Politics Is About Organizations, Not People

Almost all political commentary treats a society as a collection of individuals. Voters have opinions, citizens have interests, leaders have characters, and politics is what happens when these are aggregated. I think this picture is wrong at the root, and that the wrongness explains why so much political effort accomplishes nothing. The unit that acts in politics is the organization, and a theory that does not start there is a theory of the wrong thing.

Ten People Are Not Ten People

Yuval Noah Harari makes a point that is obvious once said and ignored in almost every political conversation: if you want to have an effect on the world, organize. Ten people who have formed an organization are vastly more powerful than ten individuals with the same views, the same talents, and the same energy.

The reason is not mystical. An organization can divide labour, persist past the attention span of any member, accumulate resources over time, act in one place while its members are elsewhere, and present a single face to the world. A group of individuals can do none of these reliably. The organization is a technology, in the same sense that writing is a technology, and it multiplies what its inputs can do.

Consider the scale of the difference. Nobody imagines building a 747 by asking a few thousand skilled individuals to each contribute a part. Nobody imagines Google's infrastructure arising from independent engineers who happen to share a goal. These things are impossible without an organization, not merely harder. The organization is not a convenience layered on top of the work; it is the thing that makes the work possible at all.

Where the Good Comes From, and the Bad

Once you see this, look at the ledger.

Most of the good in the world arrives through organizations. Vaccines, water systems, universities, the courts, the grid, the food supply. Not one of these is the product of individual virtue. Each is the product of a structure that coordinated thousands of people, most of whom never met, toward an outcome none of them could have reached alone.

And most of the harm arrives the same way. Wars are fought by organizations. Pollution at scale is produced by organizations. The financial crisis was not a collection of individual bad decisions; it was organizations doing what their structures rewarded. I have written about why corporations defect where individuals cooperate, and the argument there generalizes: the organization is the thing with the power, so the organization is the thing that does the damage.

The individual, for good or ill, is simply too small a lever. That is not a moral judgement about individuals. It is an observation about where the force is.

The Mistake This Exposes

Here is what follows, and it is uncomfortable for most political activity.

Effort aimed at changing the minds of individuals is, with one exception, mostly wasted. Persuading a voter changes one vote in a system where votes are aggregated into a choice between two organizations. Persuading a citizen to consume differently changes one consumer against a market shaped by firms. Persuading a soldier that a war is wrong changes nothing about the army.

The exception is individuals who head organizations. A minister, a chief executive, a university president, the leader of a party. These people are worth persuading, not because they are better or wiser, but because they sit at the point where an organization's power is directed. Even then, as I have argued about the freedom cost of climbing, their latitude is narrower than it looks — but it is real, and it is the only individual latitude in the system that moves anything.

Everyone else is a member, and members do not steer. Which means that if you are not at the head of an organization and you want to affect the world, the first task is not to persuade anybody. It is to build or join an organization that can act. Harari is right, and the implication is that most of what passes for political engagement — the argument, the post, the opinion firmly held — is a hobby.

Why We Resist Seeing It

Two reasons, I think.

The first is that we experience ourselves as individuals and extend the courtesy to everyone else. It seems obvious that society is made of people because we are people and we can see them. Organizations are abstractions; you cannot point to one. But you cannot point to gravity either, and it is doing most of the work.

The second is that the individual picture is flattering. It says your opinion matters, your vote counts, your choices shape the world. The organizational picture says that unless you are organized you are a spectator, and that the entities actually contending for control of your life are structures you do not belong to and cannot address. That is a harder thing to believe, and it is true.

What a Correct Politics Would Study

If the unit is the organization, then the questions of politics are questions about organizations. How do they form? What do their structures select for? Why do they persist past their usefulness? Under what conditions do they cooperate with one another, and under what conditions do they defect? How does a society keep the ones it needs and constrain the ones it does not?

These are not the questions you will hear on a political programme, which will be discussing a person. They are the questions that would have to be answered by anyone who actually wanted to change something. That they are so rarely asked is, I think, the clearest evidence that most political discussion is not about changing anything. It is about the individual, because the individual is who is watching.