# Many institutions have become cancerous Let’s look at this assertion through the lens of evolutionary theory and group selection. [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]. [^1] Cells become cancerous when they stop following the rules that all the cells in the organism follow. In this case, the organism is the higher of two levels of a group selection system. One of the [[Observations that lead to the assertion of institutional decay]] is that individuals are prioritizing themselves over their institutional mission. [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]. Organizations are weird because they are default alive instead of default dead once they reach a certain size. [[What if all entities had expiration dates?]] To further the analogy between cancer, organisms, institutions, and individuals: cancer develops when cells no longer experience senescence. [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]] - which basically is a cancer on the Level II institution. If the Level II institution is functioning well, it forces the organization to either die or continue to support the goals of the level II institution. So if we’re seeing a proliferation of cancerous Level I institutions, it means that something has gone wrong with the Level II institutions. Here I’m going to go off-roading for a bit: hopefully we’ll find our way back. Level II institutions seem to have experienced a divergence between their implicit, explicit, and perceived missions. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]. Why has this happened? There are many explanations that will appeal to different people based on their values and beliefs. * Societally, we’ve shifted towards focusing on the importance of the individual over the importance of the institution. This has been helped by the internet removing gatekeepers and giving everybody a voice. Gatekeeping used to be one of the ways that institutions kept individuals in line. * Individuals and institutions no longer agree on what the rules one level up the hierarchy *are*. If you dig into it, I suspect that people on different ideological teams actually have different perceived missions of different Level II institutions. This is not inherently a problem in the group-selection model, as long as those different perceptions can compete against some agreed upon fitness function. The problem is that there is no consensus fitness function all the way up. The extreme version of this is the [[Post-consensus world]]. * In business at least, the missions diverged over the idea of “maximizing shareholder value.” Most people perceive businesses to have missions other than just maximizing shareholder value, so if their explicit mission becomes maximizing shareholder value their perceived and explicit missions have diverged. * There are fewer resources in the system (less growth) which intensifies competition between Level I institutions and individuals. ie. There’s less [[Slack - concept]] in the system. It’s easy to align all your missions when there’s lots of resources to play around with. And since the group selection rules in the Level II institutions were set up in a high-growth world, they were not set up with the teeth to assert themselves when they run up against the incentives of a low-growth world. ([[Expended list of WTF happened in 1971 and afterwards]]) This note was originally titled ‘Most institutions have metasized.’ [[Noah Tye]] noted [That word doesn’t mean what you think it means](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/010/692/19789999.jpg). It means that a cancer has spread to multiple sites around an organism. However that may actually be true. There isn’t just one Level I institution where the individuals have stopped following institutional rules. It feels like *all* the Level I institutions in many Level II institutions have this problem. One newspaper starts going for clicks instead of sense and other newspapers follow suit. ### Related * [[Load Bearing Fiction]] * [[Fair games can be gamed]] * [[Having more separate games is good for society]] * [[Fair games have legible rules]] * [[Institutions need to either be explicitly temporary or have a path to sustainability]] [^1]: I have very little actual knowledge and training in evolutionary theory so this is mostly just made up hackwork but it feels explanatory and self-consistent enough to be worthwhile mental kindling for different ways to think about real phenomena. <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Many+institutions+have+become+cancerous) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Many+institutions+have+become+cancerous)