How the Institutionalization of Society Can Limit Innovation and Creativity
In the 1970s, Ivan Illich described how, in our institutionalized society, people’s immaterial needs are redefined as needs for commodities by the institutions which hold a monopoly on the provision of them. Because of this, we are indoctrinated to confuse process with substance. Illich said, “Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.”
When I first read Illich, I felt that many of my own intuitions about the world around me somewhat confirmed. For so many of us, from a young age, when we have conversations with adults about the world, they teach us to confuse process with substance. I think that this inadvertently teaches us deference to the status quo. Because we are bypassing questions about the actual substance behind issues, and aren’t thinking from first principles about topic like safety, learning, health, community life, meaningful work, etc. or whatever we are passionate about, we aren’t thinking enough about how to channel our efforts towards the kind of endeavors that would really take our society forward. We aren’t thinking coherently about how to create a world that might be significantly better or different. We are subtly guided to believe that such thinking is useless and you might as well just conform to the world as it is.
Steve Jobs touched on this issue when he said, “When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world…Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it.” My sense is that this kind of culture is more suited to some temperaments than others. Plenty of people are perfectly fine with this while others are not.
This confusion of process with substance perpetuates the status quo and existing power structures. As we are receiving this programming, it can feel like the world is closing in on us. Again, I think that to some people this feels safe, and to others it feels suffocating. Neither experience is right or wrong, but both are valid and need to be understood. Unfortunately, the latter tends to get marginalized.
As Illich argued, one of the main ways we are indoctrinated to confuse process with substance is by spending a majority of our early years in the school system. Because we are not really able to question whether school (a monumental life experience) is actually meeting our needs, we become indoctrinated to accept the status quo in general. Illich said, “Once a man or woman has accepted the need for school, he or she is easy prey for other institutions. Once young people have allowed their imagination to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort. “Instruction” smothers the horizon of their imaginations…They will no longer be surprised, for good or ill, by other people, because they have been taught what to expect from every other person who has been taught as they were. This is true in the case of another person or in the case of a machine.”
A lot of kids experience this existential panic as they feel their destiny becoming carved up by the school system and their autonomy taken from them. Their life priorities are being handed to them by a massive, impersonal institution and they are not spending their time figuring out who they are, what they value, and how they want to contribute to the world. When they worry about why they are being shaped in this way, they are told that “this is what one does” and “this is how it works”, and get the message that if they persist in this line of thinking there will be hell to pay. They likely face the threat of punishment or of being pathologized (which has severe long-term negative consequences). So they are conditioned to accept the world as it is, which is the enemy of creativity and innovation.
And just to be clear, this isn’t to say that we should do away with institutionalization completely. I think it would be difficult for most of us, including myself, to imagine such a radically different society that we are confident would work well (though Illich certainly tried and made some proposals). My intention is merely to raise an issue with it that we might want to be aware of. Any social or political arrangement will involve tradeoffs, and we should seek to expand our awareness of even the best situation. So this isn’t to demonize the status quo institutional arrangements.
In addition to the opportunity costs of confusing process with substance, I believe it can also enable scary and dangerous acts. If particular individuals become so incapable of thinking about the substance of issues and think only in terms of process and existing institutions, then horrific acts could be easily rationalized by falling under a category defined by an institution. For example, there is something called the “troubled teen industry”, where thousands of kids are exposed to mental, and sometimes, physical torture and are then brainwashed to blame themselves for the consequences of the abuse. Rather than meeting the kids’ actual needs, their needs are defined according to the needs of the institutions and environments that didn’t serve them well, and thus, horrific abuse is redefined as “therapy”. These things go decades without seeing the light of day, because the professionals in the ecosystem that oversee this (mental health professionals, administrators, educational consultants, etc.) have been socialized and incentivized to ignore the substance of what is actually happening.
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