The World is Not Governed by Human Beings.
Organizations have the power!
Organizations, not human beings, govern the world!
All major decisions in the world are made by organizations,
based on the accumulated internal rules.
This cannot be changed, even when we would all fight against it.
Fortunately, there is no need to change it.
You can't change them from inside.
An individual is powerless inside the organization.
Anyone in an organization, including the CEO, can only slightly
bend the course of the organization.
When someone tries to change the organization in a direction which
differs too much from its course, the organization will eject that
person and the organization will assign another person to the vacant
function.
This is true for every person in any healthy organization.
When an organization looses that capability, it is bound to die.
You can't change them from outside.
An individual is powerless outside the organization.
When a person want to influence an organization from outside, he or
she has to form or join another organization to interact with the
first.
This illustrates again that only organizations play a serious role in
the world, not persons.
When a person wants to influence the world, he or she has to give up
individuality and work for an organization.
We depend on them.
Everyone needs organizations.
A person can only be successful when he or she works along with the
groups he or she belongs to.
Remark that groups, including families, are organizations.
We fight for them.
This is very democratic.
The whole plea to make all countries, and all organizations more
democratic, is a plea to shift the power away from individuals to
augment the power of organizations.
But organizations Cannot Think, Or can they?
See also sibling article:
How Human Intelligence is copied into Organizations.
Organizations make decisions, adapt themselves to changing
circumstances, and solve problems they are confronted with.
One may object that all this is done by people, and this is partially true, but in an organization, there is never a single person who has a mental model of all the aspects of the organization and its relations with the world. Therefore the decision making is a gradual and distributed process in which parts of the organization (departments, groups) consider aspects of the problem and interact with other groups to come to a decision. This has striking similarities with the way our brain works. In our brain, there are many specialized centers which are able to consider a problem from their specialized point of view. The cooperation between these specialized centers in our brain depends largely on a specialized wiring between the centers. Similarly, the cooperation between the individuals and groups in an organization depends largely on the structure of the organization and on the internal procedures.
(See also “How Human Intelligence is copied into Organizations.”).
But organizations Have No Will, Or have they?
They have their own will, engraved in their structure and procedures. We all know how difficult it is to change an organization. Organizations, especially large organizations have a considerable inertia because their way of working, their way of thinking is hardened in the internal procedures and the internal structure of the organization itself. That gives a character to the organization and the tendency to go-on in the old direction can be seen as the "will" of an organization. Here also there is probably a very close relation between the internal mechanisms of our will and the will of an organization.
Is this good or bad?
They are Natural Organisms, just as we are. It is the way nature works, whether you find it good or bad depends on your subjective interpretation. If you do not like it, the organizations will ignore you (because they have a will). Remark the similarity between multicellular life and organizations. Remark also that the organizations we describe are not limited to organizations of people. For example Organizations of primates, ants, bees, and symbiosis between different animals and plants. Multicellular life is in fact an example of an organization. We shouldn't call that a bad idea.
OK, but the power is in the hands of men.
They have their own way of thinking, engraved in their structure and procedures. This is partially true, but the larger the organization, the larger the role of the structure and internal procedures in the decision making. A growing part of the decision making which is imposed by the structure and procedures of the organization. The procedures assure objective decision-making, aiming at decisions which do not depend on whoever implements the decision procedure.
When the procedures for evaluation, accounting and decision making (Enterprise Resource Planning) become more stable, the procedures and rules can be automated in computers. This is in fact a simple form of artificial intelligence which is introduced in the workings of the organization. More advanced forms of artificial intelligence are gradually integrated. It is obvious that organizations will embrace any technology which makes them stronger independent from the fact that there are people or computers behind it.
They make objective decisions,
excluding us from the decision process.
The ongoing effort to make decisions (for organizations) more rational
leads to formal decision making, excluding all subjective (human) influence.
The procedures to do so are AI
without having the name.
Remark that a large organization itself can be considered as a form of artificial intelligence. This fact can be used to study how intelligence works.
How long is this going on?
It's too late. The world has never been governed by human beings. Small organizations (of animals) was the natural step after the development of multicellular life. Hence, this was already going on before humans lived on earth.
If we include multicellular life as a form of organization, the life of organizations goes even further back in history.
But organizations are not Alive, Or are they?
They are living organisms.
Yes, they are!
What makes you think they are not?
The remaining question is: “Will We be Tolerated?”
Will We be Tolerated?
Further reading.