Articles arranged by date - Shaman Ross Bishop

Institutionalization

by Ross Bishop

Because rationalism has no philosophical base it can only deal with life symptomatically. Problems that emerge from the philosophical core of a society are simply beyond the scope of rational comprehension. Rationalism creates solutions to symptoms and then institutionalizes them. But dealing with a symptom, i.e., street gangs or criminal recidivism cannot be successful because it does not address the underlying causes, such as the failure of social values, of which Western society has been stripped, interestingly enough, by rationalism. We try to fix crime after there is a robbery, mend the body after someone is sick, deal with urban decay after the cities fall apart, manage pollution after the air and rivers are fouled, catch drunks once they are out on the highway and deal with sexual problems after the rape; but we are playing catch-up, perennially applying band-aids to the symptoms of problems we cannot, or do not wish to, comprehend.

When an idea is institutionalized, organizing it brings about an inherent loss of energy and vision which eventually kills the original idea. The institution becomes more concerned with survival than with its creating purpose. The institution's need to survive guts the courage from its people. Bureaucrats the world over spend their days ducking risks and protecting their rears rather than courageously facing the problems they are charged with. They have little choice, this is what institutional living demands.

The concern for survival closes off the organization's original source of vitalizing energy - the exploration of that which is new. Discovery is born out of vitality, and thus creates independence and zeal. Independence is threatening to organizational stability and organizations work very hard to dampen discovery and innovation. Consider the energy of Plato's great school at Crotonar or Pythagoras' Mystery School and compare them with modern education. When you learn, you learn externally from another, and therefore become dependent. Individual thought and exploration are discouraged. In the 1960's and 70's NASA was a hotbed of development and technological innovation. Today overburdened with bureaucracy and budgetary sensitivities it wallows on the shore of exploration like a great beached whale. Governmental bureaucracies are not alone. Every major religion and corporation suffers from the same constraining influences of dogma and belief. When a company wants real innovation it creates a "skunk works" an independent group of bright people freed from bureaucratic constraints.

W.I. Thompson pointed out that one of the great failings of the 20th century has been our failure to maintain personal values in our institutions. We have lost what little we had in business, government and education, and we seem to be on a path to obliterate them from our relations with each other. "Let's do lunch." Through our rational duality we divide the world into "good guys and bad guys," and we punish the bad guys and put them in jail, at least in theory. But crime in the U.S. is a class affair. It is a blue collar, lower class thing. White collar criminals are rarely prosecuted and do not serve hard time when they are. Bank robbers steal thousands, white collar criminals steal millions, but after all, the bankers went to the right schools . . . We know that prisons do not work, the evidence is overwhelming. Convicted felons return immediately to crime upon release. The very few "victories" the system has are lost in the mind-blowing din of its failures. We just do not know what else to do, but heaven forbid that we should change our values! Prison populations have quadrupled over the last 20 years, yet no one feels safe. The concept of police is a total failure -- the average criminal commits at least 12 serious crimes in the year he is caught. It is not the fault of the police, the rational framework offers few other options. People are fed up, so government will build more jails and hire more judges and police, creating more criminals and more crime.

Rationality does not allow society the latitude to approach moral dilemmas like abortion from a moral perspective. Although problems of this kind can be extremely divisive, rational solutions simply cannot address their causes. These problems are moral ones, they have no rational solutions, and thus the difficulties escalate. The Civil War was the rational response to the problem of slavery and the differing political beliefs of the North and South. The full force of The Government of The United States was behind The Emancipation Proclamation and similar laws, yet 100 years later, Martin Luther King Jr. had to pick up the gauntlet of human equality and take it to the streets. His battle was fought in Selma and Little Rock, but it was won in the living rooms of America. The same was true regarding the protests over the War in Viet Nam. Social change is not a rational process. Watts, Washington, Newark and Detroit burned, people in East LA rioted, and all we did was to send in the National Guard. We did not, perhaps did not want to, understand the problems.

Street gangs supporting the drug trade have institutionalized themselves on to the national scene over the last few years. Places once as remote and serene as Des Moines and Omaha have felt their impact. For many kids the gang serves as family, the only place where they can find fellowship, respect and a place to belong. You often hear the word "love" used by gang members. Sometimes the gang is the only place they can find it. That is a truly sad commentary on the state of our society.

