Institutions Seek Their Own Self Preservation

The Government seeks to expand its own power through expanding bureaucracy (politicians making more laws so their lawyer friends will have jobs), corporations seek to undermine competition to secure their share of the market, churches cover up criminal acts of their preists and acquire vast wealth in contradiction of the principles of their respective religion, and even nonprofits create or influence policies that keep people dependent on their services for generations.

Is this a nefarious design or just the nature of human institutions abiding by the same laws of nature and natural selection as every organism on the planet does?

CriticalThought said:

The Government seeks to expand its own power through expanding bureaucracy (politicians making more laws so their lawyer friends will have jobs), corporations seek to undermine competition to secure their share of the market, churches cover up criminal acts of their preists and acquire vast wealth in contradiction of the principles of their respective religion, and even nonprofits create or influence policies that keep people dependent on their services for generations.

Is this a nefarious design or just the nature of human institutions abiding by the same laws of nature and natural selection as every organism on the planet does?

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Nefarious design implies some puppet-master controlling all the strings. I guess if you buy into secret societies developing a new world order it would seem like an argument.

IMO it's just a natural extension of the "greedy monkey" theme. Despite all illusions, we are just a very successful species of primate. We display similar characteristics to the monkey who will eat and eat until it is too stuffed to eat, and still try to eat some more. In our case, this is exhibited by the gathering of wealth and/or power.

I guess that places me in the "natural selection" corner. :shrug:

CriticalThought said:

The Government seeks to expand its own power through expanding bureaucracy (politicians making more laws so their lawyer friends will have jobs), corporations seek to undermine competition to secure their share of the market, churches cover up criminal acts of their preists and acquire vast wealth in contradiction of the principles of their respective religion, and even nonprofits create or influence policies that keep people dependent on their services for generations.

Is this a nefarious design or just the nature of human institutions abiding by the same laws of nature and natural selection as every organism on the planet does?

Click to expand...

You made all of the following claims without providing a single shred of evidence that any of them are true:

1. The Government seeks to expand its own power through expanding bureaucracy
2. Corporations seek to undermine competition to secure their share of the market
3. Churches cover up criminal acts of their preists and acquire vast wealth in contradiction of the principles of their respective religion
4. Nonprofits create or influence policies that keep people dependent on their services for generations.

First prove your assertions, then we may have grounds for discussing whether there are laws of preservation that apply to organizations as much as they do to natural organisms. But thus far all you have is a bunch of claims with nothing to back them up.

Claim #2 seems very likely to be true. The rest? Not so much.

It's probably true that: some governments seek to expand their own power, some churches have covered up criminal acts and/or acquired wealth in contradiction of their principles, and some nonprofits may have influenced policies to keep people dependent on them. But in order for your explanation to be worth considering, you'd have to first establish that it's not just "some", but that it is a statistically significant number which points to a clear pattern.

It's the natural result of unrestrained human nature run amok.

I would also keep in mind that often times bodies will not expand their power and influence if it comes at the cost of meeting additional accountability measures.