by A friend of mine recently started a new business. I’ve been chatting with her regarding her progress getting started and assisted with getting her website set up. Recently, a physical office was opened, and she has been having trouble receiving mail. She posted the exchange below on her Facebook account:
New business owner: Hi, I’m concerned that there is no mail being delivered to my business.USPS: There is no business associated with that address.New business owner: Okay, because the landlord installed a mailbox and talked to someone at the post office who said it was taken care of. I have sizable checks coming to me and I kind of need my mail.USPS: He didn’t talk to [Joe Schmoe] in [town in central PA] to confirm.New business owner: What? Who is [Joe Schmoe] in [town in central PA] ? Where is my mail?USPS: Here’s [Joe Schmoe]’s number…
The hallmark of modern civilization and modernity itself, for better or worse, is the abstraction of various functions played by various institutions as roles independent of a particular person. The individual within an institution is merely a cog that serves some particular function independent of that individual as a person. What this means in practical terms is that you get your driver’s license from the DMV from a human, but that human plays a role within the organization. If that person leaves the job or dies, your license is still valid. You of course dealt with a living, breathing human being at the DMV. But they are an extension of an institution that plays some particular function in society and what their name is or ethnic background or what their father did for a living is irrelevant. Whether or not you personally know that person, or are related to them, or are of the same clan or not, is all irrelevant.
We talk about ongoing institutional collapse, measured in terms of public trust and institutional competency, in abstract terms. But every once in a while the abstract gets reduced to the concrete. At some point, you get told, you need to know a guy to make things happen. There’s no playbook for whatever happened above. There is no manual published by the bureaucracy that could have warned my friend. You just sorta have to feel around until someone gives you a name and phone number of a person to complete some process necessary to the commencement of engaging in commerce. You just have to… figure it out. And what you figure out is that the institution is no longer abstract — there is actually a person and not some role within some process — and knowing their name is how you get things done.
The above anecdote is amusing, and maybe even frustrating for my friend, but when people encounter the consequences of a state apparatus that starts to see its monopoly on the use of force drift away, either due to unwillingness or inability to defend that monopoly, you will start to see things that you will likely find disturbing.
Buckle up.
