Institutional failure and the polycrisis

The Exchange expounds….

it seems like a daily occurrence that something dramatic, important, and problematic sits right in front of me and honestly, I’ve just sort of learned to live with it. Pandemic? Economics? Politics? Climate? AI? Clean Water? War in Ukraine? Violence? Civil rights? Rule of law? Whatever.

It actually doesn’t make any difference whatsoever what your particular reality tunnel looks like or what party you donate money to; there’s just no question that the dominant form of political/economic structure — democratic capitalism — is facing a polycrisis, a term likely popularized by historian Adam Tooze from Columbia University. 

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We desperately need the power of collective intelligence and distributed cognition (not to mention resource management) that functional, positive-sum institutions can provide, at the same time few of us believe those institutions are functional and positive-sum.

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The problem with corporations is that, like all institutions, they are not themselves inherently intelligent. The other problem with corporations is that they are a structure that exists not with a mandate to make the world a better place but to make money for shareholders. In fact, most companies explicitly have in their charter that they exist to make money doing a thing. There’s nothing wrong with that mandate, but it does fall short of another function that institutions have traditionally held: projecting wisdom forward through time.

Elite mindset  prevents the people with power from exercising it for long term benefits to public good…