Amerika

It was initially thought that Dark Organizations could not be fixed. The deepest challenge in reforming one is caused by the “ego problem.” From a Western perspective male egos are under-developed meaning the ego does not “balance” the personality.

Even after the Abu Ghraib scandal, the U.S. Department of Defense implemented structural reforms, but the psychological and cultural roots of the problem — especially ego, pride, and institutional defensiveness — were never fully addressed. In fact, they were often reinforced by the system’s response.

In organizations like the Secret Service, Homeland Security, or the Pentagon, personal identity is enhanced by the perception of others of the strength, control, and invulnerability of the individual. Much of career success depends upon this projection of personality gestures.

When failure occurs, especially in high-stakes roles, the ego of those higher in the leadership hierarchy is threatened. This leads to defensive reactions: denial, blame-shifting, and suppression of dissent, because admitting fault feels like a personal and institutional failure.

After Abu Ghraib, the military focused on punishing a few “bad apples” (like the soldiers who committed abuses) while protecting senior leadership. That enabled the organization to go on, but instituted a constant witch-hunt for anyone who could be the sacrifical “bad apple” for that time period. This caused individuals to collaborate to hide bad deeds while over-promoting good deeds.

There was no effort to examine how ego-driven leadership, groupthink, and fear of failure contributed to the abuse. Whistleblowers were still punished: while some reforms were made, the culture of retaliation against those who spoke up remained. Careers were threatened by the need to protect the organization, and so like in the Soviet Union, the organization received no bad news percolating upward from the rank-and-file. This made it numb and insensitive not only to its bad deeds, but to the degree of success it was experiencing, sort of like the body counts in the Vietnam Conflict.

Any actual reform would have required not just psychological safety but career safety, where operators and officers can admit mistakes without fear of retaliation or loss to their chance for future promotion. Instead, the hunt for “bad apples” continued, sacrificing many whose only sins were violating the dogma of the day.

Institutions are built to protect themselves, and only learn from failure when they can find someone or something else to blame. Individuals protect their careers. Middle leadership hides problems from its superiors. Higher-ups never hear about problems for below.

This parallels the decline of the West since WW2. There are two interconnected pathways to decline: an organizational pathway and a social contract pathway. The former is based on systems and procedures, but the latter reflects the experience of the individual citizen.

The organizational pathway consists of the replacement of organic, goal-oriented systems with mechanistic ones based on individualism, or the success of individual careers. This contributes to a loss of systems-oriented thinking and replacement with checklists and internal metrics for career advancement unrelated to actual achievement.

The social contract pathway refers to the breakdown in the civilization that government was supposed to protect. When families are no longer functional, financial security is elusive, and institutions like pensions and legal systems no longer protect the everyday person, the citizen experiences the social contract as an imposition instead of a value-added service.

Both pathways reinforce each other, creating accelerating decline. In the process, the actual nature of egalitarianism is revealed. If we should be equal but are not, there must be a bad guy. Therefore, hunt for “bad apples” before fixing systemic dysfunction.

We might refer to the postwar period as the Age of Hubris. The West considered that it had won the war and defeated all other systems, so it believed it could do no wrong, and it expanded on principles of individual equality at the same time it expanded its bureaucracy.

The military and economic dominance of the West created overconfidence. This belief in the exceptionalism of democracy led to the belief that Western institutions were so naturally superior to others that they could not fail, which caused a decline in innovation and creativity because the answers were known in a means-over-ends context.

A big problem of this era was the emphasis on individualism — Dale Carnegie style salesmanship courses, Toastmasters communication expertise, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, focus on individual careers, cul de sac suburbs to escape society — over culture, which was viewed as a collective imposing restraints on the sacred individual.

Examples abound. Individual performance metrics replaced team/organizational outcomes. Short-term personal gain was prioritized over long-term institutional success. Organizational loyalty declined and turnover increased as people advanced their careers by job-hopping based on what their last promotion enabled them to do.

In recent years, this has accelerated. As of today, 75% of executive compensation is tied to stock performance (vs. 25% in 1980s). Average employee tenure is 4.1 years instead of 12 years as it was in the 1980s. Only 32% of employees are engaged at work, and 65% prioritize personal growth over organizational success. Lastly, 36% of the workforce is in the gig economy to supplement its day jobs or replace them, up from 10% in 2005.

