Bourgeois Deinstitutionalization

Why 21st-century society can no longer generate useful institutions, or even protect the ones it has.

The first 100 days of the Trump Administration have seen the deinstitutionalization of the United States, a process that began in the 1980s, accelerate. This is no longer the managed decline overseen by an upper class gradually divesting from a domestic middle one it no longer needs; this is gleeful, unpredictable destruction. The federal government, the universities, and the courts have never been bastions of leftism, but they are being eviscerated by the “populist” right wing as if they were radical and subversive—they are nearly being treated as national enemies. Institutions in desperate need of reform are, instead, being gutted or discarded; there is no reason to believe that what replaces them will be better than what we are eliminating today. It’s also happening far faster than anyone expected—even wealthy individuals who supported Trump in accord with their narrow economic interests are finding themselves upset (poor things) with the financial consequences of the destruction they did not think this 47th president would actually bring.

At the same time, useful new institutions are not being created. Aging corporations continue to decay, because they always do, but the new companies (“startups”) replacing are notorious for shady practices, vicious cultures, and low or even negative contribution to the betterment of society. It is too early to tell whether history shall judge the current period of rapid deinstitutionalization to have been, in a long-term perspective, desirable or regretted; it is nevertheless the case that we live, in the sense of the ancient curse, in interesting times—times in which institutions trusted to protect us can fail with no warning, and in which we should not expect organizations that collapse to be replaced by anything we could possibly want.

Could an era such as this one have been predicted? Yes. The timing of such events is impossible to forecast until they have actually occurred; their methods and order, however, are not new. Bourgeois capitalism and its apotheosis, neoliberalism—named thus although it shares very little in common with (also nearly extinct) U.S. centrist “liberalism”—were always bound to go this way. Collapse was always guaranteed; on this, both the left and right agree, though there is dispute regarding its etiology. The right tends to blame permissiveness and either invoke the paradox of tolerance—liberals, unable to condemn even those human expressions that deserve rejection, have no immunity to those (e.g., fascists, true sexual perverts) who operate in bad faith—or, at the opposite extreme, assert that “the left” has invented a new performative, secular intolerance in the name of “wokeness.” On the other hand, the left—the real left, not the watered-down corporate “woke” one—tends to hold the more accurate, but incomplete, view that it is capitalism’s escalating need for profit that drives systems like ours to their inevitable destruction—that the demand for escalating profit is itself is a force institutions cannot survive, rather than a symptom of loss—of-purpose and deeper decay. Still, all of us agree that bourgeois liberalism (if it ever existed as such, because anything bourgeois becomes deeply illiberal when its financial interests are threatened) has no more than a few years of life left.

I believe there is a simple reason why bourgeois institutions are, all over the world, falling apart so rapidly. The leftist argument, in which the profit motive is causative of collapse, is more correct (in my view) than the rightist one, but nevertheless only provides a partial explanation. Profit maximization is one logical endpoint of the more generic bourgeois orientation, but not the only one, and all manifestations of bourgeois thought (including those that are notionally not oriented toward profit, such as academic prestige or charitable reputation) are destined to reach the same odious end and at about the same time. So let us go deeper. What false beliefs about human nature and society does the bourgeois mindset contain?

In traditional societies—no virtue is assigned to prior or older societies simply because they are such; we cannot go back to the old ways, and we should not try, but it is important to know our social history as humans—there are people with institutional support and people without it. You are either ranked or (worse) you are unranked or (even worse) you are a slave—formally made unfree by legal institutions. Our justified hatred of hierarchies—an impulse that bourgeois culture has leveraged, in order to make us accept its own informal (but rigid) rank system—might lead us to think it is preferable to be unranked, at least in comparison to having a low assigned rank, but that is almost never the case. The unranked are those who have not yet been formally made unfree because it is unnecessary to do so; their need to survive—to earn a daily wage, to pay rent—has them so slave-like already that there is usually no point in formally enslaving them.