It is interesting how "unrational" rational problem solving often becomes. While the government conducts a massive "war on drugs," liquor and tobacco (which are also addictive) rip great holes in our social fabric, kill thousands and thousands of people, create a huge public health care expense, while the government looks the other way. But, we cannot blame this entirely on rationality. (It is related more to the lack of morality from a society stripped of its spirituality.) Liquor and tobacco are big industries and their political clout is considerable.

Drug abusers need help, not jail. Sixty percent of the 1.4 million Americans in jail today are convicted of drug offenses (in 1970 it was 16%). Study after study has demonstrated that by any standard of comparison, treatment is 10-20 times more effective than incarceration, but we do nothing to help the user. It is not politically popular and we do not want to admit the existence of our own social failure. These "derelicts of the system" embarrass us. Compassion is not a part of the militaristic mind set.

Rationality does not recognize human needs, it recognizes only things. We tried prohibition, and it was an absolute disaster, but the rational approach is so ingrained in Western thinking that we can do little else. We also continue to look to government for solutions to our moral dilemmas, another ongoing mistake.

The limitation of institutionalized rational thinking brings to mind a story: One night a gentleman was walking down the street and came upon a man who was on his hands and knees under a street light, searching for something. The man was drunk and not being very successful in his search. When asked, the drunk mumbled that he was looking for his car keys. The gentleman helped with the search but the keys were nowhere to be found. Finally he asked the drunk, "Well, exactly where did you lose your keys?" The drunk replied, "I lost them up in the alley." "Well why don't you look up there?" asked the gentleman. The drunk replied "I can't see anything up there, it's too dark. There is more light out here." Institutions tend to rigidify thinking around established concepts and put their energies "where the light is" even though the real solutions are in the dark, up in the distant alley. The FDIC spent $733 million of your tax dollars in attorney's fees to recover $200 million from the S&L debacle of the last decade.

A revealing example of institutionalized rational problem solving is the school system in Kansas City. Beset by racial problems and frightful student performance, the city's school board persuaded the citizenry to spend a whopping $1.2 billion to overhaul inner city schools. The board built new schools, upgraded buildings, installed computers, gave teachers raises, built a wonderful performing arts center and athletic facilities and spent $32 million to bus kids so that they could racially mix these wonderful new facilities. These are the rational solutions that the institutional mentality applies to problems every day. The result? Virtually no change in student performance, dropout rates or racial disharmony. Things actually got worse.

The only bright spot in the Kansas City program was the Martin Luther King Middle school which received very little of the board's beneficence. The principle of the school did two simple things: first, he made parents sign a contract that their children would show up for school, and do their homework, and secondly, he required students to wear uniforms. By involving parents in their children's education and removing class and gang clothing distinctions, the students of this school posted remarkable improvement while the rest of the Kansas City school system floundered. It is not likely that the educational bureaucracy will be able or willing to learn the simple lesson of this successful school. The people who run the Scholastic Aptitude Tests lowered, after 42 years, the S.A.T.'s scoring curve in order to compensate for the embarrassment of modern American education.

The rational bureaucratic mentality can see from point A to point B, but after that, things start to get murky. A while ago authorities at the Wisconsin State Prison refused to deliver a copy of The Progressive magazine to an inmate because it contained an article on how to make a hydrogen bomb. Returning the magazine, a prison official noted that the article presented "a probable hazard to the peace, order, and safety of the institution and the inmate." It is doubtful that the inmate could have acquired the billions of dollars necessary to build a hydrogen bomb, and if he had, that he could have concealed the vast industrial complex necessary to build the super weapon in his 8' X 10' cell. This emphasis on physical solutions to human woes illustrates what G.K. Chesterton described as "The huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul."

Even with prison recidivism at all time highs it is unlikely we will ever hear much about the following two programs again. The entrenched prison mentality runs too deeply for wardens and other prison bureaucrats to think about sacrificing their own jobs. In Nebraska there is a program in which juvenile offenders are educated and taught independent living and family reconciliation strategies. It boasts a 50 percent reduction in recidivism. In New Hampshire juvenile offenders are offered the chance to do community service work for local businesses or nonprofit agencies instead of going to jail, again resulting in very low recidivism rates. Because they contravene established thinking, they will receive little serious consideration by the establishment.

The biggest failing of institutionalization is that it destroys the natural web of connectedness between people and society. The major problems facing Western society today: drug and alcohol abuse, street gangs, welfare dependency, emotional stress and depression, urban decay, white collar crime, political corruption, educational failure, pollution, sexual and physical abuse; all stem from the destruction of social values that used to hold society together.