Our embrace of individuals over institutions isn’t serving us well

In the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber noted that sweeping industrialization would transform how societies worked. As small, informal operations gave way to large, complex organizations with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, leaders would need to rely less on tradition and charisma, and more on organization and rationality.

He also foresaw that jobs would need to be broken down into specialized tasks and governed by a system of hierarchy, authority, and responsibility. This would require a more formal mode of organization—a bureaucracy—in which roles and responsibilities were clearly defined. Power would be entrusted to institutions, not individuals.

Yet today, according to Gallup, our faith in institutions has been shattered. From political institutions to schools to big business, support has fallen precipitously, and now only the military and small business enjoy majority support. In essence, the process Weber described has been reversed: we’ve discarded institutions and embraced individuals. It is not serving us well. 

How Institutions Shape Societies

In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. Today, regarded as the seminal work of capitalism, it wasn’t seen that way at the time (the term did not exist in common usage). Rather, it was a powerful critique of mercantilism, the dominant economic model at the time, which sought to accumulate a country’s resources through promoting exports and minimizing imports. 

Yet Smith pointed out that the wealth of a nation lies in what it produces, not what it can sock away in vaults. Moreover, he argued that when wealthy merchants have the opportunity, they tend to corrupt political systems in order to extract more wealth for themselves, and that free markets are the most effective way to allocate resources productively.

More recently, economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson build on Smith’s ideas in Why Nations Fail. They explain why the fate of nations rests less on innate factors such as geography, culture, or climate and more on the quality and types of institutions they build: inclusive institutions or extractive institutions.

Inclusive institutions protect property rights broadly across society, establish fair competition, and reward innovation. Extractive institutions, on the other hand, concentrate wealth in the hands of a small elite who exploit the broader population. These elites control resources and use state power to enrich themselves at society’s expense.

In other words, the wealth of nations is linked to the well-being of their people and this is largely a function of institutions. We depend on schools to educate, corporations to produce, governments to serve, and the media to inform. The health of a society is inextricably tied up in the health of its institutions. 

Institution Building And Institutional Capture

Great leaders are remembered for the institutions they create. Napoleon is remembered for his civic code as much as for his military victories. Franklin Roosevelt will always be associated with the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson with the Great Society. We recognize great industrialists like Walt Disney not just for their individual deeds, but for the organizations they left behind. 

Autocrats understand that their power is directly a function of their ability to control or influence institutions. Many of these, of course, are political institutions, such as ministries, parliaments, and courts. Many others, such as corporations, religious organizations, educational institutions, and the media, are not. 

That’s why when Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in Russia, he moved quickly to consolidate private media under Gazprom, install his own oligarchs and cultivate a close partnership with the Orthodox Church. Power is never monolithic, but distributed across institutions. To control a society, you need to control its institutions. 

Pro-democracy activists often employ a similar strategy. They target institutions that are important to the regime. For example, the Serbian activist group Otpor targeted the police with an elaborate strategy that both hampered their efforts and gradually recruited them to join the cause. When major protests broke out after an attempt to steal an election, the key security forces defected and joined the protestors. 

As Dostoevsky explained in The Grand Inquisitor, there will always be a conflict between churches and their messiahs. If people truly love the messiah, they won’t need priests to provide mystery and authority. They would be free to pursue truth for themselves. 

The Erosion of Institutional Authority

In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” and vowed to unleash the private sector. What followed was not a renaissance of institutional strength, but a steady erosion of it. His deregulation led to the Savings and Loan crisis. Then came the dot-com bubble and crash, two long and destructive wars, the Great Financial Crisis, and the Covid pandemic.

Each time there was a villain to execrate: Big Business, Wall Street, Neocons, the Military-Industrial Complex, Big Banks, Big Pharma, the media, and of course, nameless government bureaucrats (sometimes also known as public servants). As the Gallup data clearly shows, we no longer trust our institutions.

It is, in a strange sort of way, like The Grand Inquisitor in reverse. With no more churches to worship, we’ve gone in search of messiahs: demagogues, tech billionaires, podcast hosts, and many others. We’re not craving altars. We seek parasocial relationships, hoping that our personal saviors will free us from institutional authority. 

The difference today is that we are often interacting with institutions without even knowing it. As the Filipino activist Maria Ressa has long documented, nation states are fighting an active information war, seeding our conversations on social media with divisive messaging, then amplifying the response with massive bot farms. Those tech oligarchs and podcast hosts aren’t just passive observers, but often actively pursuing an agenda for their own benefit. 

What we’re left with is the worst of both worlds: less freedom and less prosperity. 

The End Of History All Over Again

In the 1990s, Western-style liberal democracy was triumphant. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Cold War had been won. Teams of diplomats and consultants rushed to spread the Washington Consensus, an agreed-upon set of reforms that poor countries were pressured to undertake by their richer brethren.

Francis Fukuyama noted at the time that we had reached an endpoint in history, when one model had achieved dominance over all others. Yet even as he laid out the rational case, he invoked the ancient Greek concept of thymos, or “spiritedness,” to warn that even at the end of history, some would insist on going their own way, no matter the consequences. 

The truth is that every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution and the pendulum will continue to swing until there can be some agreement about shared values and how to move forward. Today, we can see the consequences. Populists aren’t so much “anti-elite” as they are anti-institution, and today’s media environment rewards those who attack them. The result is a world that feels far more divided and dangerous than it did even during the Cold War.

Our mistake was that we were far too triumphant about a “unipolar world” to recognize that we needed to redesign our institutions to adapt to a new era. We are still largely living in a society governed by postwar institutions designed for how the world was nearly 80 years ago—no Internet, no cheap air travel, global GDP roughly five percent of what it is today.

Today, much like after World War II and in 1989, we are in the midst of a fundamental realignment. To build a different future, we need to rethink our institutions—what values we want to embed in them and what our relationship to them should be. How should schools educate? Corporations produce? Governments serve? And the media inform?

We don’t need saviors or messiahs. We need to redesign and rebuild institutions that can serve and sustain us for the 21st century.