Medieval peasants, for example, rarely revolted because they liked being peasants—it was far better than being a day laborer or a worker in a filthy, dangerous city. Even serfs had protections; the nobles had to provide for them in times of poor weather or sickness, and they could not be sold to employers such as factories, mines, and brothels. The unranked were de facto and often soon-to-be slaves; declining wages, increasing living costs, and usury (with its own potent inflationary effect) made sure that they could be enslaved as soon as the upper classes wanted it done. The medieval era may have been one of relative social peace only because people were so clearly ranked, and because a hereditary rank system (for all the evils of such) eliminates the mostly deleterious, omnilateral competition that characterizes the “free” life of a wage worker today.

We probably never fully stopped being, in this sense, a traditional society. A man’s career is mostly predictable by what his father does; women have some social mobility, but the coarsest kind, if born with high physical attractiveness. We would love to believe we don’t live in a world like that, but we do. The net effect of all the competition that bourgeois liberal society exults is still zero—we can fight as hard as we want, but our opponents will fight just as hard, and the end result, on average, is non-advancement as the final compensation for the social and health costs of excessive work. These pushes and pulls cancel each other out—we “work hard” but so does everyone else— and the effect that remains on a person’s inevitable social position is mostly hereditary, with a small amount of luck thrown in.

Rank, of some kind, still has a massive influence; we simply pretend, in the United States, that it’s anachronistic, because meritocracy-by-assertion makes it easier to motivate workers. It costs companies nothing to claim that they choose leaders based on true merit rather than social capital; therefore, they will do so, even if their internal processes do not change.

Does that mean that bourgeois liberalism’s claim that we are all unranked—that all of us all live and die by the sword of the labor market—has no effect? No. Claims of ranklessness would not be made if they did not have effects. CEOs understand they will be less envied and less hated if it is widely believed that their salaries and work conditions are determined by a labor market (they simply managed to out-“merit” the rest of us in ways we cannot understand because we are lesser creatures) than by, as is in fact the case, processes designed to protect hereditary social rank. It is also to the benefit of the system that, for every person who stands a chance of actually becoming a big-company CEO, there are ten thousand useful idiots who will “hustle” under the delusion that they might one day be invited to join that club.

Bourgeois liberalism struggles to create institutions—it can be done, as we saw in the US midcentury, but at great expense, because in doing so they are forced to suspend the so-called “market discipline” that, in bourgeois theory, we all live under. Older traditional societies were not bashful about the fact that institutions existed (and still exist) to confer rank. More broadly, institutions exist to deliver protections—this is why people tolerate their upkeep costs, their inefficiencies, and their often backward ways. Contrary to neoclassical economic theory, human markets always diverge; there is no possibility for equilibrium if there are participants facing the severe political disadvantage of having to sell their own labor—it’s simple game theory: they are too fucked for “free” market motion to ever go in their favor. Intelligent people see that they have no future on a truly free labor market—there will always be someone willing to do the same job for less pay and under worse conditions—and therefore seek rank (or reputation, which is an informal kind of the same thing) as soon as they can get it. Thus, a professor who is productive enough in his first six years to earn membership in the club of permanent academics is granted “tenure” (rank) and (in theory) can no longer fired except in cases of severe underperformance. An artist or author who achieves representation, publication, and repute is (again, in theory) entitled never to lose these advantages because proof of sufficient creativity has been established. A “businessman” (in most cases, a private-sector bureaucrat) expects to have a job title of director by age 35 and vice president by 40 in order to have distinctions that separate him from the regular labor market, so he can move about the economy in conditions of privilege. Money itself is a protective institution of this kind—our society has decided that people who furnish numerical evidence that they have consumed less than they are judged to have produced are entitled, in retirement, to consideration they no longer have the physical capacity to demand from others. People of all social classes value stable employment, but what is “stability” in this sense? It is protection from the oscillations and, unless there is extensive state support (as there was in the midcentury) for a middle class’s existence, downward trend of the labor market. It is a form of rank. We dislike the concept of rank—we correctly see it as a source of social injustice—but, at the same time, no one wants to be a gig worker.

