steinbeck calls the monster, I am here calling institutional rationality. It is the set of extended relationships that make up large scale social structures. We get involved in an institution, and we can start to feel obligated to certain perform behaviors and to take certain actions. Outside the robot, the monster, the institution, we would not take these actions. In fact, when we are outside, we might even be willing to fight against the robot, the monster, the institution. But something happens to us when we are inside. We feel a shift in perspective. We feel the pull of the monster on us.

So we place the ‘needs’ of the institution at the center, and keep re-centering them, despite the cries of actual suffering persons in our midst. Because saying “the robot needs this” lets the driver off the hook. Just doing their duty, after all. Just maintaining order—even as the order continues or at least ignores the suffering of actual persons.

But re-centering the needs of the suffering brings on the possibility of unexpected outcomes. The hope comes in asking, “can the driver of the robot be convinced to deliver an unanticipated outcome?” It is both the hardest and the easiest thing in the world, you see, because the robot does not want anything.

It cannot. The robot, the monster, the institution: it doesn’t think.

But we do.

3.

My glasses do not think. However, I think differently with my glasses that I do without them. My automobile does not think. Nevertheless, I think differently when I am driving my car than when I am walking on the sidewalk, or even from when I am a passenger in someone else’s car.

Donna Haraway and K. Wayne Yang have both developed ideas of cybernetics, inviting us to think about the porous barrier between some concept of our humanity and its augmentation through technologies. We humans think differently with this augmentation. It is important, however, to remain scrupulous that the other side of this relation, the technology side, does not, in itself, think.

We can convince ourselves that the institution does think. That is what the men in The Grapes of Wrath are saying:

The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

A fancy name for the process I’m talking about here is “parasociality.” We imagine that some inanimate object has intentions, or consciousness. Or another way to talk about it is to say we are anthropomorphizing the institution, attributing human qualities to the social structure.

Due to parasociality, we often will imagine that these technologies participate in some form of thinking independent of us and our active thinking. This is never the case (my glasses do not think, my car does not think) but the hallucinatory field of parasociality can be strong and convincing. Especially when the technology has been given quasi-human features, such as a mock-face, or interactive politeness, we can beging to imagine an interiority that the object or technology simply does not have and will never have.

This parasociality becomes especially disorienting when we are interacting with large scale social structures. Institutions can certainly seem to have intentions, interests in obfuscation or self-preservation, and a kind of intelligence. These parasocial hallucinations can be quite strong (indeed, when you read any story by Franz Kafka, they are palpable in their insidious protagonism), which makes it all the more important to remember, in every moment, that technologies cannot think, and that institutions are nothing more than hyperscaled social technologies.

What, then, is the thinking part? As ever, the thinking happens with the people operating these institutions. The thinking resides with the flesh-and-blood persons in the hyperscale social technology. However, as we observed above with the example of glasses or the automobile, it is certainly the case that we think differently when we are interacting with these technologies. In the same way we could observe a kind of “automobile rationality,” we can observe various forms of “institutional rationality.” That is, we can observe distinct ways that we think differently, as a result of a certain tangent of relation towards an institution as a hyperscale social technology.

For example, a person might have a distinct rationality in play if they approach the a healthcare institution as someone who needs care to survive, and may discover pressures to adopt a different sort of rationality if they are in a leadership position in the healthcare institution and their job performance review is tied to maximizing profits (which might well be tied to the denial of certain forms of care). At no point, however, is the institution itself doing the thinking, despite the protests of those who are actively benefiting from their proximity to the institution.

4.

We must resist at every turn the temptation to anthropomorphize institutions, or to give them some kind of metaphysical agency. We can begin to imagine that an institution has volition or that institutions act as volitional agents apart from the persons who hold positions of authority in those institutions.

This is not to say that only individuals exist. There is definitely an intra-action effect that manifests around the collective institution. But this is not the same as saying along with Margaret Thatcher that there is no culture, only individuals.

Now why, you may ask, do institutions default to this kind of blinkered legibility, and these tactics of isolation? I argue that they do so because the logic of an institution is directed exclusively to the preservation of the institution by any means necessary.

This is not some nefarious conspiracy. It is the very logic of how institutions are conceived and constructed, using instrumental reason in an economic environment predicated on predicable futures. No surprises and efficiency are the ruling logics.

Human problems are complex, and a single individual can have a number of intersectional traumas and injuries that need attention. (I think about the unhoused friends of my family, and the very complex difficulties they have).

Institutions are designed to not see humans in their complexity, individually or collectively. Rather, by their nature institutions simplify and divide human complexity into legible, manageable, and often ignorable categories.

And I don’t mean when institutions are failing that they do this. Rather, this happens when institutions are working. That’s why reform is often so difficult - even when the problems are well known. It is hard to reform something that is working as designed.

Abandoning our agency to the institution is the path of Adolph Eichmann. It is the foundational exchange needed to create instrumental nihilism.