When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can image. Benevolent, friendly, nice to the children, even nice to their slaves. Caring about other people. I mean, as individuals they may be anything, but in their insitutional role, they’re monsters, because the institution is monstrous.

Noam Chomsky in the film The Corporation

The first enormous truth flowing from our civilization is that, today, everything has become “means.” There are no longer “ends.” We no longer know towards what we are headed.  We have lost our collective goals.  We dispose of enormous means, and we put into action prodigious machines to reach nowhere…

Jacques Ellul in Présence au monde moderne

 Technique will not tolerate (or accept) any judgment passed on it.  In other words, technicians do not easily tolerate people expressing an ethical or moral judgment on what they do.

Jacques Ellul in The Betrayal of Technology (video)

In their respective, and typical styles, Ellul and Chomsky seem to overstate the point to drive home the point: “monstrous,” “prodigious”, “will not tolerate.”  In my experience in dozens of institutions, I see what Chomsky is saying and see how Ellul explains how it comes to be.

It may be a truism to say that an institution (pick one: university, city government, business, non-profit organization, etc.) is greater than the sum of the people who make it up but what that implies and why it happens is important.  We all participate in institutions, either employed by them, contributing to them or supporting them in some way.  And so, Chomsky’s words are important to consider.  Yes, he was talking about corporations. Here, I am saying it applies to all institutions.

Am I suggesting they are evil, or useless, or inherently violent–after all, monstrous implies no good.  I am not suggesting that, nor is Chomsky, I believe, saying they do not have a role in society.  Indeed, as the film argues, corporations do (or at least are designed initially) to serve the common good.  And yet…

And yet they fail.  Ellul provides some insights why that is.  First, all institutions are founded to accomplish an end, and except for a few strictly nefarious ones (drug gangs I suppose), the ones that most of us participate in have ends–often articulated in a mission statement–that are both laudable and lofty.  But what Ellul suggests, and I have seen, is that institutions quite frequently forget the ends to which they say they are striving; trading the lofty missions for not only something far more pedestrian but also something far more sinister.

Not only are they enamored with means rather than ends–the newest branding strategy, the coolest website, the hippest cause, the slickest ideas–but they trade the ultimate ends for these means, essentially making the means the new, de facto ends.  This may seem innocuous but can lead them down paths that have little to do with why they came into being.

Let me use an example that has repeated itself many times in my personal experience.  A wonderful non-profit with a great mission to rid the world of hunger, bring practical peacebuilding, or reduce child mortality.  At a certain point in its existence says “we could do more, we should do more, we must do more–we must grow, we must enlarge, we must carry our salvific efforts to the world (not just the puny piece we are now touching).”  Yes, this really happens.  Oh perhaps nobody actually says it just that way but “relevance” demands growth, the good we do requires scale.  And at that point, the ends have already started to shift.  At that point, the means start to be the focus and the ends slide away.

But I would take it a step further because at that moment there is also a new way of thinking about the “necessity–the “indispensability”–of the organization.  We are now the requisite organization and our survival, our eternality, becomes the most critical end to which we strive. And when that happens, when institutions aspire to godlike eternality, then truly monstrous things can and do happen.  Because when that happens institutions spend a whole lot of time trying to build allegiance to themselves.  And a whole lot of lies get told.

There is an understanding of “the fall” in Hebrew scriptures which says that the whole Eden myth is a story of humankind’s quest for autonomy.  Following quickly on the heels of that quest is the striving after eternal life as in “I want to be free from all constraints and I want and must live forever…”  A cautionary tale from our ancestors.  And a caution for our collective selves as well.

But Ellul goes even further suggesting that our own enamorment with “technique” and its focus on the one best way is also a culprit in the monstrousness our institutions become.  Today, the technical sophistication of even the least sophisticated organizations is something to behold.  Laden with technicians who refuse critique–and, who are, according to Ellul the high priests of “means”–we find ourselves in organizations incapable of accepting critique and incapable of seeing the dark paths down which they have wandered away from their true ends.

Am I overstating the case a la Chomsky and Ellul?  I don’t think so.  In fact, I don’t think so SO MUCH that I spend most of my days (it seems) trying to figure out how to reorient the institutions of which I am a part back to the true ends of their existence.  It is what I believe to be an essential ingredient of that elusive thing called leadership: leaders as guides to help institutions they lead find their way back to the path leading to the ends to which they all say they aspire.

I am not a hillbilly, but this may be a kind of elegy.  I am not a hillbilly but am really only removed from them by a thin generation and about 350 miles.

When I look at the things that are happening: the hot white anger; the grievances worn on a sleeve; the altered logic of climate change denial twinned with six-day-creation-6000-year-old-earth “science”; the looming apocalypses brought to us by a malign government (democrat); the chest puffing “America only” bumper sticker politics…

When I look at these things I see that I am not so far from home–not my home, but the homes of my mom and dad. A certain kind of fundamentalist Christianity seized them sometime after they left the “hills” (cove, creek, holler) and saved dad from alcohol.  Mom saw all she needed.  If God could do that!  Well then, God and Jesus was where she needed to give her heart.  And she did.  And they did.

Dad, wearing “the pants” and being the Old Testament God of war, discipline, and rules.  Mom, meekly being Jesus on the cross and loving, loving, loving.  Mom was pro life before it was really fashionable (she had, no doubt seen abortions in ways that many had not, will not), but she loved every single mom who came by with her child and she sacrificed for them.  Hours around the kitchen table taking in all comers and listening, listening, listening.  “Can I pray with you?”  and she would.  And they (most of the local detritus and some from much further away) found their way to her table.  I saw them.

Dad, went with Wallace in ’68 and would have gone for Trump last year.  And though Trump makes Wallace look like a decent man, the factors that led dad down that path are the same these nearly 50 years later: anger at a world that no longer looked like anything he thought he knew.  An America abandoned to “them.”  Dad went to John Birch meetings in the basement where we would later live.  The only time he EVER went to a political rally was to see Wallace in Hershey, PA.  Dad falling in love with Jerry Falwell and his brand of gnosticism–learning to bus children to the church where they were ritually counted to show the world that hundreds were coming to Jesus: this is what I saw.

They had a rudimentary grasp of the dispensationalist wall charts that adorned so many church basements.  Mom sang in lots of them before that illness took her voice away forever.  They believed in a straightforward gospel of ultimate reward and ultimate damnation.  No gray areas there.  And though they would have denied it, they lived in fear of a crude kind of dualism in which Satan was so close to winning that it was up to folk like them to hold him at bay–and God had designed it all that way.

They had me ask Jesus into my heart early on–once is enough they said.  I knew better and repeated the sinner’s prayer thousands of times–fearing that somehow I would trip up and the God of dad would leer at me and say “Aha, you were too late with your repentance THIS time Robbie.”  I was scared pretty much all the time, what with the God of dad, the Russians (commies) and those “inner-city blacks” who were out to take what was never meant to be theirs.

So, I live today and I see all of this as a homecoming, somewhere between the hills/cove/holler where they were raised and the piedmont where I fell in love with baseball (and Bob Gibson).  I don’t ask Jesus into my heart anymore, and find that I can’t really believe much of anything that mom and dad taught me.  But the God of my dad and the Jesus of my mom help me understand much of what I see here, now.  I live in their houses–their hills, their cove, their holler. We all do.