The bourgeois liberal myth, of course, is that we are all unranked—we are all free, we are all individual transacting units—and that we can actually trust the market to render meritocracy unto us, as if that were its divinely designed purpose rather than an accident that occasionally happens. This belief is sustainable in the context of an empire that is continually growing richer; it is unsustainable when a society reaches its natural limitations, or when technological growth ensures that the “market value” of the same human labor is destined to go down by about 6% per year. In the 1950s, when more people were winning than losing for reasons very few people understood, a belief in meritocracy in an ostensibly market-driven society was tenable. In the 2020s, when more people are losing than winning—also for reasons very few people understand—self-asserted meritocracies (such as universities) are destined to be despised.

A perfectly bourgeois institution, if one ever existed, would confer no rank. It would mercilessly reject (e.g., fire, disenroll, denationalize) people, even regardless of genuine past contribution, if it believed its future economic needs were suited by doing so. It would not even have a real CEO or real managers; it would have to be run either entirely by legalistic if-then policies (which is wildly impractical) or by artificial intelligence (and almost nobody wants this.) It would confer lasting benefit and rank on nobody. In this way, it would perfectly fair but also deeply unloveable. It would protect no one and, due to human reciprocity, no one would protect it; instead, everyone would exploit it until there was nothing left to be picked up and carried away.

In the real world, where there are no spherical cows and there are no totally bourgeois institutions, it is somewhat illegible (and must be so) who is truly protected. Organizations would be unable to function without conferring substantially above-market compensation and lasting esteem (thus, rank) on a small number of “valued” individuals whose job requires them to protect the institution’s interests and in cases where legal demands (e.g., nondisclosure and noncompetition agreements) are insufficient to enforce full alignment. Businesses, thus, turn executives into nobility not out of the kindness of their hearts—they have no kindness and, as legal abstractions, no hearts—but because there is a level at which individuals can do enough damage that the only way to win their loyalty is to genuinely and permanently elevate them above market processes. However, the two-class corporate institution, although common, is hated—morale in the inferior class, if they become cognizant (and they usually do) of their status as such, will plummet. To survive, the organization must trick workers (who, in practice, are still destined to die by the sword of the labor market) into believing they are part of a “corporate family.” These two-class businesses are cheap and, in some grotesque ways, efficient, so they will continue to proliferate, but in times of uncertainty—in times when rank is not a good predictor of who will be decisive in the organization’s upholding or abandonment—they will never be protected by their own people. They continue to exist and they shift wealth to the individuals who own them, but they serve no purpose.

It is true that we are in a time of rapid institutional dismantling, but it is not the forces against institutions, at least not solely, that are causing rapid deinstitutionalization, because those have always existed. Indeed, economically right-wing liberals—in U.S. typology, libertarians—have long argued that fast-paced institutional deletion (“creative destruction”) of the kind we are seeing now could, in fact, be beneficial if it caused better institutions to emerge in the space freshly cleared. This argument is theoretically defensible, but out of accord with what actually happens—in the 21st-century, we categorically do not see the replacement of malfunctioning institutions with better ones; instead, we see see the emergence of deformed organizations (e.g., venture-funded startups that preserve the worst traits of corporate capitalism, but none of the good ones) that ought to have been stillborn. The reason, of course, is that institutions—old and new—require protection if they are to survive, let alone reach a state in which they are capable of functioning properly. How can a bourgeois institution—either designed to protect no one (if it truly functions according to the purported ranklessness of bourgeois culture) or to protect only the few (if it follows the behavioral patterns of actual bourgeois institutions)—win the good will that would cause people to protect it? It can’t. It doesn’t deserve protection.

The era in which human society is incapable of generating new institutions is fated to end. The driving force may be rapid healing (e.g., due to conscious “de-Boomerization”; that is, reversal of trends associated with a generation notorious for atrocious social and economic leadership) or it may be total collapse. Either way, though, the downswing cannot last forever, and the inevitable result is that we will find ourselves in a post-bourgeois era.

Radical leftists—I am one; a radical is not necessarily an extremist, but is someone who believes society must be transformed at the root (radix)—have one vision for the post-bourgeois future. Fascists have a different one. I know which one I prefer, but I have no ability to forecast which one we will actually be getting. All I can say for sure is that the era of the bourgeois institution—the era in which people protect institutions that seem incapable of protecting them, due to a belief in market “meritocracy” that is no longer supportable by the evidence—is over, and there is nothing anyone can do to bring it back.