Why Institutions Are Dying

Introduction. The institutions that aren't dead today are drastically less powerful and ambitious. Nietzsche traced institutional decline to the modern indifference towards the future. Nietzsche on strong institutions and how modernity makes them impossible 👇

Democracy represents a degeneration of the state. A Monarchy has considerably greater “power to organize.” Endless parliament debates, constant populist pressure due to elections - this DEFANGS the state. Democracy makes it impossible for states to have long-term ambitions.

In practical terms, an institution is a set of men, across generations, devoted to the same goal. The pre-conditions for an institution: “The will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility.” But tradition, authority, & responsibility are now out of fashion.

What all institutions need: “A solidarity between succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum.” Do you see this generational solidarity? Amidst fallen statues, a rejection of the future in the name of climate change, the inexorable atomization of humans?

Healthy institutions are PROOF that the past was interested in the present, and the present is interested in the future. This instinctive desire to shape the long-term is now "lost." Without a torch to pass on, an institutions is just a hollow building occupied by hollow minds.

Nietzsche on the contemporary lifestyle: "One lives for today, one lives very fast – one lives very irresponsibly: it is precisely this which one calls freedom." But institutions demand that we live for the future - that we live deliberately, responsibly, and thus slowly.

We fear temporary restraints more than we fear permanent dissolutions. Nietzsche: "That which makes institutions is despised: whenever the word authority is so much as heard one believes oneself in danger of a new slavery." Institutions fight dissolution but need restraints.

People who can’t plan for the long-term ultimately try to destroy the long-term: "The décadence in the valuating instinct of our politicians, our political parties, goes so deep that they instinctively prefer that which leads to dissolution, that which hastens the end..."

Nietzsche on why marriage is longer the institution that it was: “The rationale of marriage lay in its indissolubility in principle: it thereby acquired an accent which could make itself heard against the accidents of feeling, passion and the moment.” Not anymore.

As institutions grow out of generational labor, so does beauty. When the short-term is all we care about, ugliness is the natural consequence. Nietzsche elaborates on this in his aesthetics theory. Read on: What Is Ugliness? Nietzsche Answers.