How Do Institutions Become Possessed?
Pigs Drowning, Fortune-Telling Girls, and Cultural Idols
This will be the only piece this week, due to upcoming travel and writing deadlines. In lieu of a piece Thursday, go read my recently released piece with Comment on how Christian community isn’t your antidote to loneliness! —The Management
Institutions Can’t Repent, But Can They Be Possessed?
The question of whether institutions—whether big banks, governments, universities, or large scale social institutions—can repent has been raised in various ways. When we are asking for a name to be changed on a building, are we simply asking for more representation? No! We’re asking for a moral acknowledgment. When reparations enters the public discussions, is it just economic equitahy in play? Nope: we’re firmly in the land of moral rectitude and restitution.
The problem is that I’m doubtful this can happen, insofar as the analogy doesn’t work: institutions aren’t people and thus, they can’t be penitent or saved or have a “change of heart.”
About a year ago, I wrote a five-installment series thinking about the nature of institutions, particularly how institutions—when we experience harm from institutions, it’s not necessarily because the institutions are out to get us. At the time, I was about two years out of my own horrific experience with a former employer, having seen it churn through myself, and several friends, and trying to process how an institution of higher education could do so much harm and yet others not see it.
So, no McDonalds in Heaven. No corner elementary schools winding their way through Purgatory.
But can institutions be possessed? Can they be so taken by malevolence, dysfunction, and harm that the only language available here is that something beyond human intention is in play?
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve realized that my reflections on church harm are related here: churches are different than “institutions”, but share a lot of similar features. First, institutions exist to carry a value forth over time, while churches exist to proclaim and worship God. Secondly, churches are, I presume, those communities of persons in whom the Spirit of the living God is at work to turn it into the image of the Son to the praise of the Father. That’s not to say that things can’t go horribly wrong, and in its own way, churches become only institutions: how many times have we seen church turn into bureaucracies with a worship service attached? I’ve linked my earlier writings on this here, but feel free to skip on below:
After I read Kirsten Sanders’ latest essay, I realized that there was one more question that needs asking: What if institutions going bad is something like demonic possession?
How Institutions Become Possessed: A Brief Typology
As Kirsten points out, the first caveat we want to make is that to speak of institutions is to speak analogically: institutions don’t have feelings, or souls, or the capacity for salvation or repentance as institutions.1 They can reverse policy, make amends, pay fines, etc., but institutions are something which exist over and above particular human agents, and as such, don't correspond to the soul, repentance, or salvation of a particular person. She concludes her essay with the following thought, that I want to pick up here:
A final question, which is why do institutions seem to have an agency to do harm that exceeds their status as “not-creatures”? The best answer for this is because they, like the pigs at Gerasene, can be possessed. But I’ll leave you with that thought for another day.
Having said all the caveats above, whether “possession” of an institution is possible is a bit more interesting.
On the one hand, Jesus didn’t die for Blockbuster or Pets.com.2 But on the other hand, particular persons, so possessed can introduce a character of possession into a corporate entity. All of us can think of an example of a once-beloved institution—a university, a nonprofit, a business with a noble reason for being—that began well, but then over time, changed into something either more banal or something more malicious and self-serving.
The reason I want to offer the three-fold typology for considering how this happens is ultimately so that we can be aware of it, and name it as such. Moderns are very loathe to speak of possession, but if you believe in being saved personally, then stereotypes aside, I think we can think of our propensity toward evil as being influenced by something more than simply bad intentions or manageable tics. And thus, three ways that institutions might become possessed:
1) Pigs Drowning: Malevolence Shunned but Which Takes Over
The most infamous instance of demonic possession in Scripture isn’t actually of a person, but of animals: the pigs in Matthew 8: 28-34.3 There's a lot going on in this story that I'm going to set aside, because I think it provides a helpful analogy for thinking about what happens when an institution goes south.
In the story, possession isn’t a personal action which occurs, but neither is it impersonal: its’ transpersonal, even if “person” isn’t quite right when referring to pigs.4 You have a group of pigs into which the manifold demons who had been in one person are now transferred to a group. What's interesting here is that the herd is spoken of by the demons in the story as a collective: it's a herd which gets possessed. Not each individual Wilbur, Babe, or Snowball gets possessed necessarily, and yet, all suffer the same consequences.
By analogy, when an institution moves in its mission toward something more dehumanizing and less personalist, from something which attends to particular people to something which simply amorphously maintains its mission in order to survive, it’s been possessed not down to the individual level but at the collective level. Each pig will perish, though not each pig is discretely possessed. All members of an entity will be affected, though some will be crushed and some will be momentarily buffetted.
How that happens is, like with the pigs, that an alien presence identified as alien comes into the collective. Perceived as alien, it imposes itself from the outside as something that a collective must bear despite its self-perceived mission: the pigs have no choice in the matter, and so, the pigs have to just deal with it. It immediately begins to influence the collective behavior, to steer the collective action, to dominate the collective fears and ethos. This is critical, I think: that whatever is influencing the collective behavior maliciously is known to be at odds initially with the group ethos. The pigs are eating and minding their own business, doing as pigs do, prior to the demonic incursion, and then it becomes quickly a natural5 presumption that what we should do as pigs is to throw ourselves into the deep.
