After high school I moved away for college, and on my first visit home at the end of September, I went back on a Friday night to find friends. I walked up to the football field just after the game had ended. The stands were emptying out, people drifting off toward their cars. I remember the feeling, a still-adolescent feeling: I was shocked that the place had continued to function without me. They’d gone ahead with the school year, the football season, the turn in the weather, even though I wasn’t around. Apparently, I was just another graduate, another electron spun off into the universe.
Anyone who has worked for a large company has probably experienced something similar. There’s good old Ted, who’s been around forever, knows where everything is, can help with any kind of problem, is as integral to the functioning of the organization as a catalytic converter. Ted is a company mensch. He’s practically part of the building. But then you show up one day and Ted is gone, retired, moved, let go under hazy circumstances, and now in his place is Bill. And Bill is no Ted. Sure, he seems nice enough, capable even, but he doesn’t possess that calming mastery of the org chart that Ted did, until two weeks go by and you’re calling Bill for all the stuff you would have called Ted for. And then pretty soon, maybe not even a month later, you’re shooting the breeze at lunch, and someone says who was the guy in that cube before Bill? What was his name? You can almost see his face.
An institution is an organization that’s learned how to outlive its people. Institutions are broad structures that human beings pass through on their way to whatever comes next. And they develop rules, traditions, protocols, cultures, ways of existing that are above the people who come through them. That’s how they manage to exist through time. The people change but the institution persists.
And yes, they can be creepy and overbearing. Institutions evolve toward a Skynet-like self-awareness. There is always the potential for the culture to morph into a cult, where rules and procedures turn into a kind of ideology, and the only behavior ideology recognizes is submission. So they’re not perfect. Like anything touched by human hands, they get bent, smudged, look worse for wear, and aren’t nearly as luminous after real world use as they were in the abstract, back when it was all a daydream.
I go to the post office every day for work. It’s one of those mundane but necessary tasks, because even though most of the work can be done sitting at the computer, there are still documents that need to be sent back and forth. So everyday I check the PO box, that little metal portal into another world. And though I, like everyone, have made fun of the post office on occasion, I am essentially fond of the Postal Service as an institution. I depend on it. Its disparate outposts are a signal of its relentless reliability.
When news arrived recently of changes at the post office, instigated by the newly installed postmaster general, and if not the result of the current president then certainly congruent with his desires to inhibit voting by mail in the rapidly arriving election, I was filled with a variety of feelings. There were all the normal feelings about the integrity of the election and about how this seemed, once again, to be no way to run a railroad. But it also felt logical and predictable: our current president is a destroyer of institutions.
I’m writing this on the eve of the 2020 Republican National Convention, and this year the RNC will forgo a newly written platform, a document expressing its objectives and principles. Instead, the RNC adjourned without adopting a new platform until 2024 and stated that it supports the current president and his America First agenda.* Full disclosure: I dislike our current president.
It’s not another brick in the wall but another brick taken from a wall. Each institution he infiltrates, he destroys or remakes in his image, which is an empty facade, a building whose contents have been blown out long ago. This is not because he wants to destroy things per se (though perhaps he does?), but because he is the ultimate individual; he cannot countenance anything outside himself, anything greater than himself. He doesn’t support institutions, because he doesn’t believe in them. He believes in himself. Anything that steps to that belief is denied, until it succumbs to his personality, until it bends the knee, like the RNC, or until it breaks down because of his malignant hostility, like the post office or a number of other institutions. He might be actively engaged in the destruction of various principles and institutions as an expression of some political motivation, though that suggests some larger agenda above and beyond his own will to power, which I doubt. The reason he doesn’t like the UN is because he can’t stand it. Its persistence and existence outside and above him is anathema. He doesn’t believe anything in the world has dominion over him. He doesn’t have to listen to anybody about anything, whether it’s masks or climate change or the Federal Reserve or manners or anything. He is the ultimate authority. The potential existence of other authorities is a baffling insult. He expects people to fall in line. What else would they do? He has no empathy. He cannot see past the boundaries of himself. He can’t comprehend the feelings of others because they don’t exist. Sometimes he reads aloud words written by someone that are meant to transmit a feeling generally similar to sympathy. But these statements are always zombie-like, worse than a student reading aloud in class under duress. There is none of the self-generated pleasure he gets from free-associating, cruelty performed as a joke. I think he genuinely enjoys hearing himself talk because it reminds himself that he exists, that he is king. He’s a man who has been rewarded for doing and saying exactly what he wanted to do at whatever moment he wanted to do it. He’s got the self-awareness of a gland. It’s no accident that his real estate empire consists mainly of him putting his name on buildings. He is nothing but brand. He burns himself onto everything he touches. There is nothing outside of himself, and anything that approaches the sanctity of his fortress of individuality is mocked, condemned, corroded.
Institutions were made to exist beyond people. They were made to withstand people leaving, people dying, people retiring. They were set up so that they could persist outside these vicissitudes. There was discourse hubbub a few years ago when Mitt Romney, then presidential candidate, said that “corporations are people, too.” This was derided as idiotic and a sign of his robotic, managerial slickness. But it’s literally true! Legally speaking, corporations are treated like people. And reasonable people can argue whether or not this is a good thing, economically, legally, morally, but Romney wasn’t riffing. And the reason that corporations are thought of as individuals, in the eyes of the law, is so they are separate from the individuals who run them. They are companies that are trying to turn themselves into institutions. Did Apple die when Steve Jobs died?
The relationship between institutions and individuals is always antagonistic. I myself am comforted by the existence of institutions, rather than challenged. Perhaps that makes me simply less of a man. The question is what does one do with all those people who exist outside one’s self. Do those people actually exist?
It’s like the roadways in my town. Why are they laid out the way they are? Isn’t there a better way to get downtown? Probably. It’s idiotic that I have to drive three miles to the interstate and then head down that way. I should just be able to drive out of my driveway and plow through eight neighbors’ yards and a school in a straight line to my destination. But someone or a group of someones long ago laid out the roads. And if I’m going to participate in this society in a meaningful way, I have to refrain from deploying my freedom to drive through people’s yards because it potentially provides a more direct route. Could these roads be improved? Absolutely. To give up one’s own freedom, if just a little bit, for the sake of perpetuating an institution is to confess that other people exist. I will only get what I want through compromise. That’s the secret of society: everyone is at least a little disappointed. It makes the motor run. To improve an institution means you think it’s somehow worthwhile. By destroying institutions he is destroying the ingredients that enable society.
It’s exhausting to have to say all this in sentences. It feels so self-evident, so freshman year poly sci, so Basic. I’d much rather moon about some novel or my feelings about humidity. Part of the reason I find the post office magical is because I believe that the world visible through that little porthole actually exists, and it’s sending me notes. Do people actually think that man can give them what they want?
*The label “America First” is a lie. Trump’s agenda has always transparently been “Trump First.” Any actual benefits America the polity receives from Trump unambiguously pursuing his own self-interests are merely accidental. I hold this truth to be self-evident.