– Level 3 institutions (from now on L-3i). Meta-institutions.
Its most significant institution is the market. Institutions enhance society growth, and a growing society needs more institutions. When this virtuous loop starts, soon the society has more institutions that people can handle by themselves. So, in the same way that institutions were created to manage relations between people, meta-institutions were created to manage relations between institutions. Example of it are: markets for derivative contracts, customs arrangements, Doha agreements, Constitutions or Bill of Rights, IMF, UN, Foreign Exchange Markets, EU, etc.
Meta-institutions can be very powerful so to ensure its independence, meta-institutions have
been designed in a specific way that makes them very difficult to be controlled. No one wants a meta-institution, which controls other important institutions, to end up in the hands of a person, or a small gang of people. Problem is that the ultimate guarantee of control and ethical performance of an institution is the person. Once you let Meta-institutions free of any control, the assurance that institution’s goal is the welfare of the people gets lost, because nobody can account it and reinforce it. Without any control, institutions care about nothing but their own interests (market, state, party, business, religion, etc) and people’s needs become a secondary goal.
There is no conspiracy whatsoever in this way of working. Institutions have to be powerful enough to survive as they have to be useful tools to manage society. But without human control the amount of power and resources required to survive is up to the same own Institution, and this is never enough. Therefore, disappears the illusion of an institutional performance with humanitarian values in the society, as the interest of the institutions is its own interest or its parents Meta-institution interests.
Meta-institutions dehumanize so deeply its society and grow so quickly that at one point society simply stops functioning. There are not enough resources to be plunder from the enormous meta-institutional structure neither trust between citizens to push society towards another direction, or to make more sacrifices to satisfy the institutional needs. When meta-institutions lead the system to a crisis -like popular upraises, wars, chaos, financial cracks, genocide, etc.- we stumble upon another drawback of meta-institutions, the ease at which some messianic figures can access the power and control the institutional system
In such a terrible crisis all of the democratic mechanism of control and accountability become outdated and people leave off any hope of a fair and democratic government as long as somebody appears and claims he/she/them can fix the situation. Sometimes a good leader may emerge, a benevolent figure who effectively can lead the situation and dismiss the meta-institutions that are not working and causing all the problems, but there are the same possibilities, or even more, that the emerging figure turns out to be a dictatorship or tyrant who concentrate all the power in his hands with the excuse of saving the population from the crisis or the enemies or whatever ‘evil’ pops up in his/her/their minds.
E.g. and simplifying: Roosevelt was able to intervene USA economy because of the 29 crash that plunged the system. Hitler was able to manipulate the German population because the nation was crashed and demoralized. Lenin was heard and followed because the Russian system was in misery. Gandhi succeeded because the colonial institutions were sinking and didn’t have enough support from the metropolis.
The same applies to smallest crisis. One cannot interfere in a financial market, until it sinks and threatens to sink the whole system. One cannot alter the sovereignty of an extremely corrupted country until it runs into a crisis and threaten the other countries. One cannot modify the law to suit its needs unless its way to big to fall or unless the people is already so full of rage that are about to make a revolution. And one can not change a political party or force it to behave ‘nicely’ until people organize themselves and overtake it rendering the party useless -then the party will quickly change and be very ‘nice’ … for a while.