2) The Fortune-Telling Girl: Malevolence Entertained
In Acts 16: 16-21, we find the story of a girl able to divine the future, who is owned by men. She tells the truth about the apostles, that they are in fact apostles telling people of salvation in Christ. The apostles do as apostles do, and promptly cast out the demon, though what the demon is saying is correct. Chaos ensues, in no small part because her owners are mad that they’re no longer making money from her.6
That it is the owners who are mad, and benefiting from the woman’s possession is the interesting here: they are obviously fans of the possession, and yet not possessed themselves. They are approaching the possession as we approach many vices or evils: assuming that we are the ones in charge, and that it can be steered with just the right management techniques or tricks toward something profitable: I mean, look—she was the hyping the apostles!
Here, possession for institutions takes the form of what Jacques Ellul calls “the technique”: assuming an ends-means rationality that is just interested in outcomes. The problem is that over time, our habits and our lives become acclimated to the technique, not the other way around. We start off as the owners, and are enslaved very quickly to it. This is different than the pigs in this: the alien presence is recognized as alien, but not malicious, and in fact, a quite efficient tool to be used!
3) Cultural Idols: Malevolence Generated From Within
In Exodus 32, as the people are awaiting Moses’ return, they develop—quite quickly!—a new form of social organization: the worship of the golden calf. As the narrator observes, it’s not something alien to the people, but comes from within the people themselves. In fact, the calf literally comes off of their own bodies:
Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.” (Ex. 32:2-4)
The new religion, and all of the supporting practices, are self-generated by the people as a means of providing order, support, and comfort in a time of great anxiety. Moses is gone, and probably dead on the mountain, and we’ve got to do something else pretty quickly. And so, the answer emerges from within their midst, though not the property of any one person. But their re-enslavement happens none the less, even though the power that is enslaving them has its origins from none other place than right past their noses.
The how here is more interesting, I think, than if possession emerged from outside. By beginning as a something internal to the “organization”, everyone is able to have buy-in, contributing something of their own to the common project. There is no Pharaoh any longer: they are the Pharaoh having created their own possession. It’s the common goal of the group, and thus, it’s a problem that belongs to everyone and no one person in particular.
Of course, as we see here, that also means that no one from within the organization is capable of dismantling it. It requires a Moses, separate from the people, face glowing, to name it for what it is, and begin the dismantling of something the people have sacrificed to make. And the ultimate irony is then that the thing the people bound together left them as a precious offering, and returns to them again, as a bitter drink and as the occasion for their judgment. Sometimes, the worst part of an institution being destroyed is that we can’t walk away from it, but have to absorb the damage back into our bodies.
Next Monday, we’ll have our next paid subscriber book club over Basil the Great’s Sermon to the Rich—paid subscribers will get an email reminding them of the details.
Enjoy your week! Go enjoy the weather—I’ll be in Arkansas with some good churches in the Little Rock area, talking about Christian community.
If you want the polar opposite take on institutions here, consider the work of Curtis Chang, found here. Full disclosure: though I disagree strongly with his take, I piloted his course on campus for a group of students, because I think the thing he’s caring about is good. He’s on the right track with respect to wanting people to care about institutions over time, that helping good things to flourish after you’re dead is right and good. But he seems to think, in my opinion, too much of institutions, that they are too much like humans, and thus, far more culpable or have far more real agency than they do.
I, for one, would be delighted to see Blockbuster raised again on the last day, if in fact Jesus did die for institutions.
This is one of a handful of stories in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, meaning (among other things) that it was probably important enough that all three felt it needed to be remembered. See also Mark 5:1-20 and Luke 8:26-39.
Peter Singer, in his Animal Liberation, would say that’s just speciesist to presume that pigs aren’t persons analogous to humans. Another time, another day.
I say “natural” and not “reasonable” here, both to avoid the questions of whether or how animals reason, but also to signal that what is happening here becomes quickly second nature to us, and assimilates our reasoning processes to it. Here’s where I think, contra Singer, that humans have the ability to deliberate about what external pressures mean for their collective life, and that ability to deliberate has something to do with how we name personhood.
There’s a not-infrequent line of interpretation about this story that says that this is just one more instance of Paul being mysogynist because he’s taking away her ability to make money, forgetting that she is enslaved to the owners. That women should be able to support themselves, I take to be a given, so let’s set that aside: who’s really making that argument? Paul? What this line of interpretation that freeing her from possession is somehow mysogynist is that possession is, Scripturally speaking, a form of enslavement, such that by freeing her from demonic possession, the owners have no reason to enslave her physically either. There’s no reason to suspect that the demon has the girl’s agency or economic interest at heart here, that depriving her of possession is damaging to the girl, and it’s just silly to see this situation as anything other than dehumanizing.
“I, for one, would be delighted to see Blockbuster raised again on the last day, if in fact Jesus did die for institutions” 😆
Walter Wink wrote about institutions that we (people) create becoming demonic. While Wink believed that they could be redeemed, I am not so sure. But the greater question comes down to how do we live a non-possessed life in a possesed world?