Calls for institutional renewal often strike the contemporary ear as hopelessly genteel—like an appeal to etiquette in an era of outrage. Such calls evoke responsibility, restraint, decorum. All of those have their place, but all sound thoroughly disconnected from the frantic, performative ethos of our moment. For some people, the juxtaposition is the appeal, or at least a sign of how necessary such renewal is. But those are the people who least need to be reminded of the value of institutional formation. To persuade those who really need to hear these calls for institutional commitment, we need to emphasize what stronger institutions could offer in this moment, not just what they demand.  

What they offer is agency. And that is precisely what our moment sorely lacks. This should be obvious, but it is obscured by two habitual assumptions of modern social analysis.  

The first of these assumptions is that social breakdown is a function of unrestrained impulses and uncontrolled energies. This is a familiar and generally reasonable conception of threats to human flourishing, but it is not adequate to describe this peculiar moment. The assumption is rooted in the fact that human beings are moved by passionate desires for things like pleasure, status, wealth, and power, and our pursuit of those goals can deform our lives if we don’t subject it to some formal structure and formative moderation through marriage, schooling, work, religion, and other binding commitments. Disordered lives are therefore frequently products of pushing too hard, recklessly rushing, and losing control.  

That kind of disorder is still with us, of course, and it does deform many lives. But it is now increasingly overwhelmed by a very different kind of threat to human flourishing, more distinct to the twenty-first century, which we are still only beginning to comprehend. Some of the most daunting challenges we face have less to do with unrestrained human desires pushing people’s lives out of control and more with the dearth of desire entirely. This lack of energy and drive seems to leave people languishing and enervated. Our distinct disorder is that we are doing too little, not too much.  

Marriage and fertility are in collapse. Teen sex and dating are down. Young people are working, socializing, partying, and even driving less than any recent generation. Drug use is still an enormous problem, but it is now focused on substances that provide passive escape and the numbing of pain, not pulsating intensity and liberation from inhibitions. 

This retreat into passivity has mitigated some familiar problems. Divorce and teen pregnancy have declined dramatically, for instance. Even after modest increases in the last few years, there are about half as many abortions every year in the United States now as there were thirty years ago. But the decline of dynamism has come at a very high cost. Awakening dormant energies turns out to be harder in some ways than restraining wild urges. What we are seeing is not just disengagement but a widespread failure to launch: people unsure how, or why, to enter fully into life. 

And as generally happens with our worst vices, people aren’t enjoying this passivity even when it is what they seem to seek. Our society is overflowing with frustration at its own collective impotence. Citizens resent becoming passive observers or subjects of uncontrollable forces. The technologies shaping our cultural and natural environments, the economy we work in, the flow of migrants across our borders, our public finances, the disorder of our cities all just happen to us, while the systems constructed to produce accountability and control on all these fronts appear crippled and rigid—unable to function except through occasional crude and inhumane jerks of authority.  

Populism is an outlet for rage at this condition, but it is not a solution to it. It yields a politics of spectators, and its chief mode of action is powerless criticism, often tied up with conspiracism. The angriest voters are mad at the ineffectiveness of leaders and institutions. That’s why intense partisans frequently hate their own party almost as much as they despise the opposition. And populist politicians often implicitly prefer functioning as powerless commentators to serving as powerful agents of action, as anyone observing the twenty-first-century US Congress could tell you. 

On its face, this kind of politics idolizes maverick leaders who claim the power to act unrestrained. But such idols rarely do more than claim and pretend. Their exertions tend to be brash but ephemeral, and their bold assertions of achievement rarely add up to much that lasts. They’re performing, not using power effectively, and their performance mostly consists of posturing against the institutions they have been selected to run—the institutions that could actually make their leadership effective. 

And here we encounter the second habitual assumption that obscures our view of this moment: that institutions are fundamentally frameworks of restraint. This assumption also has some truth to it. Subjecting powerful people (presidents, CEOs, judges, corporate titans) to formal institutional roles imposes some rules and constraints on them that confine their will and channel their ambition. Institutions do restrain in this sense, and such restraint is especially important for building up some trust in elite power, which modern societies now badly lack. But such restraints, and such trust, are ultimately means to an end that is nearly the opposite of restraint.  

Indeed, institutions might be most simply defined as forms of collective action. They are how we act together toward shared purposes. A family, a church, a school, a business, a civic group, a university, a newspaper, a legislature, or a court is a collection of people devoted to a common purpose and organized to achieve it in a way that gives each person a role in relation to the others and to the purpose they are pursuing in common. Those roles do constrain the individuals involved, but always with the aim of empowering them to participate in effective joint action that would not otherwise be possible. 

Our leaders fail to act effectively because they think they need to break the institutions they lead in order to act. But in fact, they need to embody and inhabit their roles in those institutions in order to act.   

A key reason we tend to emphasize the restraining and socializing potential of institutions is that we are used to thinking that those secondary benefits of institutional life are what we risk losing. Throughout much of the twentieth century, it seemed as though the modern state and the modern market offered ways of effectively meeting our most basic needs—for physical safety, financial security, education, or entertainment—that didn’t require much institutional engagement. We could act in the world mostly as free-floating consumers, and the question was where we would then find the meaning and connection that acting together through institutions had long offered. Robert Nisbet described the problem this way in 1953: 

Remaining active in civic, religious, and communal institutions offered diminishing direct practical benefits, and we couldn’t justify the commitment and investment involved on the basis of indirect socio-psychological advantages. As Spanish social philosopher José Ortega y Gasset famously noted, “People don’t come together to be together; people come together to do something together.” The most persuasive case for institutional renewal can’t be a case for affiliation or connection; it has to be a case for action. And as long as effective markets and governments made such a case unnecessary, it was going to be difficult to persuade people to invest themselves in institutional work.  

But in our time, that most basic and powerful case for institutional engagement is urgently pertinent again. Some of our basic needs—for security and prosperity, for education and formation, for friendship and connection—are not being met effectively enough. Our society feels a palpable desire and need to “do something together.” And that means we feel the need for revitalizing core institutions—even if we cannot yet quite name the need we feel.  

We know how to talk about the secondary, socio-psychological advantages of institutions. We see that they would help us be less lonely and isolated, and that they could help to socialize us. But we don’t know how to talk about the primary advantages of institutions: their ability to facilitate effective action in the world—interpersonally, communally, locally, nationally, globally. Every institution begins from a shared practical goal.  

We will need to learn to think and speak about this primary function of institutions if we are going to relieve the rage and frustration that now overwhelm the politics of every free society. To do that, we must take ownership of our frustration and look for ways to act more effectively—rather than just waiting for outsiders to rescue us. We have become accustomed to understanding ourselves as spectators of a world out of our control. If we want to be more than that, we must churn our discontent into a will to act together.  

And that is going to require us to look to institutions as essential catalysts, and to renew them. The case for such renewal is not nostalgic, or pedantic, or romantic. It is a pressing, timely, practical imperative. It may not be what the frustrated societies of the West are demanding yet, but it is exactly what they need.