Everyone Should Read Arnold

-- By NonaFarahnik - 18 Feb 2010

“The actual habits and attitudes which operate under the banner of the creed to make the institution effective have a slightly obscene appearance. Nice people do not want to discuss them, except for the purpose of getting rid of them.”

For Arnold, institutions are a necessary corollary to our human sociality. Every organization--from a little league baseball team, to the US Coast Guard, to the now defunct Lehman-- appeals to that sociality through a unique institutional culture furthered by self-fulfilling propaganda. An easy way to see the functioning of these orders is when Potential New Members are being recruited by competing institutions: fraternity rush, admitted student days, law firm happy hours, etc. Once a member has been initiated, the institution can heighten its control by using its ordering principles to motivate its adherents and to sharply demarcate us from them. This is not to say that institutional distinctions are a bad thing... provide something to compare our behavior to in a world devoid of standards... And as Arnold says, effective because they can be used by both sides. We can torture because we are not them... we do not torture because we are not them...

Coupled with our sociality (and perhaps developed alongside it), is our desire for a world narrative with inherent meaning and order. That need for outwardly-existing (often divine) order stifles our ability to question reality and to recognize how more pervasive and ordering institutions can manipulate public attitude and thought. Thus, we recognize these forces only when the context of the institution's functioning is benign (Santa), or so blatant as to make us uncomfortable about its effectiveness (Nazi Germany). Otherwise, we operate as if these forces do not exist. This is reflected through the purposive content, but underlying ignorance of the New York Times’ Where Fear Turns Graphic.

We have a hard time recognizing the less identifiable and more difficult ways by which powerful institutions bombard us with particular attitudes and creeds. This ignorance perpetuates the separation borne of institutional identification, and leads to moral rationalization grounded in institutional folklore, not in reality. A simple experiment to witness this phenomenon can be performed by watching the Fox News Channel during prime time. Journalism today mostly serves to help obfuscate what is actually happening in the world around us (particularly from 2:45). We are often left unable to see how an institution functions and its direct relationship to how we think and function.

If institutions unconsciously move us by creating some notion of a general will whose furtherance demands the suppression of the particular, we should be focused on improving the frameworks of society's most basic structures so they are more just. The first way to improve these frameworks is to rip off the wool. At the least, leading should understand that managing an organization is managing human sociality; not managing an abstract entity.

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

As Eben points out the Net makes it possible to form collaborative organizations stretching across the whole breadth of humanity in the blink of an eye. My work and the work of hundreds of thousands of other people has shown that anarchic production in such communities can not only rival but surpass capitalist innovation, and that cultural distribution will be massively democratized, leading to the collapse of power-concentrating mass media...

Organizations make their own realities- mass communications increased that power, but the net with a much more anarchic model—there are more voices—fuck with an organization’s identity as its own thing…things go viral… centralized organizational structure doesn’t matter anymore…

The ability to disrupt communication is changing dramatically.

A model of how framing the structure for people can make things happen. Finding common ground tha appeals to everyone and connect them through a shared vision, and if you can take a step further a shared experienceLet's Do It. This is an especially effective example because it shows how the decentralization if information reduces the need for state entities to do the social work that is characteristic to its existence.

Even if traditional organizational models are destroyed and organizations can't centralize their PR/voice, a facet of an organization can be the multiplicity of its voices. Even with a future where organizational functions will b e disrupted by the dissolution of central communications, Arnold's model is still relevant. Arnold's analysis is an analysis about human sociality, not human history. Unless that dissolution fundamentally alters human nature...

The rituals of the classroom--the music, the lively debate, Eben’s knowledge and war stories, the crowded office hours where students spill out into the hallway-- reinforce Eben's goals. The wiki gives us room for free thought, and a place for more structured work. We can work on its construction and reroute the pipelines if we so please, or with little effort as to the how, we can just participate in this entirely collaborative exercise.

The open letter to P. Moglen talk page is a good indication of organization in the face of decentralized communication. Eben in Amsterda, art writes the letter. the class commentators get in on it and start shitting on parts of the class or defending Eben. The benevolent monarch is forced to response-- publicly.

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Arnold's analysis of the way in which organizations are held together is still appropriate, as you show. His understanding of organizational psychology captured much that would later become so overwhelming as to be (as you show) invisible, because he explicated mechanisms that mass broadcast media would mold into an immense organizational landscape literally unimaginable at the opening of the 20th century.

But the principles of social self-organization represented by the quotation from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry are becoming powerful themselves in the 21st century, as the Net makes it possible to form collaborative organizations stretching across the whole breadth of humanity in the blink of an eye. My work and the work of hundreds of thousands of other people has shown that anarchic production in such communities can not only rival but surpass capitalist innovation, and that cultural distribution will be massively democratized, leading to the collapse of power-concentrating mass media, with equally profound organizational consequences as those that Arnold's writing partially described.