Dispatch #18
🏛️ Institutio institutato v. institutio institutans: the actual corporeal organization v. the unobservable but inferrable processes giving rise to actual institutions.
An institution is a sustained collective fiction, a narrative sustained by the consensus of its members. An organization collectively builds a model of the way the world works. This model is constantly tested by interactions with outside forces and internal stresses. A well-grounded model should perform superiorly to a poorly-grounded model in the absence of strong disequilibrating forces (which may be social, regulatory, or market-based). This collective psychological fiction requires curation of an internal culture and an external brand. The culture determines what sorts of actions by members are allowed, the limits of roles and rules, and the penalties for overstepping those bounds or remaining too much within them. The brand is a self-conscious persona assumed by the organization for the purpose of luring in customers and contracts.
Epistemological hygiene is key to adaptation to external and internal reality, without which an organization becomes delusional and morbid. We would like to define epistemic hygiene as "maintenance of belief in true things." However, this fails as a program because we do not agree completely on what true things are, and there are strong domain dependencies introduced—thus, collective fiction. Another attempt at definition is "maintenance of metaphysically-compatible rigor and consistency in thought processes." Epistemic hygiene is a matter of "drinking clean water and washing your hands regularly"—that is, only consuming high-quality epistemic quantities and regularly auditing and updating an organization’s internal psychic materiel. Much like personal hygiene, the results of good epistemic hygiene are apophatic or asketic in nature, affording the same pleasure as a clean room and the same utility as a sharpened and oiled blade.
Keeping in mind that a thought is the product of thinking, much as a cloud is the result of condensation, one must distinguish methodological processes from teleological products (institutio institutato v. institutio institutans, the actual corporeal organization v. the unobservable but inferrable processes giving rise to actual institutions). We group these roughly into methodology and ontology–epistemology (OE).
Epistemic hygiene is a matter both of group behavior and of personal practice. It is clear that one can have good epistemic hygiene and believe patently false or absurd things. However, a good system of epistemic hygiene promotes improvement and coherence in the belief system, implying that with certain foundational principles (such as the canon of parsimony and the use of logical abduction) one should be able to tighten up the system into something like truth.
A cognitively sovereign organization is capable of maintaining its own memespace for members to interact. At the extreme ends of cognitive sovereignty, one has the cultist and the milquetoast. Visionary founder effects like Steve Jobs’ infamous “reality distortion field” can form significant parts of cognitive sovereignty, as can the right hyperreal objective. Strong enculturation correlates highly with cognitive sovereignty; weak enculturation (as when executives pass smoothly between broadly-equivalent roles at multinational corporations) correlates with cognitive thralldom.
As epistemic hygiene and cognitive sovereignty mutually reinforce each other, the feedback loop can be bolstered from both directions. Cultivation of “clean” inputs with analogues of political hegemony within an organization’s internal culture render an organization capable of engaging and correcting unsuitably deviant processes. In extremis, an organization may play host to internal cabals with incompatible objectives (κράτος ἐν κράτει).
An organization may maintain compatibility between its publicly stated objective and its true objective (open), or it may maintain a façade (closed, kayfabe). Without priviliged information, it is difficult to tell if an organization acting out of concert with its public objective is in fact closed or just dysfunctional (sclerotic, unfocused, akratic, etc.). Furthermore, internal cabals may execute a program of institutional capture and substitute their own objectives for the original intent of founding. This may happen across generational succession or by wresting control of and occupying key roles.
Emergent maladaptive phenomena, such as mission creep or internal coup attempts, must be regularly and rigorously guarded against.
Au contraire, an institution is a sustained collective. If around a fiction, it dies. If around a truth, the opposite.