Red: These walls are kind of funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, gets so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized. They send you here for life, that’s exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyways.
-[size=75]The Shawshank Redemption[/size]
• Institution: An organization defined by established rules and by its relationships with other institutions - constructing a web of interlinking entities, making up a greater whole: Society. The walls are set….
• The authority of an institution isn’t created by the unique characteristics of the individuals participating within it – they are replaceable and expendable machine-parts fitting into, or being trained and shaped to fit into, particular roles and functions - but it is created by the nature of the institution as it has been established by its place within the whole and by its necessity within this web.
• Bureaucracy – Each member must be able to do ones duty (job) in the mechanical, unthinking, uninvolved, unaffected manner essential to the institution’s function. Thinking or getting personally involved, beyond the training necessary to successfully do ones job, is unnecessary and, if it interferes, it becomes detrimental to the individual’s integration, status and, therefore, overall sense of well-being. Thoughts are strictly policed, and this is one more reason why dumbing-down becomes a natural by-product of any institutionalization. The less thinking mind is more easily assimilated, kept in line, placated and satisfied, and so the system makes sure it produces such minds in abundance. Stupidity is a sure way towards happiness….
• Specialization – Limiting a mind’s interests and place makes it both expendable and unable to function outside the parameters of its expertise - experts are produced in abundance, so that no one of them becomes too important to the system as a whole and, through the façade of ‘knowledge equals intelligence’, promotes the idea that possessing information means possessing awareness or the ability to analyze information – ‘information equals freedom’. In fact an “expert†can only offer you his opinion, as it has been shaped and guided by institutions which he becomes the spokesperson for, on a particular small piece of reality. The expert mind isn’t, necessarily, aware of any overview, since this would distract it from its speciality and its ‘special’ social position – an expert’s self-esteem is integrated within the systemic status quo, making him an agent of it. Why would he risk this?
• An institution takes over a social role, necessary in human group dynamics, and stabilizes it by making it inflexible and unchanging. The particular individual, taking on the symbolic position of its authority, is irrelevant, since the individual can be anyone that can successfully shape himself/herself into a close enough approximation to the institutional ideal; (s)he need only embody the image of the ideal figurehead and play the part sufficiently to be promoted upwards by those he convinces. Therefore an institution is a conservative construct, which forces its participating individual parts to adapt to its premises, and so gain the symbolic air of power, or perish in quarantined oblivion.
• Regimentation - All institutions use a controlled and strictly enforced regimentation to establish discipline. Time schedules, regulations, duties, responsibilities, constant distraction, training and physical/mental effort are used to keep minds fatigued, involved and in place - unable to consider any other possibility or lacking the energy to do so. Through this tyrannical control over an individual’s every moment, deciding everything from feeding time to recreation time, keeps the individual in a constant state of anxiety and imbalance; making it vulnerable and easily manipulated. Leisure is the systems worse enemy……It allows the mind to question. The roots of Nihilism……
• Assets – Resources and their control have always been at the root of all human power and sense of value. An institution’s authority resides on its control over access to resources, which it doles out as reward or restricts as punishment for individual ‘good/bad behaviour’. It was when nature was tamed that man became trainable, along with it.
• When did man lose his confidence in his own personal perceptions of the world? When did he become ashamed of uttering a word that was not popularly acceptable or sanctioned by some institutional authority? When did man begin fearing error or of suffering the consequences of his own evaluations - unburdening himself from personal responsibility in this way?
• The problem with institutionalization is that it replaces individual effort with communal effort and makes a mind dependant on common decrees and proclamations from popularly accepted authority figures, with the appropriate institutional proofs of dependability/respectability, until the mind ceases being capable of functioning outside its comfort zones – the mind loses the ability to think when thinking is done for it; it then becomes stuck in adolescence where self-responsibility is deferred to another entity, a mother/father figure, that now decides how each individual is judged.
• When information is plastic and can be interpreted or spun into whatever conclusion serves the dominant social environment’s stability, then it becomes important that whoever does the interpreting and explaining, on its behalf, be rooted in this very system’s framework and have a vested interest in its continuance.
• Truth – The ambiguity and imprecision of any assumption makes it all the more malleable and useful to a group. It is in how one asks a question and how one approaches a conclusion that determines its nuances and insinuations. It is because of this that ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ becomes invaluable constructs of institutional monopolies.
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.†– [size=75]Arthur Schopenhauer[/size]
• An institution takes on the dynamics of any clan or organization. It acquires its own laws and literature – It taken on its own language and communication code – It establishes its own holy figures and sacred scripture – It creates respectable and unrespectable information sources – It relies on faith. Has not, even philosophy, become institutionalized?
• Restriction – A sure sign of institutionalization is how it is unable to think outside its own premises (the box). In the effort to filter out unwanted inanities and destructive, often distracting elements, a mind forces itself to limit its breadth of exploration by limiting itself to specific, mutually respectable perspectives and sources of information. In the process it becomes dependant on cultural authorities and institutional power. Finally the mind ceases exploring nature, reality, truth, directly and simply becomes a commentator on established perspectives, which it endlessly deconstructs and takes position in relation to, thinking…that it is thinking.
• Initiation – Access to any organization is restricted and strictly enforced. The individuals allowed in must display their value to the whole by acquiring the correct demeanour and prerequisite attributes, from the correct institutions, that will enable them to be integrated and considered ‘peers’.
• The walls are not always physical. Mental parapets are erected when idols become authorities that tyrannize our thoughts and we fail to speak a sentence if it is not in relation or in reference to them. We no longer comment on reality, as we perceive it, but find ourselves obsessed with commenting on what others have agreed about reality, on our behalf. Like all walls, their bulk creates a screen between the observer and the distant, unknown horizons and, sometimes, dangerous frontiers; it makes itself the prevailing subject matter.
All alone, or in twos,
The ones who really know you,
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand,
Some gather together in bands,
The bleeding hearts and artists,
Make their stand.
And when they’ve given you their all,
Some stagger and fall.
After all it’s not easy,
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall.
[size=59]Pink Floyd[/size]