Institutional Decay

How societies lose what they try to preserve the most over time?

Let’s start by thanking Samuel P. Huntington and Francis Fukuyama for coming up with the concept of institutional decay. Basically the idea is that whatever institutions we build as society: say judiciary, kingdoms, universities, elections, currency, banking, security forces, etc to serve some of the core needs of the society, eventually stop doing what they are supposed to do. If nothing else it tells us to question our institutions and help in keeping them relevant over time. Let’s say institutions need institutional maintenance.

Photo by Jessica Favaro on Unsplash

All institutions have some charters. They are solutions to some problems. What we mean by institutional decay is that over time the institutions will stop serving the people and end up serving different masters. Instead of upholding their values, they will use the excuse of those very values to proliferate the opposite. We will now go through some examples to build some intuition around the concept.

Kingdoms are nice since one needs to pay taxes to one person every year and the taxes are equal or fair by some definition. The problem it solves is that of extortion by many people who claim to be kings. Since everything is king’s property, he takes care of all of it by preventing unlawful activities and standing up for the common man. Kings by definition are required to be just and good! Otherwise they are not the solution but the problem itself. Institutional decay predicts that kingdoms will eventually becomes extortion business.

Most civilisations believe in the divine justice which renders any form of judiciary totally useless and unwanted. What is perhaps wanted out of judiciary composed of people is simply the speed of judgement, otherwise judgement day is anyway promised. Institutional decay predicts that justice will eventually get delayed, reaching the same timelines as divine justice.

Why?

All institutions are made up of words. It is impossible to have an institution without having its well defined definition. Whatever the institution wants to accomplish would require more words to come up with rules and procedures designed to bring consistency into how the institution works.

Let W be language corpus used to define the institution. Over time language evolves and we now have say W’ words available in the language corpus. W’ may have more words than W. Consider a question asked in language corpus W’ which uses words which are not in W? Chances are that it is impossible to answer this question purely in words W, unless and until every new word in W’ can somehow be translated into some sentences in W. If not, the rules have been bended.

For example: Hate speech may be punishable when broadcasted, as the media owner is responsible for deciding the content. But on social media, hate speech spreads via sharing by individuals. Should we treat social media posts as broadcast? It is a tricky question. Social media is not private conversation but it is also not a broadcast medium. Moreover it could be treated as a broadcast medium for someone who has 100m followers but not really applicable to someone with 100.

The key message is that any set of rules defined in some language state W, lose their meaning and coherence when confronted with new questions asked in new words.

Rules themselves have no rules to detect their own incompetence in matters that are beyond their reach.

How should we punish anti-national people? Most of our laws have no definition of anti-national. Anti-national sounds like a person who should be punished. But likely definition of anti-national is simply who doesn’t follow the laws of the nation. It can only be judged by a court. Anyone who is in jail for some crime they committed against any citizen, is anti-national. The question: ‘how should we punish anti-nationals’ questions the competence of the whole of the legal framework of the country by citing as crime what is actually an act of judgement.

Institutions decay because they are made up of words. They are defenceless against new words. They are utterly incapable of detecting the language drift that renders them meaningless. Sadly there is no antidote for this problem. Institution without words are not institutions by their inherent lack of definition and on the other hand, their very act of defining themselves make them vulnerable to language drift and oblivious to their own decay.