Institutional Think

Reading the latest from David Brooks today:

... institutional thinking is eroding. Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction. -- read more

I have to disagree, in part. I don't think institutions are dying. I think they are evolving, just as they always have. Faith in institutions isn't waning, but blind faith in institutions may well be. There is always corrections to institutions throughout history. Big corrections are called revolutions; French, American, Industrial. Gradual, and slightly painful 'eroding' is nothing more that humanity's way of adjusting to the times. The newspaper industry will wane as it had rose, Governments will rise and decay, business will die and be born again. We are the institutions, and we are constantly "correcting".