An institution is a self-perpetuating social organization created to achieve a specific purpose, which enables its founders and their allies to maintain power and control over other members through a set of formal rules and regulations. Overinstitutionalization has overwhelmed America and resulted in a loss of community; economic, political, and social chaos; as well as violence and war, so says Butler D. Shaffer in his prescient book Calculated Chaos.
Our lives have become hopelessly entangled with, and therefore controlled by, a plethora of institutions. We have become increasingly registered, regulated, licensed, taxed, and digitized.
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Butler D. Shaffer, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival. Coral Springs, FL: Llumina Press, 2004, 338 pages, $24.95.
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INSTITUTIONS ARE US
“We are born in hospitals, educated in schools, married in churches, employed in business establishments or government agencies, supervised by political authorities, retired with institutional pension plans and government security benefits, and we return to hospitals to die.” Shaffer, p.20
INSTITUTIONS AND CONFLICT
“Institutions are the principal means by which conflict is produced and managed in society. The success of institutions depends upon the creation of those conditions in which personal and social conflict will flourish.”
Shaffer, p.6
SHORTCOMINGS OF INSTITUTIONS
“The political State has not established order; religions have not made us more moral; education has not blessed us with wisdom; the mass-marketed affluence of our industrial system has not provided us with security; our ideologies have not advanced our understanding.”
Shaffer, p.269
THE STATE
“We have been taught that political leaders exist to serve us by harmonizing our differences and coordinating our energies in order to maximize our interests and promote the general welfare.
We discover that they coerce, threaten, and intimidate us to get us to do what they want in order to further the purposes of the State.”
Shaffer, pp.107-108
“The political State provides us not a shield but a jugular vein, a central point upon which a foreign state can focus an attack upon an entire nation.”
Shaffer, p.291
“In unity there is vulnerability, not strength.”
Shaffer, p.292
A CONFLICT-FREE SOCIETY
“A conflict-free society would be characterized by cooperation, not coercion; by mutuality, not manipulation; by personal autonomy, not collective authority. A conflict-free society, in other words, would be a stateless society.”
Shaffer, p.290
THE CHALLENGE
“Can we learn how to organize ourselves into groups without creating our own Frankensteins; how to work and play and help one another without institutions, without politics, organizational hierarchies, “hot” or “cold” wars, manipulation, moral imperatives, indoctrination, exploitation, rules and regulations, conflict, and all the other trappings of what we are fond of calling modern civilization?”
Shaffer, p.285
DEINSTITUTIONALIZATION
“The deinstitutionalization of our lives would likely result in more decentralized, individualized or small-group oriented, forms of economic activity.”
Shaffer, p.293
COMMUNITY
A partnership of free people committed to the care and nurturing of each other’s mind, body, heart and soul through participatory means.
COMMUNITARIAN
One who believes in individual rights and community obligations.
RECOMMENDATION
Butler Shaffer’s life-changing book is a must read book for any card-carrying decentralist or secessionist.
Thomas H. Naylor