This led to a loss of systems thinking. When organizations operate as fragmented silos, they are unable to integrate complex systems; this is why corporate products decline over time into incoherent messes built of conflict promotional campaigns.

On the second plank, the degration of the social contract changed the experience of citizens from a sense of mutual benefit and working together to me-against-the-world. This started in the festering disaster of the educational system, where State authority superseded parental authority, leading to schools making decisions without parental consent or notification.

This was made possible by Teachers Unions, which thanks to the government-funded nature of public schools, achieved monopoly power which prevented accountability. This is the same reason large corporations eventually seek monopoly, since without competition, there are no alternatives, which means that they can do whatever they want to the consumer sheep attached to them.

In the meantime, middle class wealth declined. Single-income family was no longer a viable means of supporting a family; dual incomes were required. Government mediation through high taxes and regulations eroded the trickle-down economic effect. The middle classes, which stabilized democracy, lost ground and partisanship increased.

As a result of this, a number of feedback loops were created.

The first was the pairing of individualism with the weakening of the family leading to an atomized society, which then accelerated individualism and further deprecated the family. Organizational individualism rewards personal advancement over institutional success, meaning that individuals now lack both organizational and family anchors. Short-term thinking dominates all spheres as a result.

This contributed to the second, a loss of institutional memory in business. Short employee tenure (individualism) translates to no organizational memory; accelerating technology means generational knowledge discontinuity. Siloed knowledge at organizations and in technology means no ability to tie things together into “systems of systems” dedicated to producing a goal that strengthens the organization.

Finally, this created spiralling decay. Each generation inherits weaker institutions than previous. Organizational instability and family instability together mean no stable foundation for the individual, or culture. Financial insecurity and the need for increasing amounts of education means reduced capability. Each generation loses the ability to think in terms of systems or anything beyond their own job, shopping, and social group, and so they are successively less capable of reversing decline.

We can see now how Dark Organizations arise from the lack of integration between individual and group, State and culture, and business with knowledge. When egalitarian systems arise, they produce individualism, or the bourgeois notion that the individual owes no duty to society, humanity, nature, culture, or knowledge other than his own circle, a small bubble cut off from the rest:

The French aristocratic political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) described individualism in terms of a kind of moderate selfishness that disposed humans to be concerned only with their own small circle of family and friends.

This follows with traditional ideas of social collapse: “things fall apart” and cannot be coordinated because there are too many rules on the systems level, and each individual is going in his own direction on a social contract level, because the social contract has been made facilitative instead of being a matter of participation in a culture and its goals. Breakdown is disconnection, discoordination, and separation of individuals from any central principle of purpose that could unite them.

This shows us the grim truth that individualism is egalitarianism, and both have the same root in means-over-ends thinking — an inherent vice of humanity — accelerated by the rise of the bureaucracy and commercial interests to address the fears of the bourgeois middle classes:

Egalitarian ideals were also a significant feature of the Enlightenment movement, which emphasized the common humanity of all members of society. Both these schools of thought have focused on one of the most fundamental propositions of egalitarianism, which is that all people are of equal moral worth.

If humans have equal moral worth without having to demonstrate a contribution of value to civilization, they are “liberated” from the constraints of culture, traditional, and social values. They are also free to act as individualists who seek their own careers over any sense of shared production or goal, an act which forms the basis of decline.

Dark Organizations can only be defeated by ending this fracture by setting goals of achievement, not ticking boxes on a checklist or following correct procedure, which requires replacing the job-mentality with the production-oriented mentality, and updating systems to use a Darwinian approach of keeping only those who contribute toward the goal, not merely the obedient and conformist.

In short, as Plato argued, we need to get back to the thinking of the “gold and silver strains” of humanity, who are less concerned with profit, popularity, and avoiding conflict than they are with achieving goals. When this mentality takes over systems, organizations follow, and the Dark Organizations within them are disadvantaged to the point of near-extinction.

Tags: collapse, crowdism, dark organizations