Origins of Societal Institutions

Primitive Politics

Primitive hunter-gatherer bands and nomadic pastoralists lacked institutions, being simply organised around a few families. Once agriculture developed, groups became larger and more complex to the point that they could be called societies and civilization was born. Farming generated territorial boundaries that defined the limits of governing edicts. The governing principles of these early societies was primarily driven by lusts for power, wealth and control.

See the analysis of government and politics.

These post-tribal traditional societies were characterized by:

  • autocratic leadership 
  • hierarchic top-down control
  • wealth flows to the elites
  • focus on social unity with limits on individualism
  • adherence to customs
  • single morality/religion
  • simple structure: ruler-warriors, priests, merchants-artisans, labourers-peasants.

In such societies, those in power share the bulk of whatever wealth is available. They aim for a stable, even static, social condition that maintains their high status and superior standard of living. Subjects have more or less freedom to look after their own needs. However, improving the welfare of subjects as whole, which would mean change and losses for the elites, is avoided or minimized. Coercion and propaganda control the people—at least until they rebel en masse.

Current Versions

In our modern era, authoritarian leadership avoids social turmoil by laws limiting freedom of association, by using propaganda and disinformation, and by applying bribes and force to suppress dissent. Activists and dissenters are executed, imprisoned or exiled.

Autocratic principles demand control of the media, subjugation of the judiciary, interference in academic studies, use of secret police, population surveillance, and restrictions on movement. What progressive societies would call corruption is viewed as normal, and levels of crime and violence may be either very low or very high.

Politics in such societies is operating in Stage-1 Privileged Pluralism with relatively few large organisations: government service, the military, the priesthood, bodies with monopolies over essentials like electricity and transport, big conglomerates with enormous power. Commerce may be encouraged but flourishing is patchy or limited due to the weak rule of law, lack of property rights, and the suppression of individualism and market competition.

Freedom House rates societies on a 0-100 scale for the degree of freedom experienced by the population. This rating is a suitable proxy for the strength of societal institutions e.g. in 2021, USA scored 83 while Australia scored 95.

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) does an annual survey of the state of government using a 0-10 scale. It distinguishes between democracies, flawed democracies, hybrids, and authoritarian regimes e.g. USA is categorized as a flawed democracy.

Note that elections do not automatically mean attention is given to the enlightened goal of politics—to pursue the general good and meet the social needs of citizens.
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Elections are common now in authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, like China, Cambodia, North Korea, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, Thailand. However, in the absence of rule of law and relevant institutions, even if elections are not grotesquely manipulated, they commonly fail to lead to public benefits.

Central authorities support family life and organisations, but dislike universities, charities, and campaigning bodies that generate criticism, offer alternatives and press for change. To the elites, these are alternative power centres and need suppression. As part of the desire for stasis, the home culture is idealized by government.

Less developed societies, not fully emergent from their traditional past, usually have what are called “weak” institutions. A weak institution is one that poorly meets its citizens' social needs, and cannot be easily improved. Welfare is perceived as a drain on the wealth of elites. In times of difficulty, members of the society are expected to fend for themselves and external aid is requested.

Values or Brute Power

Applying the framework of political maturation, liberal-democratic societies have matured well past primitive pluralism. The most developed have embedded the values of the legitimist, individualist and rationalist modes. In such societies, under the protection of the rule of law, individual initiative leads to specialization, innovation and thriving commerce with systems of regulation in place to ensure that the public interest is protected.

All jobs, professions, and organisations are created for a purpose. More precisely, they are based on pursuit of pre-specified principal objects (PH6L4). However, that alone is insufficient to survive. Any and all activities must also be accepted by wider society. To get this “license to operate”, the entity must explicitly and obviously meet a social need (PH6L5P), and also broadly conform with communal values (PH6KL5S). These two levels of value/purpose (L4+L5) define the mission (PsH6G24) of any social body.

Communities form because personal needs, like security or education, invariably involve others. To most effectively meet needs, provide for defence, sustain a culture, and for other historical reasons, communities coalesce into societies. Communities and societies get strength from their culture and traditional beliefs, but their development should be driven primarily by social values-L5. All too often, an artificial ideology (i.e. value system-L6) buttressed by naked power becomes dominant.

See natural social groups in Ch. 5 of Working with Values.

The Growth of Clusters

Given a political climate that fosters fair legal process and free enterprise, clusters of social bodies form around any particular social value-L5. The competitive exclusion principle means that each social body seeks to monopolize a slightly different socio-economic niche. As the social need, education for example, becomes more and more accepted and valued, the numbers of bodies claiming to serve that need expands.

From a rather simple beginning, it becomes evident that there are an enormous and ever-expanding diversity of related activities, services and products, and an enormous ever-expanding variety of customers or recipients for those. As this proliferation develops, the social value itself becomes progressively refined and endlessly sub-divided and specialized.

Because every social entity within this cluster is different to a greater or lesser degree, each will quickly start interacting to generate mutual self-serving benefit. Even if interactions are not necessary for everyday functioning, they become required to help recipients, or to gain advantage, or to resolve problems, or to handle innovations, or to lobby government.

The Emergence of an Institution

Sooner or later, bodies in the cluster will subdivide, alliances will form, training courses will be created, conferences will be set up, service-giving relationships will develop, standards will be agreed, government will get involved, legal regulations will emerge, and so on. All these internal interactions and communications increase the size of the cluster and soon generate an in-group culture with jargon, conventions, tenets and regulatory requirements that become difficult to grasp by those in wider society, even when directly on the receiving end of a service.

This self-complexifying self-organising cluster deserves the label of «societal institution» at that indeterminate point when interactions amongst those within the cluster become significantly more sophisticated than interactions with those in other clusters (or institutions) or with the general public.

At that point, we members of the public become aware that certain vital needs are being met by diverse powerful entities whose variety and extent is hard to grasp, whose knowledge-base is massive, fragmented and highly specialized, whose operations are exceedingly complicated and technical, and whose detailed regulatory framework is largely incomprehensible.

While grateful for the quality and efficiency that results, we are also often irritated, frustrated and even overwhelmed by how seemingly simple matters have become so complicated and bureaucratic.

Evolution or Regression

The process described above is one of emergence and evolution. It is not one of systematic design and planned implementation. Once a societal institution has formed, its further progress is again haphazard and evolutionary. So wrong steps may be taken with best intentions.

Example Closed:

Governments that commit to being progressive play a major role in fostering evolution. There may be a variety of constructive motivations, for example to ensure fairness, to enable innovation or to facilitate user participation.

See role of government for more.

However, a small proportion of people like to exert power and control over others for its own sake. When in government, they may more concerned to benefit themselves and their faction than with the public good. If we add the unfortunate reality that some human beings have a fear of freedom and others shirk responsibility, pressures to regress to authoritarian ways are ever-present in society.

Governments, always susceptible to such tendencies, then disrupt progress by supporting secrecy, ignoring valid recommendations, and submitting to powerful vested interests. Centralization and draconian control slowly replace intelligent consensual and self-correcting evolution.

To Recap

In politically mature societies, societal institutions evolve to meet core personal-communal needs through their large inter-linked clusters of entities with a diverse variety of missions and value-systems.

While the core needs are similar from society to society—education, health, welfare, government, economic opportunity &c—the institution’s internal values and operations will be coloured by the culture, the history, the physical setting, the stage of social evolution and other idiosyncratic factors. So the same societal institution will vary greatly amongst societies.

Originally posted: 14-Nov-2022. Last amended: 30-Apr-2023.